I did well in tech rounds, did not get offer
We talked to some recent SWE, PM candidates & Technical recruiters (Thank you for your time !) and we could see a clear pattern where some technically solid candidates who had done a lot of amazing tech work could not clear the loops for FAANG companies like Google and Facebook. Why? In short – You did not do as well as you thought in the behavioral rounds.
Let’s start with a common Assumption/ Mistake: Since you did a lot of work, and you clearly understand what the work was, you feel that you are good and covered on the behavioral interviews.
Wrong! You need practice on how to phrase it, which words to use which not (so that you can amplify the right signals), how to up-level and down level it appropriately. This practice needs to be with professionals who can coach & guide you, NOT with peers – as that might work to your disadvantage in giving you false sense of confidence. Below we reveal our simple 5 step approach for the behavioral interviews.
- Research: Do your research on the Company, the specific job, your interviewer(s). Your best friends on this step are going to be Google, Bing, Glassdoor, and company’s social media pages. Same way, the LinkedIn page of your interviewers are going to help you understand a lot about them.
- Introspection: Do your research on yourself. Why should they hire you? How do your goals and values align with that of the company? What specific skills make you a great fit for the specific job? Write down your core competencies with very specific examples where you demonstrated them.
- Interview Expectations: Understand from the recruiter what to expect in the interviews. Their goal is to get you placed so utilize that mutual alignment.
- Prepare: At least 5 stories in the S.T.A.R format. The stories should showcase you Impact with the metrics. E.g. My work led to a X% improvement in ‘xyz’ metric leading to a net increase of XX in this vector. Most candidates we talked to thought they had it, but either the impact was missing or the amount of time they spent on each was dis-proportionate.
- Practice: Mock interviews provide you with an environment where you are able to word the stories right, get judged on the quality and format without getting penalized. You get expert feedback in the end, with written notes. It makes a world of difference.
Don’t forget to have a few questions ready for the interviewers. Our seasoned mock interviewers are standing by to help you!
Getting noticed by the recruiters
Your LinkedIn Profile
Let’s start with your LinkedIn profile. There are three logical steps: Discover, Click, Contact.
- Discover: You need to show up in their search results.
- Easiest way here is to have the right keywords sprinkled around in the right sections. If you are good at something, or are seeking a certain kind of position, make sure to have that highlighted.
- Your profile needs to be “clickable” / attractive.
- To do this, Make sure to have a high quality image which has your face, and no one else in it. Image should preferably be high resolution, with full smiling face showing.
- Make sure to have a great headline, what makes you top of your game.
- Once clicked, it needs to “reel them in”.
- Have a fully filled out objective, up to date education, current employment, and past experiences.
- No fillers & fluff. Talk about your impact, and get straight to it. Example: It’s much better to say “Designed Product recommendation engine” Instead of “Passionate & self driven team player worked closely on the engine which recommends related products to customers”
- Use bullets or numbers instead of Long paragraphs.
- Be concise in writing your technical skills. E.g. Python 2 and Python 3 should just be Python. Just like “Microsoft word, Microsoft excel, Microsoft Office 365, Word Online etc can all be clubbed as “Microsoft productivity suite”
- Have good recommendations.
- Have a fully filled out objective, up to date education, current employment, and past experiences.
Your Google presence
Search yourself on Google and see what shows up, your first few results do not showcase how you want recruiters and potential employers to see you, then this is something that needs to be fixed !
One easy & free way to fix it is to get those unwanted results buried in second or third page by creating new content that takes the prime spot. It’s easier than you think – Start writing up a few blogs / notes / posts on sites which shows results on Google sooner than your own website. Start with Facebook / Twitter / Medium / Quora or other sites. Remember: those sites should have your full name in your profile!
Being pro-active
Reach out yourself to the recruiters with a one or two line polite message asking them how they are doing, and then a line about you, typically – which has your elevator pitch!
Get referred / introduced – Ask your friends and contacts to see if they know someone in that dream company of yours’. You can also do this yourself via advanced LinkedIn search. More on this in our next blog!
I got a working piece of code .. but no offer!
Don’t be surprised! Here are the top five reasons we have seen which lead to this outcome.
- Did you solve the wrong problem – we see this more often than you’d think, do your best job in disambiguating the question. Write down at least 2 examples of inputs & outputs. Ask the interviewer if you should start coding based on your understanding.
- You are not evaluated on the output of the code but the process that led you to that code! Did you have to get too many hints?
- Did you interact too much or too little ? Both are not good signs. This is a fine line and mocks with pros are the best way to get the balance right.
- Did you code look too simple without any special casing? E.g. Checking for null pointer / empty arrays should be a habit.
- Did you get into an argument / heated discussion with the interviewer ? Interviewer could be wrong but does it really matter at the end of the day? Did the interviewer look / feel annoyed?
Mock Interviews are a good way to ensure that you have your bases covered! Set one up today with a professional of your choice from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon or others.
Top Mistakes candidates make during the Coding Interviews
- Failing to understand and disambiguate the problem statement, very very clearly. If you start solving the wrong problem, it’s a death spiral.
- Not using proper naming convention? It’s ok for example to use ‘i’ in for loops but using ‘sortedSet’ for a sorted set makes everyone’s job easy. Your brain will save a few cycles in mapping ss to sortedSet and that will reduce stress. As one engineer put it, “almost costed me my interview..”!
Pro-Tip: The interviewer is also taking notes, so he/she may not be 100% focussed on the code. If the interviewer tunes out for 30 seconds and comes back to three new variables, i,j,k, it will not make things any easier. - Missing Scale considerations. Design for finding duplicate links from a list of 100 url’s is going to be completely different ballgame from designing it for 100M url’s. Think, in memory sort!
- Ignoring small but important optimizations. Keep your eyes & mind open to see how you can continue to optimize for more efficient pieces of code as you solve!
- Not doing a walk thru of your code at the end – Make sure to spot check for some obvious flaws!
Taking a mock interview builds the muscle memory you need to continue improving these skills! Set one up today!