The first interview, or Why get a job is more difficult than passing an exam
The most surprising question that we are asked when assigning interviews to candidates for internship positions is: “What will they ask?”.
Let's clarify, this question is most often asked by students. Those for whom the upcoming interview will be the first or one of the first in their professional career.
What is the reason for this question?
')
Long experience of communication with candidates from the university showed that the reason is simple. Students often perceive an interview just as they did an exam in their university: you need to prepare (best for one night :)), come and pass. And the one who answers the questions best will get the top five, that is, he will be hired.
The catch is that the interview is not an exam at all . Under the cut the answer is why.
There are a lot of differences between these processes, we will cite only two basic ones:
Not so long ago, inside the EMC St. Petersburg Development Center, we conducted a small study aimed at studying the approaches of various departments to interviews with students. During the month, we met with representatives of the project teams and asked them what questions they asked the candidates for internship positions. As a result, in the continuation of the topic of the differences in the interview and exam, we were able to
7 questions, the answers to which should be prepared just before the interview.
1. Which company and which position do I have an interview for?
A few years ago, after a dozen interviews for an intern position in one of the EMC divisions, we received a written request from an interviewer with something like the following: “Tell them to read at least something about us before coming.”
It would be funny if it were not so sad. Believe me, an impressive, absolutely double-digit, exactly, the percentage of candidates does not know which company and which position they are interviewed for. Or, at best, they only know the answer to half the question. A competent approach implies that:
a) The candidate read about the company as a whole (when it is based, where the headquarters is located, how many people work in offices around the world, what the company's key business is, what its market position is) and about the office in which he will have an interview ( local representation, whose staff will be present at the interview)
b) The candidate carefully studied the job description, read about the product on which to work, and also carefully studied the list of requirements for applicants.
Only in a bad joke a teacher at the university will begin the exam with the phrase: “Do you know what subject you have to take?”. The employee of the company conducting the interview will definitely ask you what you know about the place where you have to work.
Why is the answer to this question important to us? During the interview, we proceed from the following assumption: "Good candidates choose the best employer, and good employers choose the best candidate." Simply put, we believe that applicants, coming to the interview, make an informed choice, considering us among the good employers, from among which the best is chosen. Obviously, with this approach, the person will not come to the interview in the company, about which he knows nothing. Hence the conclusion that both about the company and the position you read somewhere.
Just ask you - do not answer the question: "What do you know about our company?" Something like this: "You are a large international company that is a market leader." The competent interviewer will immediately ask this question: “There are many such companies, why did you come to us?”.
2. What will I tell about myself?
After the question: “What do you know about our company?” You will probably be asked to tell a little about yourself.
This is your unique chance to send an interview in the direction that is convenient for you. Recall that the interviewer may ask you about anything — this is his key difference from the examiner. The examiner has nothing to ask you to tell about yourself - first, he managed to get to know you during the semester, and second, he has a pre-designated list of topics for conversations. The interviewer needs your answer in order to understand what he will talk about with you, and about what he will not.
A good answer directly depends on how you prepared for the first question (“To which company and to which position do you pass the interview?”). Obviously, if you come to the position of a C ++ intern in an international company, it’s worth telling the following about yourself:
Such an answer will show us that
a) The candidate came to the address. That is, a candidate with interests and / or some knowledge in the field of C ++ came to our position as a C ++ trainee. Not Java, not Data Science, not IT management, but C ++.
b) The candidate has participated in projects about which we can talk with him. The important point is that we are well aware that students may not have work experience in any company. But what the student has is his study and hobbies. And it is very good if they intersect with his interests from point a).
c) The candidate will be able to adapt more easily to an international company, since at the initial stages he will have fewer problems with communications (he is already learning English).
Believe me, candidates who request to tell about themselves answer “What exactly to tell?” Usually do not show themselves in the best way at the interview.
3. What is my favorite university subject?
The teacher in the university at the exam does not want to know what your favorite subject. For us, the answer may be one of the key.
