Mastering The Interview Game (part 1 of 3) – The Pregame

The job interview process is stressful. You often compete with tens or hundreds of qualified candidates for a single position, and you can only get the position by clearly standing out from the crowd. Sounds easy on paper, but extremely hard to do, especially with a tough job market in mid-2024 as I am writing this.

I want to share my experience and some tips to stand out so you can have a better chance to get that job offer. Although I will write with a focus on software developer interviews due to my background, anyone should be able to benefit from reading this.

This article assumes that you have already submitted a job application and a recruiter has contacted you to schedule the interview.

My experience as a software developer candidate

(if you are not a software developer, this section is optional and you can just skip to the next section.)

In 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was working as a software developer at Ticketmaster which was struggling financially with all the events canceled (aka ZERO revenue), and over time, the employees around me started getting furloughed or salary cuts. My salary was reduced which was fine, but because I got the sense that my job was no longer secure, I started interviewing elsewhere. Thankfully, at that time, the market was pretty good with many software developer job openings, so I ended up submitting around 100 job applications (tracked on a Google sheet) and went through at least 40 interviews.

For those who are not familiar, an interview typically goes through multiple stages:

Recruiter screening – The recruiter looks at your job application and resume and makes sure that you qualify for the position. The recruiter may meet with you first to ask you additional qualifying questions.
Hiring Manager screening – The hiring manager meets with you to learn more about you and tell you more about the team and role. The purpose is to see if you can be a potential good fit for the team.
Technical interview – For technical roles only. Technical members of the team meet with you to evaluate your technical skills and knowledge.
Panel interview – Aka the onsite interview, you are scheduled for multiple rounds of interviews with different people, often on the same day. These include people from the hiring team, people from other teams, and the hiring manager. The rounds are a mix of technical and behavioral questions so that you can be evaluated from different angles.

For some interview processes, there are more stages, for others there are fewer stages, but this is the general format.

Back to my story. Initially, I failed ALL of the interviews in the early stages (1-3) which was sad, but, slowly but surely, I learned from the mistakes and kept improving, and by the end of that job-seeking journey, I was consistently making it to the last stage (panel interview), received multiple offers, and accepted one.

Since 2021, I have participated in 5 job interviews and received or would have received offers from all of them (I am not counting job applications that I have submitted but were rejected without having an interview). In other words, I have had a 100% interview success rate since 2021. I believe this is because through failing so many interviews, I have finally understood the proper techniques to ace the interview process, which, I am about to share with you.

The interview is just a game

Before we even start, the most powerful thing you can do is to change how you perceive a job interview.

Back in 2009, I just graduated from college and, like many others, I was massively underemployed due to the poor economy. At that time, each job interview I got was like a golden ticket that would get me out of poverty, and so I used to think of an interview as a life-or-death situation – if I didn’t end up with a job offer, then I have failed in life with absolutely no chance to recover. With each job rejection and “ghosting” (meaning they don’t even reject you…they just never respond), it felt more and more hopeless.

I am sure that many of you reading share the same feeling, especially if you are desperate for a job or if you are interviewing for a “dream job”. I shared a little bit of my past with you to let you know that I have been there before, and I consider myself fairly successful right now, so don’t give up, because your time to shine will come soon.

Anyway, as hard as it is, I want you to think of a job interview process as a game. Your objective to win the game is to impress the heck out of all the interviewers and then get that job offer out of 1000 candidates. To do that, you need to present yourself as the best candidate – well-prepared, confident, and THE perfect fit for the role.

Don’t get me wrong – I am not suggesting that you pretend to be someone else or lie about your experiences. You are still your true self, but because this is just a game and you come so prepared, you can perform as best as you can under zero stress. And if you don’t beat the game the first time, keep playing and keep practicing to improve, and soon you will start winning.

Now let’s talk about the preparation, aka the pregame.

The pregame

To perform amazingly during a job interview, you need to spend some time preparing for it, and then practice until you can answer questions smoothly, yet in a completely natural way (as opposed to sounding like you are reading from a script).

