If you cannot persuade a person to hire you for the skills you are good at, how do you even expect to win friends and influence people in any other enterprises of life? How are you going to persuade investors to back your vision with their capital? How are you going to woo a person you want to spend the of your life with? How would you befriend a person you respect and admire? How would you command the loyalty of your tribe?
It’s all about empathy:
Interviewers go through hundreds of resumes just like you, and have probably interviewed 10-12 people just like you in the current phase. You have to stand out and make it as easy as possible for them to say “Yes, this is what I want”. Someone that eases their worries and makes them look good for be able to hire you. You have to project “I am your guy”. You have to make them feel good about hiring you.
Prepare stories which highlight skills that the interviewer is looking for
At the interview, understand why the interviewer is asking the question and tell them what they want to hear. Interviewers have a purpose for every question. Technical interviewers are trying to get you to demonstrate a range of skills. They’ve asked this question a 1000 times and are well versed in the possible answer. Behavioral questions (“Tell me about a time…”) are looking for a soft skill. If you think about the question briefly, you can guess what specifically they’re seeking. Often it’s directly stated in the wording of the question!
Stuff People Look For:
Prepare notes on why you find a company exciting and show enthsiasm. You can even reference the notes during the interview. Bringing prepared notes shows preparation. The best approach is to prepare notes before an interview about what you find exciting about the company, and bring this up with each interviewer when they ask if you have any questions. A good source of ideas is to read the company’s recent blog posts and press releases and note the ones you find exciting. Convince the company it’s your dream job. Employees who are excited about the mission of a company will work harder and be happier, and companies know this. And practice.[^practice]
Practice mock interviews with feedback
If you have never jumped off an airplane before, the thought of skydiving will be positively frightening. But if you have already skydived one hundred times, while you might still feel the rush, you will no longer feel the same panic as you did the first time. Hence, the best way to handle the nerve caused by interviews is to go through more interviews. Very few performers will get on stages without practices. The more you interview, the more comfortable you will get. Everything else will follow when you just chill out and convey your thoughts clearly.
You have to convert from thinking silently.
For the nontrivial questions that you have to “think” about - apply the process to subdivide your thinking and share them. Your interviewers will thank you. You’ll thank yourself.
Composure is key. It’s better to answer fewer questions in more thorough detail than to get through every question the interviewer may have had on his list to ask you.
In the first few minutes of chit-chat with the interviewer: explain any sort of experience which sets you apart (as the interview progresses, start focussing on them - their problems to solve, but start of with this). [Relevant projects][How to talk about projects], significant technical accomplishments, credentials.
The person conducting the interview has interviewed dozens if not hundreds of smart people just like you. So what can you say that would surprise them?
“Tell me about yourself”. This question is more about the interviewer: why you are a perfect fit for the hole in the organization they have? Frame your answer around what they’re looking to see from you (hint: brevity and relevance to the job). Make your pitch and sell it.
Be the person would you want to hire if you were hiring for your startup. Aim high. Don’t strive to merely clear the bar, strive to set it.
There’s a big difference between “barely good enough” and “absolutely good enough”. Strive for the latter! If you get to a point where you think you know enough to get an offer, that’s great. Interview performance obviously helps decide if you get an offer from a given company, but it also helps decide what that offer looks like.
Can you make whoever hired you look good? Everybody wants to feel good about who they hired. Nobody wants to be responsible for a dud hire who makes their group, division, or department look bad to their peers. Can you be someone whom your boss and senior colleagues are proud to show off? This doesn’t mean you should be a brown-noser or sycophant; often the best way to make people around you look good is to be great at your own work.
Be charismatic: Charisma isn’t a requirement for most jobs, but it will make it much easier to convince people to hire you. You’ll also be a more valued employee since you’ll be able to more easily make whoever hired you look good and bring out the best in those around you, which are the other two qualities of a strong job candidate besides “Can you get stuff done?
Another key conceptual point to keep in mind the fact that while many of these tests are presented as being nominally objective, when in fact their bigger purpose is really psychological – the interviewer really is just trying to see whether they can “vibe” with you in this interaction as much as whether you are coming up with the right answers. So another thing you want to try priming yourself with (rather than meds) is an an air of simple humility, rather than defensiveness, or again, a need to be seen as always “right” or “worthy” of their assessments.
To keep in mind: Do not mistake arrogance for confidence. You demonstrate confidence when you are comfortable (not to be confused with complacency) with what you don’t know, and showing intellectual curiosity/eagerness to learn.
Be structured and organized in all communications
Explicitly check on their response to your words: “Is this making sense to you?
Frame the interaction with the right metaphors.
