Ace Your Job Interview: Tips for Landing Your Dream Job

Introduction

This post presents tips for the interview process and valuable resources, especially during this challenging whirlwind of layoffs. Most of these are lessons from my 100+ hours of interviewing at ~20 companies.

Job Inertia

Most of us only start job searching when something happens; staying in our comfort zone of domain knowledge, established relationships, and job familiarity is usually effortless. 

Starting a new job can be scary, you begin afresh – forming new relationships and ramping up in a new domain while dealing with impostor syndrome caused by your temporary incompetence. Why take the plunge when you can bask in convenience?

Why do people move?

1. Involuntary: Sudden and uncontrollable changes due to external events, e.g., being headhunted, reorgs, acquisitions, layoffs, firing, etc.
2. Voluntary: 
   1. Personal: Could be needing more time with family, recovering from burnout, etc.
   2. Misalignment: could be interpersonal (e.g., friction with colleagues or leadership) or values (not agreeing with the organizational vision).
   3. Career growth:  Seeking new challenges after outgrowing the current job or a change of mind after some soul searching. Likely triggers include missing out on a promotion, new year’s resolutions.
   4. Monetary: People sometimes need more money to cover personal obligations or meet inflation.

Is Job-hopping a great strategy to maximize earnings?

The frequent job-hopping strategy for increasing total compensation is overrated. It might work in the short term, but it is not a viable long-term strategy; it maximizes local optima at the cost of global optima. True expertise involves learning from mistakes which requires time.

Job-hopping yearly to boost compensation works until it doesn’t. At the compensation plateau, you’ll end up with multiple one-year stints, which can be a commitment red flag for hiring committees. Rather, seek additive experiences that move towards your life goals.

Deciding to move

When it is time to move, you should already know what you want in your next role. Your top priorities should be clear – it could be exciting work, renowned colleagues, or a new domain.

Knowing what you want shifts you from a reactive mode to a proactive strategy for your career; this understanding also positions you to maximize serendipitous opportunities. Eschew knee-jerk moves – you don’t want to jump from a frying pan into a fire. Here are three great posts on crafting a long-lasting, impactful career:

1. A forty-year career
2. Crafting a successful career framework
3. A simple framework for optimizing career decisions

Tips

1. Keep a wishlist of companies.
2. Always be networking and forging relationships.

Preparing

The typical interview is a mix of technical and behavioural interviews. 

Gasp! The dreaded leetcode!

You have three options:

1. Avoid companies with algorithmic interviews. See a community-sourced list of companies that do not do whiteboard interviews.
2. Dedicate preparatory time to brush up on your skills.
3. Ask for targeted questions: Some experienced leaders have successfully gotten quizzes replaced with behavioural interviews; they pointed out that algorithmic exams did not represent their capabilities or day-to-day job expectations.

The Interviewing Journey

You can boost your chances by tailoring strategies at each stage, thereby improving what works and dropping what doesn’t. Let’s talk about each step, how to prepare, and things to watch out for at each stage.

Stages

Stage 1: The Wishlist

The wish list contains the companies you love and aspire to work for. 

Your wish list might include companies where you have no connections, close the gap by exploring weaker links (e.g., 2nd-order references), or proactively reach out to kickstart relationships. Once you have your wishlist of companies, it’s time to start networking.

Stage 2: Networking

This is where you start building relationships with people working at your desired companies. Having folks on the inside is valuable for many reasons: they help with referrals, provide coaching, vouch, and follow up on your behalf.

Another overlooked aspect is the filter-free perspective on company culture – your connections can tell you the good, bad, and the ugly.

Stage 3: Application

Resume: First Impressions count!

Your resume and LinkedIn profile make up your first foot in the door – your one chance to make a great first impression. You must make it count since you wouldn’t be in the room during the evaluation! 

Red flags

1. Mistakes: typos, broken links, incorrect experience, wrong dates, incorrect skills, wrong name
2. Structure: inconsistent styling, poor formatting
3. Content: generic words, lack of a progressive story, filler material, longer than two pages

Should I write a cover letter? A great cover letter will make an application stand out; however, it takes effort to craft a great letter. 

Hopefully, your networking and resume investments translate into recruiters contacting you. If you are still waiting to hear back after 2 or 3 weeks, consider asking your referrers to do a soft follow-up. However, if you consistently get no responses, consider revisiting your resume and networking strategy to boost conversions.

Stage 4: Recruiter screen

This is typically a call with the recruiter. You get to talk about yourself and answer questions about your background, experience, and what you want.

Ensure you have a 45-second and a 2-minute pitch that makes folks: “go, wow! I want to work with this person!”. Your pre-work should cover answering these questions:

• Tell me about yourself
• What are you looking for in your next role?
• Why company XYZ?

Expect standard generic questions about hiring, leading teams, and so on; roles requiring specific skills might include targeted questions, e.g., questions about leading remote teams.

The recruiter is trying to evaluate your fit for the role and set the right expectations. Topics might include the interview process, compensation ranges, work authorization, etc. 

At the end of the discussion, the recruiter will tell you they’ll take this to the hiring manager and let you know the outcomes. If things go well, you’ll meet the hiring manager; otherwise, you get a variant of the canned response: “moving ahead at this time, apply again in the future”; some might even ghost you.

