Interview Prep: Get Ready to Get the Job

I spent a fair amount of time interviewing not too long ago. In the months of emotional ups and downs, I refined a methodology that increased my confidence as I better communicated my experience and value.

Even as an experienced candidate comfortable with interviewing and with plenty of examples to share, I was rusty. Being out of practice was the least of my challenges, though. I wanted to pivot back to a more technical role after feeling I had lost touch with the hard science I loved early in my career. Leading people was rewarding in its own way, but we were mostly solving process problems while working on mainstream technology. It was a far cry from the expression of art I found appealing when brilliant minds solved intricate challenges at the low levels of networking protocols and software programming.

I needed to modernize my skill set if I were to have any luck getting the role or into the types of companies that fascinated me. As frustrating as interviewing for months on end can be, this time was an important opportunity for me to modernize my skills to match the new roles I wanted.

Personal growth. It was easy enough in my field to gain concrete skills through online training and do-it-yourself practice. I didn’t go back to school, though that would have been really awesome. (In hindsight, there was so much I had forgotten or never had the time to learn in college that would have been great to revisit, years later.)

YouTube was a surprisingly effective training resource. Specific topics could be learned directly with a simple search, but I really found out what I wanted to learn through a variety of company presentations. Large tech company employees could often be found presenting at a user group or a conference. These companies were on the cutting edge of technologies that interested me. They had overcome challenges with high availability, scalability, performance, security, and backwards compatibility and shared their experience with the world for free. This was a huge advantage in interviews at these very companies–I could speak directly to a problem they had or would have, and at least hypothesize about possible solutions in some detail.

Communicating value effectively. A surprise to me was that new solutions often recycled old concepts. Although my experience on a topic might have been 10 or even 20 years prior, the principles of computing didn’t go out of style. I found old solutions were similar to new problems. Maybe most importantly, I started to confidently use the modern terminology and patterns that interviewers were looking for. I learned that I had to put in the effort to speak their language because they certainly weren’t looking too hard for a diamond in the rough.

Another critical part of communicating my value was adopting the STAR methodology. When responding to interview questions, many tech companies have settled on this approach. It’s no secrete either–interviewees are explicitly told they should use it! STAR is an acronym for Situation, Task, Action, Result. It’s a concise way for candidates to share the basics of an experience without rambling on or leaving out key context. A short answer allows the interviewer to ask follow-up questions that take the interview where it interests them in the most direct manner. I have the ability to provide excess context, so this was a big help for me and the interviewers.

Preparation and practice. It’s hard to get started, but so important. I am never really finished with my resume, but that’s a relatively easy one to polish up to get the ball rolling. As you do, you’ll be thinking of all your great experience and stories. These are key because a good interview response is real–something you really did. It’s easier to share and answer questions about it because as you’re talking in an interview you have this little movie playing the memory in your head.

With a little review and some critical thinking, I was able to identify the lessons learned and behaviors demonstrated. This made it easier to select a particular story on the fly to answer an interview question. It also made it easier to provide context in the STAR format without being verbose.

One difficulty of interview preparation is anticipating the topics. However, it’s relatively easy to find the 10 or 20 most common questions then prepare and practice answers for them. Honestly, my confidence increased significantly just by knowing I had answers ready for these questions.

To get the specific jobs I wanted, I also researched them directly by role and company. The company’s own web site and their recruiter can be great places to get very clear expectations. The best companies know interviewing is stressful and an imprecise process, and it’s expensive and time-consuming for them too. They truly want to take all the distractions out of it so they can get a clear signal about whether you would be a great fit. Just be sure to take the hints and practice answers for questions specific to the job.

I made note cards. Yep, just like when you might practice a speech or memorize vocabulary words. I made note cards to help me practice. On the front was a question or a topic and on the back was a story starter. Usually a single word or short phrase that triggered my mind to tell a story. I carried them with me everywhere and flipped through them whenever I had a few minutes of down time. That sure reduced my stress of feeling like I had to study and practice for several hours straight.

My secret to building the cues for each prompt was to write up an interview cheat-sheet. I wrote it up in a spreadsheet: a keyword or phrase on the left and a STAR response on the right. S, T, A, R in a vertical column with a few turns of phrase or talking points for each one. This really helped me refine each response to the common questions and the role-specific questions. At first I wrote out paragraph-long responses to remember my experiences in detail. Then, each anecdote was refined to be more concise and effective until the keywords were short enough to remember.

This cheat sheet came in really handy during video-based interviews where I could keep them just off-screen. I could casually glance over the printed reminders naturally when I got nervous or my mind went blank. I had stumbled upon this technique about 10 years earlier when I was being phone screened for jobs that required relocation. It was like an open book test! As an interviewer myself, I don’t consider this cheating, though. It’s about being able to share the real you quickly and effectively on the spur of the moment. That’s not every tech candidates specialty, so having a little reminder is fair. Besides, the organization and pre-work demonstrates other great characteristics you bring to the job.

Despite my preparation, there was an emotional toll from repeatedly not getting the job. It seemed opportunities would come (and go) in threes every couple weeks. Three recruiters would contact me on nearly the same day to get something started and I’d go through the process for a couple weeks. Just as coincidentally, I would be rejected for all three around the same time.

For each opening, I would reluctantly envision myself in this new role at this new company to better help me relate my experience to their needs. Losing the opportunity was like getting a miniature layoff each time–ending the career I had there, however fictitious. Exercising proved to be a good outlet to counteract some of that loss, though. I would walk, run, or swim at the beach then spend an hour on further study and practice with my note cards and interview cheat sheet.

I managed to persevere. Like others before me, I found 99 ways to fail before I found one success. Afterall, don’t they say that people who work hard for something seem to have better luck?

Every Topic on my Note Cards

The topics are implicitly in the form of an interview question, like “Tell me about a time when you delivered a project faster than planned?” These behavioral type of questions encourage the candidate to describe a specific experience. These are thought to be a better indicator of future performance because it really happened. The interviewer can drill into specific aspects as the candidate tells a coherent story of what really happened. This minimizes generalized answers candidates give about what should be done which are easy to describe but difficult to execute.

My responses even include examples where I failed in some way. While you may be reluctant to share any short-comings in an interview, it’s better to serve up a failure conversation of your choosing than to be pressed into one unexpectedly by questions for which you’re unprepared. This way, you get to prepare your answer in the form of lessons learned.

As an interviewer, I always ask questions to find the boundaries of a candidate’s skills. If I don’t ask any questions they can’t answer, I haven’t found their edges. Finding limits do not eliminate them from consideration–quite the contrary, it gives me a better assessment of them as a candidate which is a critical step in finding a mutual match between candidate and role.