Job interviews: be prepared!
By Erik van Kempen | September 16, 2007
Ever since I made my curriculum vitae available on my other domain (http://electronical.nl) I've received an invitation for a job interview every once in a while. But since a few months, the number of invitations is skyrocketing. I even got a phone call from a company, which wanted to hire me, when I was on my way to an interview at another company last week. Apparently, software developers (especially C, C++ and scripting languages like PHP etcetera) are not easily found anymore.
Most job interviews resulted in a disappointed recruiter and a disappointed me. It's not that they didn't want to hire me, but they were mostly disappointed by the fact that I wanted to continue studying and thus lacking more than ten or sixteen hours available for the job. So I'm still no corporate code monkey yet. Nevertheless, I learned some important things from these interviews.
Experience
Companies would preferably like to hire a twenty-year-old with over five years of professional experience. If I say I'm still in college and there wasn't much time to gain professional experience, they look at me like they don't understand. It is important that you had some professional experience from a summer job. Otherwise, they are not able to predict how you would fit in a professional world.
What to wear?
At most software development departments, the employees dress really casual. No ties, no suits, just a neat shirt and jeans. But you never know if the company, which invited you, has a formal dress code. So, as the recruiters say, you should always wear a nice suit if you don't know what to wear for sure.
Theoretical knowledge
I've always thought that recruiters liked a practical point-of-view on problems. Almost every job interview, at least for a technology-related position, consists of a part where you are tested for technical knowledge. They will probably ask you to answer some questions. My experience with this is that they tend to ask you questions that you will only know if you've learned about the subject from a book or have read about it somewhere. You have probably written certain procedures hundreds of time, without knowing what this exact action was called.
I have learned most of my knowledge by trying and thus gaining practical experience with the subject (which is how an 'ingenieur' -which is the Dutch word for an engineer with a master's degree from a university of technology- should be).
You could solve this problem, of lacking theoretical knowledge, by reading some books about the subject prior to the interview. So if you're invited for a job interview as a 'C++ software engineer', you could start reading about C++. Just to enhance your vocabulary etcetera.
Background information
If you are reading about some theoretical things, why don't you read a few lines about the company. Recruiters like it if you know anything about the things they care about. This does not mean you need to know about their annual profits, but you could read about recent activities, like product releases etc.
You can also dive into the product you will work on, once hired. They like it if you can ask some questions or point out some problems (not to many of these) with their product.
Be prepared
The main point of this post is "be prepared". It is important to know something about the subjects you are going to talk about. Prepare some questions you want to be answered. Good luck! I hope I'll be lucky once. ;-)