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How to pass a first-round interview
- parpfish 3y agoIn my experience, the first round interview is fizzbuzz because it can be graded objectively. The questions the author brings up like “Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a colleague” are saved for a later round
- bradlys 3y agoFirst “round” interviews are so often done by recruiters that it’s basically a joke to pass them. I always call them screeners and “are you a serial killer” calls. Unless you say something that goes against the typical grain of what these calls should have (e.g. speaking poorly about a company, saying you were fired, clear anti-social behavior even if minor, you have niche demands that no one will fill, etc…) then you’ll pass them easily. The first call is always about seeing if you even know that there’s a good amount of acting going on from both sides. You play your part and you’ll get to the technical interviews. People have a lower threshold for acting as you progress in the interviews and you can say more things that clearly aren’t good to say. (I.e. anything that demonstrates you don’t tolerate bullshit) No one is complaining about this round of interviewing because it’s not a real issue or obstacle for anyone.
- EForEndeavour 3y agoThis reminds me: what's the interview approach when someone was fired from their previous job? Just lie because disclosing that information will very likely disqualify you?
- blakblakarak 3y agoI’ve been fired from a job - it’s glaring obvious from my CV - I’m just honest, tell then how I learnt from my error and how I believe it makes me a better dev having reeeealy messed up that one time. If a company doesn’t want to hire me after for that reason it’s not a company I’d want to work for anyway.
- vba616 3y agoPeople could be on different wavelengths. When I read "fired", I don't immediately think of "forgot a WHERE clause when deleting from a production database table". That happens, but I don't think I've actually seen anyone fired for it. I think of it more like "you just gradually found you couldn't do the job, didn't meet performance standards, etc". In that case, the usually bland stuff about how the position wasn't a good fit but this one is seems to me like the way to go. And "CV" suggests to me a non-American or an American academic - whereas some people in this thread may be in the SF bay area (although I'm not).
- blakblakarak 3y agoI’m English and it was a balls up that cost the company six or maybe seven figures. I actually left on good terms (at least with the team) but they needed a sacrificial lamb for the board.
- vba616 3y agoDon't lie. Don't act/feel guilty. Embrace (in your head, in preparation) the reasons you had to leave as though they were your own. Only talk about the aspects of leaving your job that you have in common with a voluntary resignation on your own initiative. If you were hiring someone, think about what you would want, and what you want to know. Anything negative in someone's past, you do not really care about it, you just care they are past it and it won't have negative future consequences. Avoiding the negative aspects of your past is not a matter of deception, but of proving that you are emotionally ready to move on. On a written job application, which in my experience comes at the end after they think they want you, be honest, but read it like a lawyer and make sure you don't disclose anything that you don't have to.
- lisasays 3y agoEmbrace (in your head, in preparation) the reasons you had to leave as though they were your own. Interesting and very well put. What people who advocate the "fuck it, just lie" approach is that lying (about things one doesn't really need to lie about) can be more harmful to the person telling the lie than to its recipients.
- bradlys 3y agoYep. Lie. It’s what I do every time. I’ve continued to get new jobs and ones that were better than previous.
- nicoburns 3y agoThat was my experience every other time I've applied to a job in the last 10 years, but not during my recent job search. I got a number of rejections from 5 minute first round interviews for no obvious reason. Whereas once I got to a "proper" interview it was plain sailing. I think companies are getting a lot more applications than they were and are having to put a stronger filter in the first rounds than was the previous norm.
- swader999 3y agoWe had reception (basically someone random) do the first phone screen interviews at my last company.
- lisasays 3y agoSo if, heaven forbid, someone ever does get fired - which of the two remaining options do you propose is best: (1) commit suicide, or (2) lie in response to the "have you ever been fired" question? Since answering honestly is aparently a deal-breaker in your book.
- bradlys 3y agoYeah, lie. No shit. You think companies aren’t lying? Lying is part of the theater that is our current employer-employee relationship. Everyone knows this
- lisasays 3y agoEveryone "knows" this but it generally applies to more nuanced categories. For example, about liking your boss's jokes, believing in "Agile", etc. But in regard to, you know, important stuff, such as matters of one's employment record -- you know they have ways of checking up on what you say, and that any company worth working for does exactly that -- right?
