Interviews ... and how to survive them
Tags: interview, career
Published: 2022-07-27 17:26:47

---
title: Interviews ... and how to survive them
series: How to do interviews
published: true
description: How to do interviews part 2 - doing interviews
tags: interview,career
cover_image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9b/Young_Man_on_a_Job_Interview_%2826931177139%29.jpg/800px-Young_Man_on_a_Job_Interview_%2826931177139%29.jpg
---
## Types of interviewers and interviews
So you have been offered an interview, formal or informal.  It’s a chance to talk to a person.
Types of people you will be dealing with: hiring managers, team members, recruiters

Recruiters, as discussed before are not technically savvy but know more about the business need for this role than you do.
Usually, there is an “initial chat” with a recruiter to screen out clearly unsuited people.  Aim to get information from the recruiter about the next few stages, “what they are looking for” in general terms and convince them that you are not crazy.
Next, there will be a technical interview probing what you know.  These vary a lot in format, depth and scope
There might be a “practical” technical interview, like pair programming or a takeaway program.  This is often with a team member
Last, there is a “culture” or “behavioural” interview, often with a manager of some sort.

With *all* of these, you *must* prepare.

## Preparation

The Initial chat is usually with a recruiter.  Preparation is - get ready to talk about yourself and your achievements.  Don’t complain about your current role.  Do have a reason you are leaving.  Do have a reason why you think you’d like the role.  These types of initial chats are usually quite easy if you have covered all the requirements in your cover letter.
Sometimes the initial chat is not with a recruiter but is a technical conversation or even a cultural assessment.  If you think this is the case, prepare accordingly.

For either of these subsequent interviews, technical or cultural gather clues from the interview request email, linkedin search the person who will be interviewing you, look at the job description and make notes in any prior interview.  It could be that you have worked at the same company at some point and something like that will help establish rapport

If the interview email says “we will discuss your CV” think of a way to explain recent roles as if they are ideal preparation for this role

For technical interviews: Anything that is mentioned, make it fresh in your mind.  For example, they mention terraform, take a moment to review a terraform 101 or a cheat sheet.  

If the technical interview includes some kind of quick coding test, then practice coding in the language they mention.  I made this exact mistake in a recent interview.  I had been writing terraform code maybe two weeks before but mainly using EKS (AWS Kubernetes) providers.  The test code (which was supplied up front that I didn't read) was for AWS but with making a VPC from scratch with EC2 in it.  I was so clumsy and slow with this that the interviewer said "have you ever used terraform before"?  

If the role is suited to you, (for example in my case it is SRE) but it is in an area where you don’t have much experience ie Machine Learning then look for talks or papers from conferences that home in on this exact area - in my example SRE for machine learning.  Often talks at conferences have a nice diagram or summary about how it works, get this straight in your mind.  I’m not saying this is a shortcut for learning stuff overnight!  But the process of explaining a composite topic that you perhaps have not explained for a while is worth going over.  There isn’t unlimited time in an interview so there isn’t any need to become an expert overnight

For culture interviews, look for company “values”.  This is a thing, apparently.  Find them, understand them and prepare answers for value-based questions.   For example, if one of the values is “Value customers” a possible question would be “tell me a time when you went the extra mile for a customer”

Most interviews are on line now - I won't cover zoom etiquette apart from: Immediately before the interview set an alarm so you are on time.

## Pro tip:  Prepare for those "interview" questions
As well as technical knowledge there are “interview questions” like “what is your greatest achievement?”.  You only hear these questions in interviews. I can’t answer that cold.  So I find a list, do answers to them all and write them down.

## Pro tip: Questions you ask them!
The other sort of question is the question you ask them.  My two favourites are “why are you hiring for this role?” and “describe the first 30/60/90 days, how quickly do you expect people to be productive”.  Whatever questions you ask, you will learn more about the role
You need at least 5 of these questions to ask that suit the role and be ready to ask them when there is an opportunity.  Some of the questions will be answered by the rest of the conversation you’ve had.   If you get to the 2 minutes at the end of the interview that are “for questions” and you say “er, I have no questions” it isn’t a good look.  Here is a list https://arc.dev/developer-blog/questions-to-ask-at-an-interview/

## What happens next
If you pass the interview then your reward is usually more interviews.  Hopefully, you will get to the point where there isn’t another interview

[Photo credit](http://www.amtec.us.com/creative-commons)