But where should you start? Let us go over the study guide.

Study the company

Maybe you are interviewing at your “dream company”, maybe not, but either way I want you to (temporarily) fall in love with this company and go learn everything about it.

First, to better understand what you are getting into, read:

employee reviews from Blind and Glassdoor
salary and level information from levels.fyi
perks and benefits from the company website and the websites listed in the previous bullets

If things don’t sound good to you and you don’t want to work at that company, you can still do the interview, just use it as a practice.

Then, read up on the company:

Go to the company’s website and read its mission statement. Learn about its values
Learn the company’s history either from its website, Wikipedia or Crunchbase
Learn who the key people are: founders, CEO, and other notable leaders
Know what the company is up to by reading the recent news about it

Knowing all this information allows you to tailor your answers to align with the company values so that your interviewers can give you a better evaluation. Most of the interviewers, especially those in bigger companies, grade you based on 1 of the company values. For example, when I was interviewing candidates at Snap, I was given one of Snap’s values: “kind”, “smart” (I usually get this one because I am a software developer), or “creative”, and evaluated the candidate based on the value, so if I am interviewing you, show me that you are smart, and I will give you a high score.

Here are some examples of company values:

Study the role

Open the job bulletin and re-read the job descriptions. A typical job description can tell you a lot about the position:

the team or department where the role belongs
the role, including expectations, responsibilities, level
the qualifications for the role
company culture
compensations and benefits
work flexibility – remote or on-site? Travel required?

From this info, you can anticipate questions related to them, for example:

Have you used <listed software> before?
Give me an example of a <one of the qualifications> project you have worked on. What was your role in the project? What was the outcome?
Have you ever worked remotely with people in different time zones?

You can also use the info from the job bulletin to craft some questions to ask at the end of the interview. I am jumping ahead of myself here, but asking questions as a candidate is very important during the interview, and if your questions are unique, you become more memorable. By having great questions based on the job bulletin, you can show that you care about, and want the role.

If you are stuck, try feeding the job bulletin in ChatGPT and ask it to generate some questions for you.

Study the people

If the recruiter gives you the names of your interviewers, you are encouraged to look them up and learn about them. Please do it. Your goal is to seek common traits between yourself and the interviewer because people tend to like others who are similar to themselves.

In the tech world, most people have LinkedIn profiles, so that’s the perfect place to start. From LinkedIn, you can see a lot of info and here are just some examples:

banner picture, headline & description – these give you some idea of the interviewers’ personalities, interests, and hobbies. You can then adjust your tone accordingly to match theirs better.
education, job history, certifications, projects, volunteering – look to see if you share any similarities: have you worked at the same company? Went to the same school? Lived or worked in the same city? Similar professional background? Obtained the same certification? Roughly the same age or demographics?

People tend to like others who are similar to them. If you can find a shared background, then it’s much easier for the interviewer to like you.

Also from the job history, if the interviewer listed any job responsibilities or tools for the current job, even better, because it gives you more insight into what the role will be doing and you can craft your answers to match the expectations.
interests – what pages does your interviewer follow? That’s another clue as to what the interviewer likes.

If you want to practice, look at my LinkedIn profile and see what you can come up with.

Some people would go as far as researching the interviewers on the internet and even on their personal social media. I think it’s not necessary to do the research beyond LinkedIn unless they don’t have a LinkedIn profile.

Study yourself

I already talked about mindset in a previous section – make sure you like the company and the role, or at least appear that way. Interviewers can usually tell if you don’t want to be there.

Another thing to do is to take another look at your own resume. What I like to tell my mentees is to make sure you can speak to everything and anything on your resume.