- 20after4 3y agoSo definitely don't give the boss that fired you as a reference that they might call to check up?
- lisasays 3y agoMany employers make a point of checking the past 2-3 places on your resume, regardless of whether they were listed as references or not. Also, not listing your most recent clients/managers as references (because why wouldn't they be glowingly positive?) can be seen as a red flag.
- bradlys 3y agoAgain, I’ve never had this issue and never has anyone I know. They don’t call companies to ask if you were fired. They ask and tell you if you worked there and for what dates. Reason for leaving is never told.
- arandr0x 3y agoThere are also "legitimate" reasons to fail first round interviews, such as the recruiter picking your resume for a role that you are not actually qualified for (which the hiring manager notices after the interview), your salary expectations being too high for that specific company size/geography/role (usually a communications mismatch where they advertise a more senior role than they actually have), or it coming out that you are not legally allowed to work for them (they cannot sponsor visas; they don't hire in your country; they require citizenship; etc). All these cases are technically the company's fault, not the candidate's, but they do often come out right after the screening call.
- oofta-boofta 3y ago[dead]
- oneayy4 3y agowhat is a terrible talent market? is it when major corporations reach all time high profits while laying off most of their employees?
- hedora 3y agoIt's that, plus the candidates flip them the bird, and go to smaller companies. Most of the places that just laid off are also mandating work from office, and are having a very hard time with attrition and hiring. This is a perfect time to go to a company without those problems, since they'll be hiring much better than average these days, and, with any luck, their major corporation competitors are going to see their roadmaps implode.
- brookst 3y agoArticle suggests more research and prep for a 30 minute first round than I’ve ever done for a half-day loop. Good lord. If you have to work that hard to seem like a good candidate, the real job is going to be a nightmare.
- temp12192021 3y agoMore than I spent studying in college. Interviewing has gotten out of hand...
- HPsquared 3y agoThe entirety of the years spent studying in college is within the "interview prep" budget for most people. It's all interview prep. Really your whole CV content is interview prep.
- Scarblac 3y agoYour whole life leading up to the interview was prep! I'm not old, I just did some thorough preparation for your interview. No wait, that's not what they're talking about. They mean extra prep specifically done for that specific interview.
- Aachen 3y agoI don't know what a half day loop is, but a few hours preparing for interviews doesn't seem weird to me. Do you have more than 1-3 serious interviews anytime you want to switch jobs? For me, the problem is that 95% doesn't reply to their application form or email box, so that's where I'd optimise for time spent. Sometimes I get recruiter calls and interviews stemming from that I'd not classify as serious, like I might do 20-30 minutes beforehand to figure out what this company does and whether/how it fits into my life, but if I'm not actually looking then I'm not going to spend hours preparing my presentation. Seems to still work to get an offer, though; they seem biased towards those they initiated contact with
- trympet 3y ago
- angarg12 3y ago> Formulate high-signal questions (to get interviewers thinking). Interviews are often won or lost by the questions you ask the interviewer at the end. Half of the battle is preparing well and showing up to answer the interviewer’s questions; the other half is asking them questions that get them thinking (and make you stand out). I've performed hundreds of FAANG interviews, and I categorize this firmly in the "interview astrology" side. In my company we don't use questions asked by the candidate to determine the outcome (at least not for software engineers), and often we don't even record them. It sounds good to "impress your interviewer with your questions" but we are mindful about biases that might favour some candidates e.g. those with particularly good storytelling skills. My advice would be to not overthink it. Just ask the questions that are genuinely important to you, and don't try to focus on impressing your interviewer.
- Arch-TK 3y agoIt's weird that you dont judge potential hires on the quality of their questions, the most important parts of most creative jobs are being able to ask the right questions.
- mynameisvlad 3y agoThe questions a candidate asks during that part of the interview have almost no overlap to the questions they would ask as part of a real job. And no, not really. My job is to assess their technical skills, not how well they ask me about my work life balance while in a relatively high stress environment.
