The Silver Standard for Interview Preparation

People often tell me that I over-prepare for things. There is a reason for this. I suffer from serious nerves (almost panic attacks) if I do not prepare which leaves me a wreck before and full of regret after (Oddly enough, during the event, even without prep I can falteringly get through, but it's never polished). And regardless of business climate, all the great jobs always require you to be reasonably polished to get the offer.

In fact, all this prep work isn't just about getting the offer. One thing which I never thought about until recently was how you interview doesn't just affect whether you get the offer, but it also affects where on the salary range for that position you are perceived. A colleague of mine interviewed at Thoughtworks and whilst he got the offer, he was offered the junior starting salary, despite several years of experience. And this is because he didn't prepare and outline all his real experience.

So I prepare. Some say over-prepare. Yes I did all the below before going into my interviews. It helped me feel better going into interviews and if I got an interview, I always got the follow ups.

I had two offers from the companies that interviewed me and good follow through for a number of others. It's overkill in some ways, but I feel it helped me, so feel free to take whatever you like from the below. If anything, if you do all the below, you'll come out being a better professional anyway.

So let's begin what is probably my longest post ever.

In general, my preparation could be broken into four main areas.

1. Behavioral Questions Prep.
2. Technical Questions Prep.
3. Company Prep.
4. Optional Extras Prep.

These are in order of importance as well. I'll explain more per section.

1. Behavioural Preparation

This is the most important area to prepare. Every company and almost every phase of the interview will ask questions around this area, so nothing here will go to waste.

I could go into detail about everything I did in this area, but I'll just tell you my secret weapon. I used the "Manager Tools Interviewing Series". For the uninitiated, Manager Tools is a regular podcasts given by a pair of management consultants. They have two regular podcasts, the 'Manager' series and a more generic 'Career' series. They also have the 'Interviewing' series specifically for those changing jobs. They like to call themselves the "Gold Standard" of interviewing.

These guys are massive gasbags; they manage to take a topic that you could summarise into 5-10 minutes and convert it into 50 minutes. Yet it's 50 minutes of GOLD. I used their advice at every job I applied for and I could tell it made a big difference in driving me through to the next stage. Look it's $150 USD, but when you see the pay differential when you snag your dream job, you won't care.

They will lead you through, how to prepare, what to wear, how to answer the 'big' questions like "Tell me about yourself" or "Tell me about A Significant Achievement" all the way to following up and salary negotiations. Augment what you hear with your own knowledge as there is a slight bent towards American corporate culture.

The only augmentation I have to the 'Interviewing Series' is to extend on their STAC (Skills, Traits, Attributes and Characteristics) cards system by creating Story Tag Clouds. This is a word page filled with individual stories demonstrating a particular S,T,A or C which you can easily search. It is best served with an example/template.

Bottom Line Up Front: I demonstrated ... to do ... which resulted in ...

Situation: The problem on our project was ...

Action: So naturally I had to do 1, 2 and 3.
Result: And because of how I did that, this resulted in us ...

Tags: Creativity, ..., Conflict Resolution

Once you've created your list of stories and memorized them, you can easily pull these out and then adjust emphasis to highlight what the question asked. The fact is your work career is filled with events where you need to use multiple skills to solve a situation anyway and being able to answer their question plus demonstrate your other skills edges you up on the list of candidates. After you've made your set of Story Clouds, try googling example behavioural interview questions and try answering them using the stories you just made. You'll find you'll be able to answer many questions with the stories you just created.

2. Technical Preparation

The next part will certainly receive some derision from my ultra-smart readers. But if you're not a super-talented-developer type and just an 'above average with other skills' developer type like myself, this is for you.

Software Development is HARD. It is too hard to develop anything useful in a one hour blocks which means often interviewers use standard questions that can be solved in 30-45min blocks. Hence I will point you towards books like "Programming Interviews Exposed" which give standard questions like 'How to reverse a string', techniques on how to solve them and general advice on the technical interview. I also got a book called the "J2EE/Java Interview Companion" to practice for Macquarie Bank's retarded online technical tests. I've never had to use it, but its been interesting reading regardless as it is a quick way to get an overview of the different parts of Java.