In another interpretation, this question may sound like “What subjects did you study at the university?” Or “What subjects did you study recently?”.
If you have well formulated the answer to the second question (“Tell about yourself”), then it is quite possible that you will not have to tell about your favorite subject separately - you will mention it earlier. If the story about yourself does not allow to understand what it is worth building a further conversation, then you will be offered an alternative way to search for a topic - they will ask about what they liked at the university.
In general, the answer to this question contains extremely important information:
a) What do you like and what is interesting to you. It is desirable (see question number 2) that your interests and your sympathies coincide with the description of the vacancy. Otherwise (see question number 1) it is difficult to understand why you came to our position for an interview.
b) What can I ask you. Usually, people are well aware of what they are interested in. And if they do not understand something, then they seek to find answers or come to them on the basis of their own knowledge. Even if you don’t have your own complete Java project, you probably did some laboratory work that dealt with various aspects of the language. Let's talk about them.
c) Which of your university mentors can vouch for you. It will probably not be a surprise to you that almost all teachers,
preparing for us, we somehow know. Even if you get confused in your answers to C ++ questions (which you have recently studied and which are of interest to you), we will have a chance to ask you for a recommendation from someone (and preferably from those) who have watched you during the last years come to the point and what success you are making.
The only thing - do not say that you liked that subject, the basics of which you do not know. For example, it is not necessary to mention that you liked the subject “Operating Systems” if you cannot explain what a “process” is. Candidates who liked databases, but did not know how RIGHT JOIN differs from LEFT JOIN, received not the most pleasant reviews from our interviewees. By the way, we recently set up a similar experiment - we estimated the percentage of “database lovers” who do not know the differences between JOIN-operations. And, unfortunately, this percentage also turned out to be two-digit, comparable to the number of candidates who do not know which company and which position they come to for an interview.
4. What is my project I can call the most positive experience?
Imagine that the teacher at the exam tells you: “Please tell me what question you have learned exactly. Will respond to it. " This happens very rarely, usually in the case when you are "pulled on the top three."
We almost always ask such a question at the interview. Ideally, the candidate himself mentions the project, telling about himself (see question 2). If this does not happen, then the question is asked directly.
A successful answer will determine an impressive part of your interview success. What are its basic criteria?
a) (Unexpectedly :)) When preparing the answer, the question “Which company and which position do I have an interview for?” was taken into account. Simply put, the relevant job vacancy is voiced.
b) You yourself tell about the project (the interviewer does not pull out the information with “ticks”). Almost always, a person who is really interested in something, narrates about his favorite business with passion, often even forgetting that he is on a formal interview procedure. The candidate enthusiastically talks about which architecture was chosen, what kind of IDE he used, and even what mistakes he made.
c) You are talking about the project in which you were doing something. That is, not about a certain abstract project, on which one of your friends worked, and you in it were busy with conditional renaming of variables. It is better if you describe a much smaller job, but done by yourself.
Now back to the point that you "learned best". Your answer about the project will determine those theoretical and practical questions about which you will be told an impressive part of the interview. If you wrote a conditional server that handles requests, then you will probably be asked about critical sections, multithreading and its implementation, which (if you were interested in the project and you worked independently) you know well.
If you honestly admit that there was no project, but you spent a lot of effort on C ++ lab work, in which you had to perform specified operations with data structures, you will be asked about queues, stacks, doubly linked lists, how to sort them, add and remove items. And if you can answer such questions in detail, it will be much better than to tell you about a big project in which you have been given a very small piece. Or, even worse, you will mention a large project, but you will not be able to answer a single simple question related to the implementation of one or another of its components.
And, most importantly, it is not necessary to say that you have absolutely no experience, which you can call positive. You definitely did something that interested you in a particular language. Otherwise (see question 1) it is not very clear why you come to the interview for this position.
5. What is my main mistake?
A university lecturer is unlikely to ask you what mistakes you have made in the past - he is interested in your mistakes in answering ticket questions.