- Arch-TK 3y agoI'm not talking about inane questions like your work life balance. I am talking about questions about your product, your design decisions, etc. If I am interviewing at a company I certainly want to know that I am not going to be working at a dumpster fire. I want to know how you internally resolve conflicts relating to code reviews for example, so I know that you uphold standards and dont just allow things to get progressively worse as time goes on due to systematic indifference. Now you could be lying to me but that's why I ask more than one question. Certainly to me it feels like if a candidate is asking these kinds of questions during an interview process then that candidate also cares about those things, which depending on whether you are running a java sweatshop or an organized and productive development company seems like it would have some importance.
- Mizoguchi 3y agoIf you don't pass the screening interview is due to a few issues. 1) You are applying to a role you don't meet the minimum requirements for. 2) Didn't take the time to research about the company, salary and benefits, the product/service and the team you'll be working with. 3) Unrealistic expectations about compensation and benefits, which you should have researched above. The rest is just having a casual conversation with another human being, so if you have communication skills that's another issue you need to resolve.
- Arch-TK 3y agoHow do you research the salary if all the company says is "competitive salary". In the part of the UK I live in this seems to mean anything from £45k to £150k for roles of similar seniority. Really if there's a mismatch in salary expectations then it's not that you failed, it's that the company failed to effectively communicate this information and wasted your time on an introductory call.
- parpfish 3y agoRe 2: one of my peeves in job listings is when the job description will specify the name of the team using internal labels/codenames that means nothing outside the company. Bad: “this is a developer for the lookinglass team” Good: “this is a developer for the team that builds monitoring tool”
- jghn 3y agoYes, this. A lot of people don't even realize they're doing this. In particular, people who have spent a significant portion of their career in one company (junior devs, long timers). They're used to thinking of these terms as everyday knowledge.
- parpfish 3y agoit can also happen if recruiters start thinking that their job is to make things easy for hiring managers rather than making things easy for applicants
- jackblemming 3y agoThe fact that we have long articles like this on how to game interviews and then interviewers become keen and it becomes a stupid meta back and forth game of cat and mouse. Meanwhile us normal non-career ladder psychopaths want to talk and be treated like regular people. Every time I’ve been asked about a conflict I’ve had and how I resolved it, I die a little bit inside.
- neilv 3y agoWhat's important is that you die a little bit inside in STAR format.
- FabHK 3y ago- So, once I interviewed with a company and was asked about a conflict at work. - The task at hand was to recall (or, for that matter, invent) a situation involving a conflict at work, and convince the interviewer that I handled it with aplomb. - And so, I proceeded to recalling a situation involving a conflict, explained the Situation to the interviewer in detail, outlined the Tasks I was responsible for, conveyed the Actions I took, and related the Result of my actions. - Result: I died a little bit inside, but the interviewer was very impressed and offered me a job on the spot.
- rkachowski 3y agowhat's the real expectation for these conflict questions? is it to show that you've encountered it before? that you can manage it? that you're a reasonable person when faced with interpersonal difficulties? that sometimes hard choices have to be made wrt bad actors? that you are some kind of golden Spongebob/Candide that has never experienced being ground up in the gears of office politics? I never know which way these are meant to go
- minitoar 3y agoIt depends on the role. IMO the bar is pretty low for many engineering roles. Determining “that you're a reasonable person when faced with interpersonal difficulties” is usually good enough.
- Scubabear68 3y agoI like the writing on this article a lot more than I thought I would, some of the advice is sound - but the big caveat is most of this has nothing to do with a first round interview. What the author describes here are pieces that will come up in a typical interview process somewhere, but probably not a first round. First round to me is typically a “bozo filter” - screen out individuals who are clearly unqualified or who are an obvious bad fit. Any decent dev should get past round 1 without significant prep.
- FabHK 3y agoI think some companies send junior techies to do first round filtering (with easy coding questions), while others keep the HR folks busy doing first round filtering (with, well, behavioural etc. questions as outlined in the article).
- teucris 3y agoThe article calls this out, stating that they define the first round interview as the one after a phone screen/video screen.
- Scubabear68 3y agoSo it is like two screens before the “real” interview? Weird. Sounds like a very lengthy process!
