Know your own stuff

Interview processes vary from company to company, and even from department to department within a company. But no matter what the process, I honestly think the best way to prepare is to really know the stuff you've learned and claim to know on your resume. Oh sure, you can prep for behavioral interview questions such as "What do you perceive as your weakness", but by and large, I would figure that the interviewer is largely interested in your job-specific skills, experience and what you can bring to the job.

So where do they first get wind of your experience? From your resume, of course. Which means that no matter what sort of question an interviewer throws at you from their pool of potential questions, the one thing you can be solidly sure of is the material on your own resume. Which YOU wrote. Which speaks to YOUR experiences.

Let me backtrack a little. Our department's interview process is fairly straightforward-- start out with a phone screen, and if you make that cut, come on site for in-person interviews. Now obviously, since we're a tech group, we're really mainly interested in technical knowledge and look for proficiency in specific skills outlined in the job descriptions. Fairly straightforward, no? Either you know X programming language well or you don't. And if you don't, that becomes apparent in the interview, which runs the gamut from answering basic conceptual questions to outright writing coding examples. Nothing outside the norm from usual tech company practices.

Candidates come from a variety of backgrounds, and will thus respond in a variety of ways, depending on their experiences. Even an ideal candidate can miss a question or two on occasion, and still show enough potential to bring on-site, even hire. It's not a game of seeing how many questions they get right, it's a matter of evaluating their problem-solving approaches and their ability to pick up concepts unfamiliar to them (which happens. Nobody knows everything about everything).

Still, in my mind, there is one way a candidate can raise a red flag to me, that *does* have to do with answering questions right or wrong. As I mentioned earlier, your resume is the one tool you have complete control over-- you decide what goes into it, you craft the descriptions of your job responsibilities to convey what you intend to the recruiter, you know better than anyone else what you've learned and what your proficiencies are.

So why, oh why, when an interviewer asks you a simple question about something on your resume (sometimes just as an icebreaker), is it so difficult to answer? Why do you hem and haw when asked to provide details about a recent school project? Why do you make us practically pull teeth in order to get anything deeper than high-level details of a particular job responsibility? If you can't even speak to your own resume intelligently, if you can't even articulate what exact skills you gained/utilized in a particular project, that doesn't really bode well for the rest of your technical knowledge. Because if nothing else, if you can't answer a single question from our list, the least you should be able to do is know the stuff on your resume well. Right? Right!? It's YOUR resume!!

It's not that hard! The mind. It boggles...