We are often interested in how you react to your own failures. It is quite possible that in the draft from the previous question you did not succeed and not everything succeeded. But the understanding that
a) Failures are part of any big deal.
b) Only through failure do we gain such valuable experience.
is extremely important for any specialist. If, remembering your own defeats, you can soberly assess their causes, and also tell you what you would have done differently in order to prevent such blunders, then you will also be able to extract the necessary benefits from your mistakes at work.
6. Why do I ask this question?
Here, of course, prepare in advance will not work. But we urge you to remember that every time you are asked, for example, about how many gas stations are located within the Moscow Ring Road , think about why you are asked such a question.
This question is not asked to get the exact number in return. The exact number of filling stations in Moscow is of interest to programmers extremely rarely. But how you approach the solution of the tasks, is always of interest. And despite the fact that some abandon the tasks from the book How to Move Mount Fuji, the ability to demonstrate one’s own line of reasoning is still one of the important requirements for a candidate.
Answering questions, do not hesitate to ask your interlocutor. “But can we assume that there are no stations in the city center?”, “And can we assume that there are the same number of filling stations in sleeping areas?”, “I know for sure that there are 5 stations in my area, can we allow What is the same number of gas stations in the neighboring districts? ”- all these questions show your ability to look for a solution to the tasks set. Obviously, it’s not exactly necessary to calculate the number of gas stations in your daily practice. And to ask colleagues and clarify the tasks set will have to constantly.
Feel free to think out loud and, most importantly, write solutions on paper or on the blackboard. Cross out carefully, but if possible, do not erase (risk to erase the right). Perhaps we will understand that your decision is not going there and we will clarify the question. Perhaps you do not solve the problem to the end, but if we see the correct train of thought, this may be quite enough.
If the candidate, having heard the question about the petrol stations, leaves himself for 20 minutes, and after that he says: “Forty two”, then we can hardly make any useful conclusion. If, after receiving the task of spreading a single-linked list, you will say after a long silence that you do not know of a single way, the interview will definitely end in failure. If you start by drawing a list, there will be much more chances to understand and come up with an algorithm (even if you did not know it).
A couple of years ago, during the interviews for an intern position in the QA department, we gave students the following task:
We will consider the Earth as an ideal ball and suppose that, precisely at the equator, it was “girded” with a metal tape. Then this tape was extended by 1 meter and positioned it above the equator so that the distance from the tape to the surface of the Earth was everywhere the same. Question: Will the cat crawl into the gap formed?
It would seem - the equator is long. What is there 1 meter? The cat is definitely not going through. So answered half the candidates. The trick is that the gap is 16 centimeters wide. That is, an animal known for its natural dexterity would definitely have snuck.
Why did we ask such a question? In order to understand whether a technical university student is capable, even if in a situation of seemingly obvious answer to a question, apply a formula from a mathematics course for the fifth grade. If a student began to draw a round Earth, a ribbon, and then recalled that the circumference was 2 * pi * r, then this made him much closer to success. Half of the candidates started to draw, half of the half reached the final formula.
By the way, after the candidate said: “Yes, he will crawl through” we began to clarify: “Are you sure? Is the earth huge? Just one meter? Sounds weird…". And if the student then showed his ability to convince us that his position is correct (with the help of a very obvious argument lying on the surface), then his chances of being invited to the next round exceeded 90%.
When you pass the exam, it makes no sense to think about why the teacher included this or that question in the ticket. The teacher has no task to understand how you think. He is important to your knowledge of a particular subject. An interview (especially a student’s interview) checks not only and not so much the knowledge of one or another programming language as of “today”. The task of the interview is to reveal whether you have an understanding of basic concepts and the ability to come to one or another conclusion using them.
7. What will I ask the employer?
Agree, it is very strange before the exam to think about what you ask the examiner. He will definitely ask. You will only answer.
But to ask the employer can and should be. Moreover, employers love those applicants who ask questions.