The last book I bought as study preparation never got used in an interview, but has been entertaining reading regardless. "How would you Move Mt Fuji" goes over a number of the brain-teaser/puzzle solving questions that hi-tech companies like Microsoft like to throw at candidates. I suspect the use of these might be more prevalent in strategy/analyst/non-developer type roles than what I interviewed for. Solving the puzzles in here does help jog creative problem solving neural pathways you might have abandoned in the last few years which is why I mention it here.

Finally, if you're going to apply for development jobs, it might help to do some actual programming. The better programmer site offers a set of excellent small programming questions you can whip up in under 20 minutes. There are some excellent development questions online such as famous Thoughtworks 'Mars Rover' or 'Sales Tax' questions which meatier and worth practising since they force you to effectively use design patterns as well (some companies are ga-ga for design patterns).

3. Company Preparation

Company preparation should be done only after you are comfortable with the above. At the end of the day, the hiring manager knows about his company quite well; it's you and your capabilities they don't know about. It is here so that you can separate yourself from your competitor candidates. There are two sides to company preparation. One being most companies now want to know why you want to work for them specifically and its a very common question. The second is you need to be able to ask questions which show you have an interest and you understand their business.

That said, please, please don't ask stupid questions about market share, stock price or macro-economic company questions. The hiring manager needs you to do a specific job, not run all corporate strategy. As Manager Tools would say, use the company research to formulate smarter questions for the hiring manager.

So I made a document for each company I interviewed with and it contained the following:

1. Recruiter details
2. Interviewer details: Linked-In is your friend. Yes it's mildly stalker-ish. Live with it
3. Job description
4. Brief SWOT of the company
5. Industry trends
6. Analysis of the main product: of the company, or say the division you are interviewing for
7. Questions for the company: Feeding off the above, more on 6. less on 4,5 unless you can tie it into your current role.

For example: "I noticed you mentioned that has been integrated with to offer more functionality. Can you tell me a little more about how that is done and if I’ll be involved in doing any of that integration development work in this role?"

It does help if you care about the answer. If you hate integration work for example, you might as well abandon ship now and not waste your time and that hiring manager's.

This will take a minimum of a day per company which does suck, but it will make you feel so much more confident walking into that interview. You will ask great questions during and at the end of the interview. You can drop comments about events pertinent to the industry. You actually feel like you're part of the company and the hiring manager will also feel it.

So all the above is for the first interview right? If you get past that and into the second interview, you got to up the ante because the other candidates will be doing so as well.

• Who are this company's customers (easy) and what their problems? (harder)
• (Bonus points) Problems of this company's customer's end customer.
• What challenges is this manager currently facing?

If I don't get/take the offer, I still file all those things away because guess what, you never know when this information will become useful again!

If you need an example of the profile I did on the company I got an offer from, let me know.

4. Optional Extras

I feel odd calling this Optional Extras because I feel they are really helpful to getting you that job. I don't think they are all essential, but you know, every little bit helps.

Clothes

For what its worth, if you feel your old interviewing clothes aren't great, do invest the money and buy a decent suit or two. It won't make or break you, interviewers aren't that superficial (typically), but if it makes you feel better about yourself, you'll have more energy and that is what interviewers notice. I got two from the Discount Factory Outlet and they made me feel perkier!

Extracurricular activities.

No, I don't care about your football or hang-gliding skills. This is opportunity to demonstrate you are truly interested in this industry and not just month to month pay-check kind of person. I restarted this blog, I started playing with Git/SVN and other technologies again, I started programming for my Android phone, I started posting on technical forums. Admittedly I didn't get far with many of these ventures considering how quickly I got employed, but if I took longer, I could have pointed at these achievements in interviews. That said, considering the 'Fools In Love' section of this blog, I wouldn't give them the exact address of this blog!

Read like there is no tomorrow

I used my unemployment time to catch up on a lot of blogs, technical articles and read a few interesting books as well. And don't discount being on top of the news either. One of my interviewers threw this curve ball at me. "What do you think of President Obama's performance to date?". Regardless of political persuasion, being able to form and communicate a sensible opinion on this show you aren't a one-trick pony.

Anyway that's enough for now. I think I need a holiday from blogging after this one. Thank you for getting this far. Job hunting can miserable, but it can also be a fantastic learning opportunity. If you have any suggestions, war stories, questions, ideas you'd like to share, post in the comments below!