Some interviewers read the entire resume and ask you questions about the smallest thing they see, so prepare your answers accordingly. Here are some potential scenarios:

If you put Python (the programming language) under the Skills section but there is no mention of you using Python in any job responsibilities, they may ask you when you have ever used it, or maybe they will ask you specific questions only a Python user can answer, just to gauge your level of expertise.
If you have listed an accomplishment like “created an automation which resulted in 50% faster software build”, they may ask you to describe the project in detail. Things like what kind of automation it was, and how was that 50% metrics measured. And what was your involvement in this creation? Did you actually write the automation code or did someone else write it and you were the tester? (see the following section on the method to answer these types of questions)
If you have written that you are a “<topic> expert”, prepare to defend that claim.

I didn’t mean to scare you – in reality, most interviewers have a list of preset questions that they need to ask you, so they may not have time to ask those oddball questions. It’s even possible that they won’t get to read your resume too thoroughly to check for unusual things. Still, I think it is a good thing to do some self-reflection and prepare as much as you can in case they ask.

Finally, some may wonder: should I exaggerate on my resume so I can have a higher chance of getting an interview? I won’t say yes or no directly, the choice is yours – but I find it easier to be more honest than not, and my final advice is, once again, to make sure you can speak to everything and anything on your resume.

Study the questions

In 2015, in preparation for an important interview, I read a book called Answering Tough Interview Questions for Dummies which lists all of your typical, old-school interview questions like “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” or “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” or “What are your salary expectations?”. At the time, I spent a lot of effort to memorize most of the answers and that helped me pass many of the early interview stages like the recruiter/hiring manager screenings.

These days, in my experience and at least in tech companies, interviewers don’t ask those simple but tricky questions anymore. Still, there are some of those questions that you should prepare your answers for. I am talking about questions like “Tell me about yourself.” “Why do you want to work here?” or “Give me an example of you disagreeing with your manager. What happened and what was the outcome?”

The best way to prepare for these questions is just reflect on your professional or personal experience, write down some of the notable events or accomplishments, and then practice using the STAR (situation, task, action, and result) method to create the answers. I take it one step further and use a method I called SSTARR (summarize, STAR, reflection) which works very well for me.

What is the SSTARR method?

SSTARR is a method that is like STAR, except that it adds 2 extra sections.

What is STAR? It is a popular method to structure your response. There are already a lot of resources on this popular method online so you can read about it on your own, or you can keep reading this section for an example later.

The added R at the end is reflection, which means that after you finish with the original last R (result), you can either say something like “Looking back, I should have done <action> instead because <benefits>” or “since then, I have learned to do <thing>. This is a nice way to say that you have grown as a professional and will continue to grow.

The added S at the beginning is summarize. It means that once you hear the question, you don’t answer with the situation immediately. Instead, you can either rephrase the question to confirm your understanding, or you can summarize quickly your thoughts on the topic, or both. I like this S because the rephrasing shows that you were listening and confirms that you understood the question (and if you get it wrong, the interviewer can correct you immediately, which is good too), and the summarization synergizes with the last R (reflection) and serves as a fun introduction to your story. It also buys you some time to recall and organize your situation in your head.

How about an example?

Question: give me an example of you initiating a project on your own.

Answer:

Summarize – You know, that’s a good question. Throughout my career, I have initiated multiple projects on my own intending to optimize processes and multiple productivity for not just my team, but also sometimes the whole department and company. By doing that, the company can save cost and time to deliver better customer services and products.
Situation – As for the example, I want to talk about my first self-initiated project that I did 5 years ago. I was working as a software release manager at company XYZ. The company’s products are all web-based, and my main job responsibilities were coordinating and deploying new software releases onto the company website.

Between the releases, I also worked with a group of testers whose responsibility was to follow a bunch of scenarios to test the website, which means they manually opened the website in the web browser, and did things like clicking links and buttons, to make sure that the website looks and works as intended. The testing process was completely manual and took a lot of time.
Task – After a few months of observation, I thought that if I could automate some of the scenarios, I could save the testers’ time. To be honest, though, I wanted to help them because, after each release, the testers had to do smoke tests on the website and it could take a long time to complete. By reducing the smoke test length, my release process will also be shortened.