- 1letterunixname 3y agoUh, no. The answer is to: - Have marketable skills and experience - Market and communicate these effectively - Take many interviews because too many are arbitrary and some are terrible places you don't want to work - Aim to be fit, in good health and spirits, and presentable - Be honest In general, everything works out because the synchronicity of individuals and organizations is a self-selecting phenomenon.
- mynameisvlad 3y ago> Aim to be fit, in good health Unless you’re interviewing to be a personal trainer, this doesn’t really have any relevancy. Like yes, be presentable, don’t be a slob. But you don’t have to be “fit” or “in good health” to land a job.
- ok123456 3y agoPhysical fitness is a reflection of your discipline and a signal that you think clearly.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lopkeny12ko 3y agoA massive wall of text and just one paragraph that says "oh by the way there will be a coding assessment in the interview, you need to prepare for that as well, good luck." No further details. Totally useless guide.
- H8crilA 3y agoI think the assumption is that everyone understands that part if it applies to their role, i.e. to the engineer role.
- hedora 3y agoThe article claims that most first round interviews are behavioral questions / culture fit. That doesn't match any interview processes I've been involved with. If you are running an interview process for ICs (which this article clearly targets), you should put the highest signal questions first. That usually means a somewhat easy coding question. If people fail that, then you can immediately eliminate them from the pipeline. If they fail a hard coding question, you usually need more signal, which means more wasted time. If your culture fit / behavioral question is good at weeding out candidates, then there's probably something seriously wrong with your hiring practices. Sociology studies show that those questions are more correlated to drinking the same brand of alcohol or playing the same sports than they are to job performance. Other studies show that diversity significantly increases team performance, so filtering people on whether you'd like to hang out with them during the weekend is fraught with technical peril.
- jahewson 3y ago> Other studies show that diversity significantly increases team performance Ah yes, “studies”, no doubt by “experts”. Think about how ridiculous this claim is in the context of a software engineering team. What mechanism is supposed to be at work? (With one exception - gender differences, that’s perfectly plausible).
- abenga 3y agoI would not care to work for a team where members flippantly disregard exclusion of significant subsections of the population from their ranks, for whatever excuse they design to choose. Either way. There are competent people of all colours, creeds, and classes, and if your company is not able to get any, there's something wrong with you.
- jahewson 3y agoIndeed, at scale, a company that is significantly unrepresentative of the population from which it draws its employees surely has something wrong with it. That’s basically what these studies show (flaws notwithstanding). But that’s got nothing to do with individual teams (unless they’re huge) which are far too small to exhibit population-level statistical behaviour. I see this claim repeated often but the sources always end up being these flimsy studies of company-wide public company reporting correlated with market performance.
- speak_plainly 3y agoIt's sad this is the reality of hiring now. It's byzantine and wasteful and I'm surprised that companies are willing to burn money this way. There are great candidates who may not perform well in an interview and there are a lot of serious clowns that can waltz through this process. The questions being asked are not likely going to yield useful information and the whole thing seems designed by pick-up artists to neg candidates into accepting bad offers. Why stop at 6 interviews?
- zizee 3y agoWhat is a better alternative?
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoCertifications should mean something, not be a sales channel for AWS
- hedora 3y agoThat sound terrible. Most jobs are for specialty positions, so you'd need 10,000's of different certifications tracks. A written engineering competency test (basically, an industry-standard set of whiteboard questions) sounds good, but, having hired credentialed-but-incompetent engineers from other fields, I can definitely say it helps a lot less than you'd think.
- wyclif 3y agoThere is no reason why we can't have that, and I don't think you'd need that many tracks. Even something as narrow as cybersecurity has several different (ISC)2 tracks. They could have a different cert for each major programming language, for instance.