A role-playing exercise where you are pretending to be coworkers trying to solve problems together
Or is it a one-sided “test” where you are put on a spot to defend yourself?
You’d be the one leading the problem solving, but being capable to explain your thought process effectively, having the ability to exchange ideas with the interviewer, and just being able to come across as a good teammate is probably more important than getting that last 5% of optimization. This is especially more true for senior level position interviews where there are more design/architecture problems with relatively open answers.
Remember, they want to hire you! The life-blood of any software company is its employees. It’s looking to hire the best and the brightest and the people conducting the interview want you to succede just as much as you do.
You’re hiring them Get past the very idea that this is a one-way process, whereby it’s supposedly just you who has to prove their (intellectual, economic) worthiness to others (whose own credentials completely beyond question). In fact you might want to start practicing the complete opposite of this mindset – just walk in there as if it’s you who is contemplating whether to hire them (which in essence is true anyway – as all truly desirable working situations are two-way streets), and has plenty of other options available if this particular situation doesn’t work out. (Paul Graham has a few good paragraphs about this).
Think of it as a game you are playing
Interview questions are easy if you are confident in your abilities, have all the time in the world, and look at problems as a game. They’re hard if you encounter them in an interview, or while preparing for interviews. If you don’t see a solution immediately, it’s easy to think you’re not good enough, and that can easily distract you from finding a solution. That doesn’t happen if you’re doing it for fun.
When we are young, stage fright is an unknown experience. Look at how little kids are able to perform in front of audience without much concern, and even though they might not be great performers, their joy and lack of stage fright is something that all adult performers work hard to reclaim. Can we do what little kids do? Yes we can - by stop being concerned about our performances. Allow Yourself The Room To Suck. “Perfect is the enemy of good.” — Voltaire.
Nerves are caused by one reason - you are focusing on yourself, instead of focusing on others. It’s perfectly normal, of course, to focus on ourselves. However, during performance time, focusing on oneself achieves the opposite effect of what we actually want. It causes us to freeze in action and actually end up performing worse, potentially creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Such focus is due to fear of failure. In interview situations, in wanting to put the best foot forward, we often end up shooting ourselves in the foot when we are so focused on being perfect.
Little kids do not know what being perfect is - kids are perfect, period. Anything they do is fine, and their enthusiasm/optimism carry the day. Adults have more standards to live by, of course. But by not being concerned about how well you perform, you’ll automatically be more relaxed, and actually end up performing better.
Them, not You. Any question you ask and everything you say should be framed from the perspective of the employer and for the benefit of the employer.
It’s actually a bit trickier than “stop worrying about how well you will perform” though. Because whenever we tell ourselves not to think of something, that something is exactly what we end up thinking about.
What we need to do instead is to have “something else” replacing the “original something”.
The best “something else” in interview situation is to think about how you can help others, by focusing on answering the following questions
How will you help solve their problem? Talk about skills you bring to the table.
What intangibles will benefit your new employer?
This tells you where the company is growing and potential areas where you can help if positions are unfilled. Make that explicit as appropriate. Shows interest in success & future of the company.
Is there anything I have said or haven’t said which would leave you in any doubt that I could do an excellent job for you?Link
What are the common attributes of your most successful projects, employees etc.?
Suggests you want to be a top performer and are actively looking for fit with the team. Opportunity to reveal & highlight niche skill of yours. Psychological association between you & top doers.
What is the biggest shortcoming among other candidates for the job?
How do you typically unwind from work? What do you do in your spare time?
The more you think in this fashion, the less you’ll be concerned about your own performance, and the more value your interviewers will actually find you bring to the table.
The goal in the interview is to immediately add value. Why else would they be hiring you? Always focus on the other party. You’ll reduce your own fear, and actually make others like you more than otherwise.
Be Willing to Walk Away The by-product of focusing on helping others is this - if you are not the right person, you should be willing to walk away. Think of it this way - if you are the wrong person, you might actually end up causing more problems. You don’t want to be the person that cause others more problems if you really are trying to help. Hence - willingness to walk away signifies true desire to help others. And if you are willing to walk away - what is the reason to fear?
Dealing with Rejection
The Zen of dealing with it is NOT to question the rejection; but rather to consider it as a data point: a kind of a failed trade, or a missed sale – something to learn from, definitely but not (intrinsically) as a sign that your “product” is (ie, you are) damaged goods, per se. And so to the see the rejection as being something fundamentally good (despite the near-term financial and other costs), insofar as it at least teaches you something.
References
It all comes down to credentials, credibility and charisma
Example of how make a process/framework to hack it
What questions to put forth to the interviewer?
10 April 2019