Interviews from the aspect of a tech guy

Hi,

For the last 12 years I had the opportunity to interview quite a few people for various positions mostly related to Node.js, Java, Spring, Cloud and SQL processing. I would like to take this opportunity to write about what I was looking for in the candidates resumes, recruiters relationships and some common mistakes that people make during the interviews or writing resumes. Please note that this is strictly my opinion and that you can take this with a grain of salt.

Pre-interview, gathering requirements

On the several projects where I worked or where I am still working, most job openings will come from business, financing the needs of a project that is, where there is a specific business requirement that needs to be fulfilled. These requirements are created from ad-hoc need or opportunity, or strategic planning. 

There can be two forms of financing in general that I observed, one where we are looking to initialize the platform or novel way of processing data, and one where we are utilizing existing or expanding platform for the business need or competitive advantage. The difference is that first one is developing supporting technology and second one is developing the business. This is where some ideas of what kind of experience and profiles we would require from the candidates come to mind. The other important factor is the company and team culture. Some teams are conservative some more open, some follow strict structure and the others have more free form. These are all important factors for the success of the team. Remember, most of the time, the goal is usually to establish an effective team not exceptional individuals.

Thoughts about candidates

One of the things with agencies is that they use automated search engines when looking for the candidates most of the time and some people tend to add things into the keywords or their job description that they perhaps only heard of or just have bare understanding about them. We get candidates of different backgrounds, both cultural and technical and our goal should always be to see and understand how they can fit into our team and business culture and whether they will bring something valuable in terms of their personal and professional skills and their knowledge of technology. One of the most important aspect for the candidate is to show their enthusiasm and professionalism during this process, regardless on how they actually feel towards the process or the interviewer. This proves couple of points:

1. That they are capable of desired behavior when needed (professional and courteous)
2. That they understand the rules of engagement and what is expected of them
3. That they are not shy to enter into the new situation and do their best to fit in

Anything else leaves employer side at the mercy of the moment and unnecessary training where we should be focusing on bringing candidates up to the speed of our business and not basic understanding of the general work ethics and their professional skills.

Unfortunately, many times candidates will come unprepared or uninterested to the interview. There is a difference when someone is a bit scared or overwhelmed and when someone is unprepared. It is fully expected that candidate will know their resume in detail (what is written in the resume). This is why writing resumes that are more than 2 pages long is very wrong in my opinion. I would usually not go over second page for several reasons:

1. It is out of date (I am only interested in last 5 years at most)
2. Technology used may be outdated
3. Candidate may not have relevant knowledge to apply in the current scenario
4. I have many resumes to review and only limited time to do this
5. Many times candidates would say that they do not remember details of the implementation past 5 years and this does not help in this line of business where technology changes all the time 

It is, of course, good that candidate can reference their past experience and what they learned from it and how they evolved professionally, but details of the discussion should be kept at their most recent experience. There are many ifs and buts here, however, I need to make sure we establish a reasonable expectation of what is needed to pass the interview during the one hour process. This is a very limited time to get to know someone you have met for the first time and establish both objective and subjective opinion of the candidate. 

 

Reviewing resumes

As I have mentioned before, it is well advised to contact some of the agencies that professionally craft resumes towards the job. We all have various experiences and they do not always apply to every company or every job. The idea of a resume is to get invited to the interview in most focused and honest way and it is not the point to write you life story in there. Professional agents and tools that they use have a very limited time to go over the resumes especially for the job where hundreds of applicants apply. You must point out in your resume why you are the right person for the job requested even though in many cases you will not be a 100% match. You need to single out point from your career and experience that puts you on top over other candidates, or in other words, how to be better than the second last candidate. Once you get an interview, resume is not that much important and serves only as a reference for the conversation. As far as cover letters goes, I honestly do not remember when I last read the cover letter, so I would generally drop these. 

When reviewing resume, it always depends if I am reviewing for position of full time job or a contractor. The difference is that first position will have time to build on a career and experience and the later needs to perform immediately. Criteria may be a bit different for two types but it entirely depends on hiring manager and company that is hiring.  