Why? Because (as we know from the first question), good candidates choose the best employer. An interview is not only our chance to understand whether we want to work with you or not, this is also an opportunity for you to conclude whether our company is suitable for your career.
One of our colleagues, who has been working as an engineer for a long time, always gives the same amount of time for interviews to his questions as to questions of interviewers. In essence, increasing the interview time by half. Perhaps this is one of the reasons, almost always allowing him to show the employer that he, too, makes a choice. And, in the end, to be hired precisely in the company, from work in which both parties (employee and employer) will receive the maximum benefit.
From your questions to the employer it should be clear that you are really interested in understanding how the company works. "How
is the development process built? ”,“ At what stage is the project? ”,“ Where are the team members geographically located ”, etc. Similar questions also show that you understand that software development is not just writing code. This understanding for students is a rarity and, quite definitely, positively characterizes the candidate.
Conclusion
As we said at the beginning, our seven questions will be especially helpful to those who are confronted for the first time with the interview process. If you already have your own extensive experience in conducting interviews, we will be glad to see your practice examples in the comments.
For those interested, here are some helpful materials:
Summing up, we note once again - employers assume that your desire to get on this or that job is conscious and dictated by your interests and experience (albeit a learning one). Therefore, be attentive to what companies and to which positions you send your resumes. Do not send a resume "just like that."
If the vacancy is really interesting for you, and the answers to our seven questions are prepared by you, then the chances of getting such a desirable place as an intern or junior engineer will increase significantly. And, perhaps, you even appear on the photo of our friendly youth team;)
Let's clarify, this question is most often asked by students. Those for whom the upcoming interview will be the first or one of the first in their professional career.
What is the reason for this question?
')
Long experience of communication with candidates from the university showed that the reason is simple. Students often perceive an interview just as they did an exam in their university: you need to prepare (best for one night :)), come and pass. And the one who answers the questions best will get the top five, that is, he will be hired.
The catch is that the interview is not an exam at all . Under the cut the answer is why.
There are a lot of differences between these processes, we will cite only two basic ones:
- Interview - as an exercise with a barbell. No matter how much you can squeeze from the chest, you can always hang pancakes on the barbell. So the interviewer can ask all new and new questions, no matter how you answer. The range of questions can be the widest: from basic algorithms to complex concepts of programming languages. At the exam, the list of topics that will be discussed is known in advance. “Add”, that is, the examiner does not have the right to ask anything from another subject.
- The interview is much more dialogue than the exam. The exam always begins with the fact that you pronounce the answers to the questions of the ticket in a monologue. Then you, at best, are asked a couple of questions. At the interview questions will be asked much more often and more unpredictable. And you (let's talk about this later) can also ask questions.
Not so long ago, inside the EMC St. Petersburg Development Center, we conducted a small study aimed at studying the approaches of various departments to interviews with students. During the month, we met with representatives of the project teams and asked them what questions they asked the candidates for internship positions. As a result, in the continuation of the topic of the differences in the interview and exam, we were able to
7 questions, the answers to which should be prepared just before the interview.
1. Which company and which position do I have an interview for?
A few years ago, after a dozen interviews for an intern position in one of the EMC divisions, we received a written request from an interviewer with something like the following: “Tell them to read at least something about us before coming.”
It would be funny if it were not so sad. Believe me, an impressive, absolutely double-digit, exactly, the percentage of candidates does not know which company and which position they are interviewed for. Or, at best, they only know the answer to half the question. A competent approach implies that:
a) The candidate read about the company as a whole (when it is based, where the headquarters is located, how many people work in offices around the world, what the company's key business is, what its market position is) and about the office in which he will have an interview ( local representation, whose staff will be present at the interview)
b) The candidate carefully studied the job description, read about the product on which to work, and also carefully studied the list of requirements for applicants.
Only in a bad joke a teacher at the university will begin the exam with the phrase: “Do you know what subject you have to take?”. The employee of the company conducting the interview will definitely ask you what you know about the place where you have to work.
