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To stay sane in the interview process you must apply "mental" automation. The goal is to reduce emotional pressure. Treat interview process with balanced emoti

by nbzso 5y ago

To stay sane in the interview process you must apply "mental" automation. The goal is to reduce emotional pressure. Treat interview process with balanced emotion. Write down responses that you will repeat. Make a bullet list. Don't expect response or some communication etiquette. Make your rules and stick with them. If you have a company in mind, and HR process is not adequate, don't work with this company. Companies who are treating the interview process with HR hostility are not ones that you want to work for. If you don't have network in place and your work is under NDA, create a project which will represent your skillset. Put your current skils infront, your experience and accomplishments behind. Companies search for the best "deal", not the best possible candidate. HR is broken by design. It will not be in your interest. It always will be driven by employer requirements and HR mallice.

JohnBooty 5y ago
"mental" automation [...] Write down responses that you will repeat. Just completed a long job search and this is spot-on. I wish I could go back in time and show this to myself. I interviewed with quite a few companies. There is a pool of about 20 stock questions that interviewers ask. Each interviewer will ask maybe 5-10 stock questions and a few you haven't heard before, whose responses typically be cobbled together from other things you've mentally rehearsed. Give yourself some sample interviews. Write down your responses or rehearse them verbally, whatever works for you. By the end of my job search, one of my challenges was actually forcing myself to take a pause for "thought" before answering one of these stock questions. So that the interviewer hopefully wouldn't know I was repeating something I'd "rehearsed." It's important to note that while I was "rehearsing" things, my answers were always 100% genuine. They were my feelings and experiences. In other words, I wasn't rehearsing the act of simply telling the interviewers what they wanted to hear. I was rehearsing the act of digging through 20+ years of engineering experience to think of good examples and stories with which to answer common questions like "tell me about a project where you overcame adversity."

by nbzso 5y ago

JohnBooty 5y ago

"mental" automation [...] Write down responses that you will repeat. Just completed a long job search and this is spot-on. I wish I could go back in time and show this to myself. I interviewed with quite a few companies. There is a pool of about 20 stock questions that interviewers ask. Each interviewer will ask maybe 5-10 stock questions and a few you haven't heard before, whose responses typically be cobbled together from other things you've mentally rehearsed. Give yourself some sample interviews. Write down your responses or rehearse them verbally, whatever works for you. By the end of my job search, one of my challenges was actually forcing myself to take a pause for "thought" before answering one of these stock questions. So that the interviewer hopefully wouldn't know I was repeating something I'd "rehearsed." It's important to note that while I was "rehearsing" things, my answers were always 100% genuine. They were my feelings and experiences. In other words, I wasn't rehearsing the act of simply telling the interviewers what they wanted to hear. I was rehearsing the act of digging through 20+ years of engineering experience to think of good examples and stories with which to answer common questions like "tell me about a project where you overcame adversity."