Unless you are not the person that graduated recently, I would generally put very little emphasis on the education other than passing requirement for the job, but more one experience and enthusiasm to do the job. I would prefer to see more resumes where candidate has the experience in the open source community or had some recent (relevant) courses completed. In my opinion this would give an edge to this candidate over the rest. Continuous education and participation in your own or open source project in this line of work is extremely important. If candidate has a blog or example of work, even better. Those are the points that would put candidates way above over the rest that do not have this, providing that what is displayed demonstrates capability and is in line with the resume and job requirements.

The interview

On the interview day, whether it is online or in person, please do not be late. This is not a cliche but shows some responsibility and respect towards the people involved. In case you are being late for objective reasons, please pick up a phone and give interviewer a call, it will be appreciated. Later on this also shows that candidate understands importance of not being late to the many meetings that we may have. 

During the interviews, sometimes I interview alone and sometimes there is hiring manager or another senior resource present, but it depends on the role we are interviewing and our availability. In any case there is going to be different sets of questions designed to:

1. Validate candidate resume and expertise
2. Establish effective communication
3. Validate behavior under stress
4. Establish problem solving capacity

When interview starts, we always give a chance to candidates to introduce themselves. This can take anywhere from 5-10 minutes after we give a short introduction of our environment and job requirement. Expectation is that candidate already understands something about company and tools/processes that we are using, or how would they get the interview in the first place, right? This also shows that candidate is interested in this company/position and that they did some research prior to the interview. 

All my interviews are technical, and that means that we will talk about technology and processes that candidate used and that are relevant to us. I definitely do not know and can discuss about all the items on everyone's resumes, but based on my previous experience, there will be a lot of them where we can find common ground for the discussion. 

Regardless of the candidate I would always go through basic questions to get an understanding if the candidate thought about technologies they are using and not just copy pasted from the Internet. This would involve simple questions like: Why do you think there is an abstract class and interface in Java, for example, or tell me a difference between Java and JEE? You would be amazed how many people would struggle with this question even though this is a very foundation of how design patterns and Java coding is performed in general. After we cover basics just to get the idea where candidate stands in regards to what is written in the resume, we would get on relevant technologies that are listed as most recent or marked as expert or experienced. I would establish a and ask about scenario with the expectation from candidate to:

1. Demonstrate expertise in the area
2. Establish communication and problem solving capability
3. Provide a suggestion and see how candidate can follow a given direction

Depending on a candidate and their previous responses I may provide false leads or conflicting narrative and ask the candidate to proceed in that way to establish the possibility of a future conflict or behavior problem. This is all done in respectable way, of course, with the expectation from the candidate to politely and argumentatively point to the error. In several cases this proved to be impossible obstacle for few candidates... In general, and depending on a job, there are 3 major layers in the enterprise application. Front end, middle tier and database. There are hundreds of technologies that can go in between, like caching, routing, messaging, ETL, etc., but the important factor is that every candidate needs to be aware of these differences and how applications perform in general. When we discuss the problem, awareness of what is being applied as a solution needs to be present at all times. 

One of the important suggestions during the interview is that you should not start on a subject that you do not fully understand when giving examples. This will lead to more in depth questions and possible dead end. If a question pops up that you are not familiar with, do try to supplement with closest example from your experience. This will set you on familiar ground where we can make a constructive conversation. Having a good exchange of ideas is considered a good interview in my opinion. And remember, interview is not an interrogation, look on it more as a  focused conversation.

Post-interview thoughts

Once the interview has been completed, normally we would gather to discuss the candidates and their performance. I would generally present a written or verbal report and provide my opinion, but as a general rule, decision on hiring the candidates usually rests with the Director or VP or whoever owns the budget for the project.  

In any case, I have been in various interviews during my life where some were good and the others not so much. Not everything turns always as you expected, but in the end, you only need one good interview, and with some luck, knowledge and positive attitude, you will get your next job, or at least, a valuable experience be it positive or negative.

As always, please share your thoughts and opinions about this matter. All the best!