Why is the answer to this question important to us? During the interview, we proceed from the following assumption: "Good candidates choose the best employer, and good employers choose the best candidate." Simply put, we believe that applicants, coming to the interview, make an informed choice, considering us among the good employers, from among which the best is chosen. Obviously, with this approach, the person will not come to the interview in the company, about which he knows nothing. Hence the conclusion that both about the company and the position you read somewhere.
Just ask you - do not answer the question: "What do you know about our company?" Something like this: "You are a large international company that is a market leader." The competent interviewer will immediately ask this question: “There are many such companies, why did you come to us?”.
2. What will I tell about myself?
After the question: “What do you know about our company?” You will probably be asked to tell a little about yourself.
This is your unique chance to send an interview in the direction that is convenient for you. Recall that the interviewer may ask you about anything — this is his key difference from the examiner. The examiner has nothing to ask you to tell about yourself - first, he managed to get to know you during the semester, and second, he has a pre-designated list of topics for conversations. The interviewer needs your answer in order to understand what he will talk about with you, and about what he will not.
A good answer directly depends on how you prepared for the first question (“To which company and to which position do you pass the interview?”). Obviously, if you come to the position of a C ++ intern in an international company, it’s worth telling the following about yourself:
- I study at% univername% university, on% year% course
- I am interested in object-oriented programming using C ++
- My experience with C ++ includes the following professional and / or amateur and / or university projects: further listing with a short (in one sentence) description of projects
- In my free time I study English (I watch movies / TV shows and / or go to school and / or read books and / or ...)
Such an answer will show us that
a) The candidate came to the address. That is, a candidate with interests and / or some knowledge in the field of C ++ came to our position as a C ++ trainee. Not Java, not Data Science, not IT management, but C ++.
b) The candidate has participated in projects about which we can talk with him. The important point is that we are well aware that students may not have work experience in any company. But what the student has is his study and hobbies. And it is very good if they intersect with his interests from point a).
c) The candidate will be able to adapt more easily to an international company, since at the initial stages he will have fewer problems with communications (he is already learning English).
Believe me, candidates who request to tell about themselves answer “What exactly to tell?” Usually do not show themselves in the best way at the interview.
3. What is my favorite university subject?
The teacher in the university at the exam does not want to know what your favorite subject. For us, the answer may be one of the key.
In another interpretation, this question may sound like “What subjects did you study at the university?” Or “What subjects did you study recently?”.
If you have well formulated the answer to the second question (“Tell about yourself”), then it is quite possible that you will not have to tell about your favorite subject separately - you will mention it earlier. If the story about yourself does not allow to understand what it is worth building a further conversation, then you will be offered an alternative way to search for a topic - they will ask about what they liked at the university.
In general, the answer to this question contains extremely important information:
a) What do you like and what is interesting to you. It is desirable (see question number 2) that your interests and your sympathies coincide with the description of the vacancy. Otherwise (see question number 1) it is difficult to understand why you came to our position for an interview.
b) What can I ask you. Usually, people are well aware of what they are interested in. And if they do not understand something, then they seek to find answers or come to them on the basis of their own knowledge. Even if you don’t have your own complete Java project, you probably did some laboratory work that dealt with various aspects of the language. Let's talk about them.
c) Which of your university mentors can vouch for you. It will probably not be a surprise to you that almost all teachers,
preparing for us, we somehow know. Even if you get confused in your answers to C ++ questions (which you have recently studied and which are of interest to you), we will have a chance to ask you for a recommendation from someone (and preferably from those) who have watched you during the last years come to the point and what success you are making.
The only thing - do not say that you liked that subject, the basics of which you do not know. For example, it is not necessary to mention that you liked the subject “Operating Systems” if you cannot explain what a “process” is. Candidates who liked databases, but did not know how RIGHT JOIN differs from LEFT JOIN, received not the most pleasant reviews from our interviewees. By the way, we recently set up a similar experiment - we estimated the percentage of “database lovers” who do not know the differences between JOIN-operations. And, unfortunately, this percentage also turned out to be two-digit, comparable to the number of candidates who do not know which company and which position they come to for an interview.