Stage 5: Pre-screen

The hiring manager screen is the first test; you might get technical and/or behavioural questions. This viability test enables both parties to decide if they want to initiate the coordination logistics of a complete loop (expensive in terms of time, cost, energy, etc.); thus, success at this stage typically leads to scheduling the entire expensive loop.

Stage 6: Full loop

Congrats on getting this far! A few tips while you prepare for your full loop:

1. Scheduling: Don’t do the entire loop in one day; interviews are draining, so splitting interviews over multiple days helps keep you fresh.
2. Story bank: Review your experience and gather stories for potential interview questions. The STAR format is very effective for highlighting the critical points in your past experience; take it further by extracting a reusable framework.
3. Interview format: Most interviews are 1:1 sessions; however, some companies also do panel interviews, e.g., two or more people interviewing you simultaneously. Know how many rounds of interviews you’ll have to do.
4. Interview expectations: The questions depend on the role. Junior IC interviews will skew heavily towards technical rounds, while senior leadership roles will skew towards behavioural questions.
   1. Technical interview: 
      1. Technical deep dive into a past project, 
      2. Coding: code review, take-home assignment, or fixing buggy code
      3. Algorithmic puzzles (a.k.a leetcode)
      4. System design
   2. Behavioural interviews: questions covering coaching, delegation, execution, team building, recruiting, onboarding, performance management, DEI, conflict resolution, strategic vision, influence, etc. 
5. Role research: Do your homework about the role and the interviewers, and be ready. Always have a set of questions for each interviewer: it demonstrates interest in the position. Need help figuring out what to ask?
   1. Check out this great list from educative
   2. Interview Questions to ask as a candidate.

Before

1. Get enough sleep: Sleep deprivation impairs critical thinking leading to subpar performance. You also want to avoid battling a migraine while interviewing.
2. Prepare your interview space: 
   1. For remote calls, be in a well-lit room.
   2. Have backups, e.g., if the Internet goes out, your phone can be a hotspot.
   3. Have a glass of water nearby: A ticklish or dry throat can trigger a coughing fit; a sip is quite effective for remediation. Aside, drinking allows for a recovery pause; you can gather your thoughts and overcome flusters.
   4. Eliminate distractions: phone calls, notifications, etc.
   5. Have all the information and things you need ready
3. Settle your mood:
   1. Avoid anxiety-inducing triggers: Avoid any event disrupting your interview (e.g. anticipating interview outcomes or reliving past performance). You want to give your full concentration to the interview.
   2. Dress comfortably: it’ll boost your confidence and reduce anxiety.

The Interview Itself

1. Be specific: When answering questions, specificity wins.It is more convincing to use real-life examples. Prioritize describing situations where you deployed a framework over articulating the theoretical framework.
2. Answer the right question: A big mistake is answering the wrong question after misunderstanding the interviewer. It indicates listening and comprehension gaps; double-check your understanding by asking clarifying questions or repeating the question before answering.
3. Don’t ramble: An interview is not a monologue! Don’t get carried away and suck up all the oxygen in the room. You shouldn’t overwhelm your interviewer, so pause periodically to create openings and invite discussion, e.g. after a concise high-level overview, say: I can delve into this further if you want.

Stage 8: After the loop

Thank the recruiters for coordinating interview logistics. After that, the waiting for interview outcomes begins. You might learn of the results via email or phone.

Never say never until you see results – I’ve gotten rejections after interviews that went exceptionally well and offers from interviews I thought could have gone better. Thus, I avoid fretting.

You were rejected

Don’t beat yourself up too much; remember, you win some and lose some. 

Pat yourself for getting this far, and learn from the outcome. Ask the recruiter for insights – was there something in your background or interview performance? Use this feedback to improve for the future.

You got the job

Congrats! It’s time to negotiate the offer and determine the next steps: here is a video for negotiations.

The invisible but difficult part of interviewing – mental resilience

Interviewing is a grind – some recruiters might ghost you, some interviews might be terrible, and applying day in and day out can be tiring.

It would help to replenish your mental, physical, and emotional well-being regularly. For example, I tried to beat my running record during my gruelling interview schedules; these runs rejuvenated me – the released endorphins repeatedly buoyed up my spirit.

Ensure you do something fun to reduce the mental stress; go for walks or carve out time for your hobbies.

Compendium of interviewing resources 

Highly recommended guides for engineering leaders by Kevin Conroy.

1. An Engineering Leader’s Job Search Algorithm
2. An Engineering Leader’s Behavioral Interview Template
3. An Engineering Leader’s System Design Interview Template

Resources for acing the behavioural Interview

1. Grokking the Behavioral Interview
2. TryExponent’s Engineering Management Interview Course, especially the ‘mock interviews’.

Resources for technical interviews

1. Coderust: Hacking the Coding Interview
2. Grokking Modern System Design Interview for Engineers & Managers

Guides on improving your resume

1. Standard Resume: Great tool for making resumes.
2. What accomplishments sound like on software engineering resumes
3. How to write a resume that converts 

Tools

1. huntr: Kanban-like tool that simplifies tracking applications across multiple companies.