- hedora 3y agoSo, I write mission critical software that sits behind narrow interfaces. In my field, security and correctness are basically synonyms. Other people manage large fleets of machines, and there intrusion detection is probably the best you can do. Still other sets of people write frontend software with 10,000's of dependencies, so dependency management is the name of the game. Still others deal with PII and credit card numbers, and in that space compliance matters deeply. I could list many more sub-disciplines of cybersecurity, but I'm already up to five (and haven't even mentioned cryptography!). None of the skill sets from the five I mentioned really translate well to each other. Also, what purpose would having a cert for a programming language serve? For things like C++ and JavaScript, there are so many sub-dialects that the cert wouldn't say much about whether you could write inside a particular code base. For things like rust and go, the certificate would need to expire every few years. Also, it takes an experienced developer a day or two to pick up a new language. Getting a certificate for a language would take longer than that. That lands us where we are right now, where such certifications exist, but they're simultaneously too much trouble to be worth it, and also not worth the paper they're printed on.
- gdsdfe 3y agomost of the first round I've done are just leet code ... also saying the market is terrible is an understatement, it's the worst I've seen in over a decade.
- smnscu 3y agoI concur with the other comments here that this is almost useless. It could be useful if you're interested in companies dumb enough to care about most of the stuff this article focuses on. I've conducted over 3,000 interviews, most of them via Karat (https://karat.com/ https://karat.com/), and I can say that, as a software engineer at least, you can safely ignore this kind of advice.
- randcraw 3y agoYep. This describes only how to game the famously byzantine hiring process at FAANGs, a tiny highly abnormal subset of the tech workspace out there — only those companies that began as explosive startups who gained giant market share mostly due to great timing in catching the wave, not smart management practices.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- raldi 3y agoMy eyes were rolling too much to finish this piece, but I’ll share a pair of tips: In a technical interview, learn to recognize when the interviewer is trying to help you, and take notice immediately when they do. If they say, “Do you really need to use a float here?”, nine times out of ten what they really mean is, “Stop trying to use a float here.” As an interviewer, it’s really unpleasant to be trying to throw a candidate a life preserver and have them keep shooing it away. (Sometimes “Do you really need” questions are a trap and the interviewer is testing your confidence, but in those cases it’s usually said with a completely different tone.) My other tip is for the squishy personality test interview: come into it smiling, and keep that up for no reason. The interviewer will usually start doing it too, and that leads their brain to think, “I’m smiling, so I must like this person.”
- andrewingram 3y agoWith algorithmic questions, the life preservers often throw me off more than they help. I had one which was actually wrong, i.e the path I was going down was correct _and_ simpler. More commonly though, if I'm struggling, I'm normally juggling too many things in my head, and them adding another thing to think about makes me drop all the balls. I still value them in principle, but it seems to be a skill that many interviewers haven't developed to the point where they're a net positive.
- timy2shoes 3y agoIt can also be the case where the interviewer doesn’t really understand the question and are going from prompts. So when you try to get further understanding of their hint from them, they just repeat the hint. I think this reflects poorly on the company culture, that they’re throwing interviewers out there who aren’t ready.
- noirbot 3y agoIt definitely can, but I've been asking one of my questions for almost a decade at this point, and I've seen nearly every attempt at a solution that anyone would come up with. Often the difficulty is that the candidate is working towards something that may be a possible solution, but has a myriad of edge cases that they're going to discover and end up needing to spend far too long trying to work out. Meanwhile, there's a much easier solution they could do instead. I'm not sure of a good way to re-target someone in that situation. I have let a candidate just go down that line before because they were making swift progress on it, and I gave them pretty good marks at the end for an incomplete solution that I was pretty sure they could have worked out eventually, but for other people it's much harder. I totally sympathize with the disruption of an interviewer essentially telling you "not like that" when you're frantically trying to come up with a quick and workable solution, but at the same time, you're probably not going to make yourself look good if you're putting together an increasingly obviously unviable solution by bolting on more and more logic as you find holes.
- andrewingram 3y agoI just want to figure out how to come up with a good answer for "Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a colleague." (used as an example in the post, but not in any detail). It seems to be the question that anecdotally is the biggest reason I'm not getting offers right now, so I'd welcome pointers. Where I'm at: * I don't really know what other people mean by "conflict", so I probably go for examples that are more charged than is necessary. * When I hear "conflict", my head goes towards relationships with people who were widely problematic within the business (i.e I wasn't the only one who had difficulty with them), and more often than not, they eventually got fired or manage out -- so the conflict often resolved itself based on external factors. * Minor disagreements, ie differing opinions on how to approach a problem, aren't conflicts in my mind. Because they had no long-term emotional impact on me, I don't tend to remember these well enough to spin a story or discuss particular conflict-navigation techniques or outcomes. * I have one example where a CEO got an employee to do something unethical (and possibly illegal, not sure), and I challenged them on it. But this was kind of a no-win situation for me, I said my piece, he heard me, the particular instance was stopped, but I'm told he's still doing similar things today (I'm no longer at the company).
