9 Essential Things To Do Before Your Next Tech Interview
This is a summary of an article of the same name by Becks Hookam. The full article can be found here
Beyond the essential prep of remembering the golden rules of a good tech test there are a few things you need to do that will help you have a warm and friendly experience in your next interview.
Know who you are meeting at the interview. Check LinkedIn and give them a Google.
While you’re on LinkedIn, check out who else is in the Engineering Team and Leadership team It’s interesting to see whether a company has hired juniors before and also where else they’ve worked.
Hiring other boot camp grads is also a good indication that the company’s expectations are set about right for hiring you.
A CTO who may be hiring her first junior for this company might have a strong mentoring background at previous workplaces which could also be a reason you want to work with her.
Be able to articulate what the company does It’s surprising how often you get asked about ‘your understanding of what the company does‘ at an interview.
This question does come up as interviewers want to find out whether you care enough about this role to have looked up this easily findable information online.
Pay particular attention to anything you find on company culture and values.
Sometimes the best you can do is to come up with your own questions to ask at the interview.
There are also those interviewers who take ten minutes to tell you all about the company despite your extensive research.
That’s all okay and your job then is to smile and nod in appreciation before coming up with a question at the end to allow them to elaborate a bit more.
Read the Engineering Blog Not every company has one but if you find it, read on soldier! This will teach you loads about the engineering culture and projects.
If you can find a couple of points of interest to subtly slip into a ‘why do you want to work here question‘ you’ve scored some major interview points.
If this is a product company, download it and check it out I’m surprised at how often we hear from back companies that this hasn’t happened but you’ve got to a lot to think about at this stage, too.
Keep it within reason of course.If you’re speaking with a B2B company that runs video tutorials to sell their service to legal professionals, well then signing up for one of those calls would just be awkward for both of you.
Google the company I’m really going deep here but level up even further by looking for articles online and having an idea of who the competitors are in this industry.
You don’t need to remember it all but the act of writing it down and flicking through it once before the interview might give you moments of inspiration in the interview when you need it most.
It is even okay to bring that notebook into an interview and bring it out at the end to remind yourself of the questions you had. 9.
Give Yourself a Time Limit for This Research You should all be doing some research for any interview you have coming up but the amount of information available online can send you down a very dark hole of things you’ve gotta get done which is just stressful.
I suggest you do at least an hour of research for any interview you have coming up but no more than three.
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