Trailer for the talk
Here's a sneak peek of the talk: Barret shares tech interviewing best practices as a hiring manager for developers.
About the talk
Your resume got you in the door. What awaits you is a big hurdle: the interview process. Whether it's a one-on-one interview with the manager, a group interview with the entire team, or multiple interviews of all types, you'll have to pass them to land the job. In this talk, we'll go through several tips for leaving interviewers with a good impression. Then we’ll dive into a Q&A session for you to ask questions about interviewing practices.
This talk will cover
Tech job interview best practices from a technical hiring manager:
- Types of interviews and what to expect from each
- Prepping for your interviews
- How to leave a good impression
- Following up after the interview
About the speaker
Barret Blake is a Practice Area Manager for Microsoft Dynamics at Fusion Alliance. On top of managing a developer team, he is also a developer, speaker, blogger, father, gamer, and board member of the JavaScript & Friends developer conference.
Highlights of the talk
What are the different types of interviews?
The different kinds of interviews you might go through is a pre-screen with an HR or recruiter within or outside of the organization. These calls usually last for 15 minutes, just to kind of get an idea of what you are looking for and the positions they might have open for you. The next is some kind of assessment, including personality assessment and technical assessment. The technical assessments are some kind of coding, it could be in person or a take home assignment to create a block of code or applications to code. The most common is a white board assessment but some companies will simply talk you through the problems to understand your problem solving skills instead of just your coding skills, as those are things you can pick up on.
Another type of interview you’ll face is some kind of panel or round robin kind of interview. There are a couple of different ways companies do it. Some companies may get everyone involved and have 10 or 11 people in the same room interviewing you, or they might do one after another. These kinds of interviews are fairly common for developers where they’ll fire one question after another. A lot of times these interviews are not just to evaluate your technical knowledge and your ability to potentially perform the job, but it’s also a good way for them to evaluate your fit with the people you’re interacting with and whether your personality matches the team.
Then the last kind of common interview is with the manager. It may be a second interview, first interview, or the last interview you may face. For most companies, the manager will only interview once with another senior developer, but every company does it differently.
How do you prepare for interviews?
Review your social media profile to find things that potential employers might find offensive. Whether you like it or not, companies will look at your profiles. Another thing is to see if you’re posting about the topics your jobs are related to evaluate your passion for your job. Make sure you have LinkedIn, make sure it’s updated, and make sure it’s 100% professional.
The next thing is to research — don’t go in blind into an interview. Understand what the company does, what their products and services are, and find out about the specific team you might be working with. If you can bring in enough knowledge and questions to say you have gone out to look at the company in depth, it does go a long way towards impressing a hiring team. Also make sure to look on sites like Glassdoor to get a feel for the company to see if it’ll be a good fit for both sides.
You also want to make sure you’re presentable. How you present yourself is just as important as your technical skills. Whether you’re interviewing in person, via phone calls, or videos, make sure you’re presentable because how you appear matters. And as part of that preparation, make sure your background is presentable as well. When you’re preparing for the actual interview, make sure you’re able to speak to the actual technologies that were advertised in the job. Go out and look for interview questions in the specific tech stacks advertised so you know how to prepare for the interview.
How do you evaluate your worth?
Is the pay you’re getting right now in the market value, or are you underselling yourself at the moment? Take the time to find out what that particular technology and experience level and job you’re going to be interviewing for. Knowing what your worth is ahead of time will help you save a lot of time in the interviewing and job seeking process by not wasting your time with things that are not going to fit your needs.
Don’t settle for something just to get by for now. It’s worth waiting for the right fit for you if you can. If you have the time to wait, make sure what you’re pursuing is going to be what you think you’re worth. Right now, in most areas of technology, it’s the job seeker’s market. The going salaries are increasing, exponentially almost, the salary range is going up and up. If you take that time to prepare yourself, to get that knowledge, to know what your value is on the market right now will save you a lot of time and struggle later on. Don’t undervalue yourself. You have a worth and it’s important. Don’t interview just to interview, don’t waste people’s time by doing that. The tech community is small enough, where if you’re interviewing for the sake of interviewing, other companies will find out and that’ll harm your reputation.