Preparing for Interviews
What effective interview prep looks like
TLDR:
- Start prepping early and often - don’t wait to cram at the last minute
- Mock interviews are an underrated resource - practice among your friends to catch your blindspots (especially behavioural!)
- Balance honing general interviewing skills with practicing for specific companies
- Failing interviews is not a problem - it’s only when you don’t know why that it becomes an issue
There’s two broad types of interviews you’ll encounter for software roles - behavioural and technical. This part of the guide will first go over general strokes and advice that applies to both types, before diving into details about each one separately.
The goal of interviews is to give the interviewer confidence that you’re the right fit for the job.
Topics to cover
- Practice driving signal
- Speaking
- Get feedback from friends/classmates on whether your speech is clear and is paced effectively. You can tell by asking them to summarize/repeat what you said back to you
- Literally just practice speaking out loud with a human. I’ve conducted so many interviews where the candidate seemed to be super uncomfortable just sitting there and speaking about their resume or whatnot
- Includes attitude, intonation, body language, etc. be excited to talk about the opportunity and how you fit in
- An organic and doubly effective way to practice this is to join in-person events, whether they be hackathons, club events, career fairs, etc. This gives you the chance to practice your 10-30 second elevator pitch about what you do and where you want to be.
- Behavioural: practice with LPs or similar. Make easy, consistent, and solid stories that cover one or more LPs which you can quickly use when needed.