- jghn 3y agoAssuming they're not just reading it from a checklist & tuning out when you start talking - they're looking for a story where you had a problematic relationship with a coworker or coworkers, but managed to make it work. Ideally over a longer period of time, and not "Bob stole my lunch out of the fridge one day". For reasons similar to what you said I've found a lot of people don't have very good stories along these lines, and because of that this question is less useful than people like to think. And on top of that, most candidates are terrified of saying anything that makes them look like the ahole in those situations. So if their answer sounds pretty milquetoast who is to say if they're being careful or just don't have good stories. I have a story I use now. It involved a coworker with whom I had an oil vs water relationship for a couple of years. In retrospect I could have gone about it all a lot better than I did in the moment, although that was true for both of us. I don't have the perfect "And then I solved everything" punchline to my story, they were eventually let go. But, my journey during it all was critical to my own development. And that started me down a leadership path, changing the course of my career. So I talk about my lessons learned, things I wish I'd have done differently in retrospect, etc. I'm not painting a perfect picture of myself, but I do display introspection, personal development, willingness to take different approaches to resolve an issue, etc.
- karaterobot 3y agoHere's a controversial opinion: one of the top tips to passing an interview is just to lie. I don't mean lying about qualifications, or lying about jobs you've had in the past. But, I feel no compunction about answering a question like "tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a colleague" by making up a scenario that could plausibly have happened and hypothesizing about what you might do in it. The reality is that no two such scenarios are ever exactly the same, so a real anecdote would not be helpful, even if you happen to have a good one in mind (which I never do). Next time, the people involved (including you) are going to be different, with different personalities, a different set of problems and pressures and constraints . Forget it, there's very low predictive power in a question like that, even if the interviewer were qualified to analyze you. So, just tell them what they want to hear, and prove you speak the dumb language of corporate interviews. Is this unethical? Maybe, but only to the extent that such questions are meaningful filters (which I believe they aren't). And it is surely no more unethical than answering a question like "why do you want to work for Company X?" by saying "I am inspired by the mission and the fascinating problems you're solving" rather than "the salary is higher than my current job, and I think it will make a good stepping stone to an even bigger salary at another company in a few years", which is what we would say if genuine honesty were what that particular discourse was trying to get at.
- sctb 3y agoI think it's possible to underestimate the extent to which people can perceive this type of dishonesty, because it may be in the form of an uneasy and largely unconscious experience that leads them to vaguely report "not a good fit".
- blindriver 3y agoYep. I am really good at coming up with stuff on the spot, so when I last interviewed, I straight up made up some stuff for my behavioral interviews. I resorted to this because on my LinkedIn interview, the behavioral interviewer kept pressing me when I told him that the situation never came up (I can't remember exactly what it was, I think if I was ever asked to work on something that I disagreed with) and it dinged me on my evaluation. So from them on, I would make up white lies to satisfy my interviewers. I also make sure to note what I say on my interview notes so I keep my stories straight. Interviews want a certain "type" of answer, so if you don't give it to them, more often than not they will ding you. The same goes for Leetcode questions, if you get the answer wrong, you will get passed over, but if you get the answer "too quick", then you will get passed over because you were "too prepared", so better to just pretend to struggle and come up with the answer.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoOK so I may be biased but please don't do this. After a couple of interviews everybody is tired. 1-2 short questions are perfectly fine, but some people treat it as "the floor is yours". You won't make a better impression by asking questions, but you can make it worse. For most people though, it doesn't matter at all. Use the time you had before, when being asked, to show your best side.
- apricot 3y ago> I verified that no employee would have a compensation regression What's wrong with "I made sure nobody got a pay cut"?