4. What is my project I can call the most positive experience?
Imagine that the teacher at the exam tells you: “Please tell me what question you have learned exactly. Will respond to it. " This happens very rarely, usually in the case when you are "pulled on the top three."
We almost always ask such a question at the interview. Ideally, the candidate himself mentions the project, telling about himself (see question 2). If this does not happen, then the question is asked directly.
A successful answer will determine an impressive part of your interview success. What are its basic criteria?
a) (Unexpectedly :)) When preparing the answer, the question “Which company and which position do I have an interview for?” was taken into account. Simply put, the relevant job vacancy is voiced.
b) You yourself tell about the project (the interviewer does not pull out the information with “ticks”). Almost always, a person who is really interested in something, narrates about his favorite business with passion, often even forgetting that he is on a formal interview procedure. The candidate enthusiastically talks about which architecture was chosen, what kind of IDE he used, and even what mistakes he made.
c) You are talking about the project in which you were doing something. That is, not about a certain abstract project, on which one of your friends worked, and you in it were busy with conditional renaming of variables. It is better if you describe a much smaller job, but done by yourself.
Now back to the point that you "learned best". Your answer about the project will determine those theoretical and practical questions about which you will be told an impressive part of the interview. If you wrote a conditional server that handles requests, then you will probably be asked about critical sections, multithreading and its implementation, which (if you were interested in the project and you worked independently) you know well.
If you honestly admit that there was no project, but you spent a lot of effort on C ++ lab work, in which you had to perform specified operations with data structures, you will be asked about queues, stacks, doubly linked lists, how to sort them, add and remove items. And if you can answer such questions in detail, it will be much better than to tell you about a big project in which you have been given a very small piece. Or, even worse, you will mention a large project, but you will not be able to answer a single simple question related to the implementation of one or another of its components.
And, most importantly, it is not necessary to say that you have absolutely no experience, which you can call positive. You definitely did something that interested you in a particular language. Otherwise (see question 1) it is not very clear why you come to the interview for this position.
5. What is my main mistake?
A university lecturer is unlikely to ask you what mistakes you have made in the past - he is interested in your mistakes in answering ticket questions.
We are often interested in how you react to your own failures. It is quite possible that in the draft from the previous question you did not succeed and not everything succeeded. But the understanding that
a) Failures are part of any big deal.
b) Only through failure do we gain such valuable experience.
is extremely important for any specialist. If, remembering your own defeats, you can soberly assess their causes, and also tell you what you would have done differently in order to prevent such blunders, then you will also be able to extract the necessary benefits from your mistakes at work.
6. Why do I ask this question?
Here, of course, prepare in advance will not work. But we urge you to remember that every time you are asked, for example, about how many gas stations are located within the Moscow Ring Road , think about why you are asked such a question.
This question is not asked to get the exact number in return. The exact number of filling stations in Moscow is of interest to programmers extremely rarely. But how you approach the solution of the tasks, is always of interest. And despite the fact that some abandon the tasks from the book How to Move Mount Fuji, the ability to demonstrate one’s own line of reasoning is still one of the important requirements for a candidate.
Answering questions, do not hesitate to ask your interlocutor. “But can we assume that there are no stations in the city center?”, “And can we assume that there are the same number of filling stations in sleeping areas?”, “I know for sure that there are 5 stations in my area, can we allow What is the same number of gas stations in the neighboring districts? ”- all these questions show your ability to look for a solution to the tasks set. Obviously, it’s not exactly necessary to calculate the number of gas stations in your daily practice. And to ask colleagues and clarify the tasks set will have to constantly.
Feel free to think out loud and, most importantly, write solutions on paper or on the blackboard. Cross out carefully, but if possible, do not erase (risk to erase the right). Perhaps we will understand that your decision is not going there and we will clarify the question. Perhaps you do not solve the problem to the end, but if we see the correct train of thought, this may be quite enough.