Initially, I didn’t know how to do the automation, so I did my research and found Selenium, which is a tool that can automate clicks, typing, and other human-like actions in a web browser. I started playing with Selenium and found that I could create a testing framework so developers and testers who knew how to code could add and store tests as code in a programming language, in this case, Java.
Action – I followed a tutorial to create a basic testing framework and tested it with a tester and a developer, and they both liked it. I then presented the testing framework to the department and the testers were open to trying it out. Once my manager said I could spend time working on it, I used the framework to automate some of the easy scenarios and showed the testers how to use it. I also showed the developers on to create and add test cases.
Result – The testers were able to use the framework to replace around 30% of the scenarios, resulting in a significant time reduction for testing and software release. No, the automation did not take away the testers’ jobs – they were able to use the extra time to either go through the remaining manual test scenarios more carefully or to do something else like learning about the test framework.
Reflection – After completing that project, I caught the “automation” bug and started to initiate similar projects everywhere I went. I started observing processes more closely and doing research on how to automate those processes. As a result, I learned a lot about system design, coding in multiple languages, and cloud computing, while helping my teammates, my companies, and ultimately the companies’ customers to receive better products.

In addition to the method, also keep in mind the following:

keep the sections short because you only have limited time to answer each question
be specific where possible. It allows the interviewers to better immerse into the scenario (like a story)
explain technical terms and jargon in simpler words, so everyone can understand them
if you know the company’s value, mention how your example ties in with the value. Otherwise, you can’t go wrong in explaining how it benefits the company’s customers or your target users

What about technical interviews?

a technical interview is a special round for technical roles like software developers. In a technical interview, the interviewers would either present a coding challenge, a system design question, a troubleshooting scenario question, or questions to test your knowledge on specific domains, like a certain software tool or a programming language.

I am not very good at coding challenges, so my only advice is to practice daily on leetcode and follow this example from Google:

For system design, look at https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer.

Troubleshooting questions should be answered like you are in tech support – you start investigating from the easiest thing to the hardest. For example, if the problem is “I can’t turn my desktop computer on!”, the first thing to check is whether the computer is connected to power and there is power in the building. Maybe I will write a separate article specifically on this topic later.

Domain knowledge questions require you to know the domain well. If you don’t, you just have to go read a book or watch YouTube videos to study it.

Practice, practice, practice

Mimosa Heygorgeous GIFfrom Mimosa GIFs

At this point, you have done your research and come up with some answers. Now, find someone to practice interviewing. It doesn’t have to be a career coach – it can be a friend, your partner, or anyone really. At the very least, just give them a list of questions to ask you and practice answering. You can even apply for jobs that are not your first choice, just to practice interviewing in a real-life situation, and if you fail, because it’s not your “dream job”, it’s not a big deal.

While you are at it, check out my other article, overlooked interview tips, to help push your interview game to the next level.

After practicing a lot, you should sound more natural and polished. Congratulations, you are now ready for primetime.

The calm before the storm

In 2018, I interviewed for a position at Google and Google invited me to fly to San Jose for the onsite panel interview. I was very interested in the role at the time and spent a lot of time preparing for it, studying everything that the recruiter sent me. However, the day before my interview, my flight to San Jose was delayed for 6 hours and I ended up in the hotel at 3 AM. Maybe because I was overtired or stressed from the flight delays, I could barely sleep that night. With no more than 3 hours of sleep, I dragged my tired self to the Google office where I would spend my next 6 hours in front of multiple lions, I meant interviewers. I bombed at least 2 of the interview rounds and was promptly rejected.

If I wasn’t tired or nervous, would I have received a job offer? It is hard to say now, but I could probably done much better. The point is that aside from external factors like what happened in my unfortunate situation, you should make sure to bring your best self to the interview. Get plenty of rest, don’t eat questionable food that can make you sick, consume your caffeine, meditate – do whatever you need to do to be able to give a stellar performance.

Conclusion

Job interviews are scary for those who are unprepared. If you can adjust your mindset, do your research thoroughly, and with enough practice, you will impress your interviewers.

I hope you find this article helpful. In a future article, I will share my tips to conquer the actual interview. See you later!