Tam Kbeili is the founder of CodeCast, and CTO and founder of Aplicar. He has a long experience with both hiring tech professionals and with preparing candidates for the hiring process. He discussed types of technical interviews and shared what he believes is the fool proof ways of nailing them on VanHackCON 2022. Here you can read some of his most interesting ideas.
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The Real Purpose of Interviews
Tam says the technical interview process has two goals. The first one is to assess whether the candidate has the technical capacity to perform the role expected of him. The second is to understand if the person fits well in the team that already exists in the company or that is being assembled with other professionals.
To do well in technical interviews candidates need to understand these two ideas and prepare for both of them.
3 Basic Rules For Preparing For Technical Interviews
Knowing what is expected of you gives preparation a whole new purpose. Tam thought of three principles to guide candidates:
Principle 1
“The interview itself is a skill you need to master”. Team VanHack will help you do it!
Principle 2
“Treat the interview more as a conversation and less as a task”. Show your communication skills, show interest, ask questions. Think of recruiters as potential future coworkers or bosses.
Principles 3
“Know as much as possible about the company”. Read about the company, check its blog and social media. If they have a public product, read about it. Search your network for someone that already works at that company and talk to them (if and when it’s appropriate).
Challenges You Might Be Given During a Technical Interview
There are different types of technical interviews. Tam reminds candidates that preparing for all of them increases your chances since you never know which one you will find during the hiring process. “Sometimes companies don’t do just one but a combination of them”, Tam says. Some common types of technical interviews are:
- Whiteboard – “the idea for the whiteboard interview is that they usually give you an algorithmic type of a technical challenge, like to reverse a linked list or how to merge two arrays together or something. And then you have to walk them through that, step by step. It doesn’t literally have to be a white board because you could be doing it remotely on an editor or something”.
- Take Home exam – “Some companies will give you a technical challenge and it will give you a day or two to do it. And maybe at the end you have to explain your solution.”
- Pair with a developer – “They’ll tell you: we want to work on this feature. Why don’t you pair with one of our developers and guide us through it?”
- Build a mock up – “This is usually for hybrid roles where you don’t need to use a huge amount of code, for example, when you’re applying for a front end position”.
- Debugging Challenge – “It is walking the team through debugging a piece of code and coming up with a solution”.
Rocking The Technical Interview
Tam says while the goal of a technical interview is to assess the candidates coding abilities, it’s personal skills that will put you ahead in the race. When you apply for a position, knowing how to perform the task at hand should be more or less a given. How you do it on the other hand may impress recruiters or not. Being creative, offering different solutions, and being able to keep a good report with the team are all “secondary” factors being analyzed during the technical interview.
Candidates should be chatting with the recruiter and asking questions, while performing the challenge during the interviews, Tam suggests. “Ask what types of programming languages you are allowed to use”, for example. Say “hey would you like me to start by writing tests for this?”. Communicate, verbalize your thinking process, walk them through what you are doing and share the ideas behind the solutions you are implementing.
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