If the candidate, having heard the question about the petrol stations, leaves himself for 20 minutes, and after that he says: “Forty two”, then we can hardly make any useful conclusion. If, after receiving the task of spreading a single-linked list, you will say after a long silence that you do not know of a single way, the interview will definitely end in failure. If you start by drawing a list, there will be much more chances to understand and come up with an algorithm (even if you did not know it).
A couple of years ago, during the interviews for an intern position in the QA department, we gave students the following task:
We will consider the Earth as an ideal ball and suppose that, precisely at the equator, it was “girded” with a metal tape. Then this tape was extended by 1 meter and positioned it above the equator so that the distance from the tape to the surface of the Earth was everywhere the same. Question: Will the cat crawl into the gap formed?
It would seem - the equator is long. What is there 1 meter? The cat is definitely not going through. So answered half the candidates. The trick is that the gap is 16 centimeters wide. That is, an animal known for its natural dexterity would definitely have snuck.
Why did we ask such a question? In order to understand whether a technical university student is capable, even if in a situation of seemingly obvious answer to a question, apply a formula from a mathematics course for the fifth grade. If a student began to draw a round Earth, a ribbon, and then recalled that the circumference was 2 * pi * r, then this made him much closer to success. Half of the candidates started to draw, half of the half reached the final formula.
By the way, after the candidate said: “Yes, he will crawl through” we began to clarify: “Are you sure? Is the earth huge? Just one meter? Sounds weird…". And if the student then showed his ability to convince us that his position is correct (with the help of a very obvious argument lying on the surface), then his chances of being invited to the next round exceeded 90%.
When you pass the exam, it makes no sense to think about why the teacher included this or that question in the ticket. The teacher has no task to understand how you think. He is important to your knowledge of a particular subject. An interview (especially a student’s interview) checks not only and not so much the knowledge of one or another programming language as of “today”. The task of the interview is to reveal whether you have an understanding of basic concepts and the ability to come to one or another conclusion using them.
7. What will I ask the employer?
Agree, it is very strange before the exam to think about what you ask the examiner. He will definitely ask. You will only answer.
But to ask the employer can and should be. Moreover, employers love those applicants who ask questions.
Why? Because (as we know from the first question), good candidates choose the best employer. An interview is not only our chance to understand whether we want to work with you or not, this is also an opportunity for you to conclude whether our company is suitable for your career.
One of our colleagues, who has been working as an engineer for a long time, always gives the same amount of time for interviews to his questions as to questions of interviewers. In essence, increasing the interview time by half. Perhaps this is one of the reasons, almost always allowing him to show the employer that he, too, makes a choice. And, in the end, to be hired precisely in the company, from work in which both parties (employee and employer) will receive the maximum benefit.
From your questions to the employer it should be clear that you are really interested in understanding how the company works. "How
is the development process built? ”,“ At what stage is the project? ”,“ Where are the team members geographically located ”, etc. Similar questions also show that you understand that software development is not just writing code. This understanding for students is a rarity and, quite definitely, positively characterizes the candidate.
Conclusion
As we said at the beginning, our seven questions will be especially helpful to those who are confronted for the first time with the interview process. If you already have your own extensive experience in conducting interviews, we will be glad to see your practice examples in the comments.
For those interested, here are some helpful materials:
- Guerilla Guide for Interviewing . Since the time when Joel Spolsky wrote this article, an impressive number of years have passed, but the material has absolutely not lost its relevance.
- A bit about those issues that are worth thinking about why they are being asked
- Questions asked by successful candidates
Summing up, we note once again - employers assume that your desire to get on this or that job is conscious and dictated by your interests and experience (albeit a learning one). Therefore, be attentive to what companies and to which positions you send your resumes. Do not send a resume "just like that."
If the vacancy is really interesting for you, and the answers to our seven questions are prepared by you, then the chances of getting such a desirable place as an intern or junior engineer will increase significantly. And, perhaps, you even appear on the photo of our friendly youth team;)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/246701/
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