Some Dos and Don’ts I’ve noticed throughout my experience of interviewing potential candidates. These are things that will help in the interview process with me and can be potentially applied to interview processes with other startups as well.
Dos:
Understand for your interviewer.
For a startup, your interviewer may or may not be someone that will be working on the same thing as you will, nor is it guaranteed for them to have the exact same field of expertise as you. It’s best to have an understand your interviewer’s work & expertise before you go into very specific technical details about your work. For example, talking about a very specific mobile package size optimization project when your interviewer (me) doesn’t have any mobile development experience (yet). It’s easier for your interviewer to resonate with what you’re saying if they can understand and follow you. However, some things are consistent across all software specializations, like software design principles, optimization tradeoffs, etc.
Understand the position you’re applying to.
This is similar to the point above. Usually when hiring at a startup, we have specific roles to fill and projects to complete. Using the same mobile dev example, if a candidate is applying to a mobile dev position with the expectation of building out a mobile app from scratch, it’s hard for me to judge if they are a good fit if they mainly talk about their experiences optimizing mobile app startup times or building out component libraries for other teams at a big co.
Ask good questions and express interest.
I’ve had a few interview experiences where during the main interview process, the candidate was shown to not be a good enough fit with the company but their the questions or post interview comments pushed them to the next interview round. Here are a few examples:
- Strong interest in the company or the culture. This has to be genuine and not something like “AI is the new wave”, which I’ve heard way too many times.
- Good understanding of the product. Questions or comments that demonstrate a (exceedingly) good understanding of the product and company direction (i.e. aligns with how we’re thinking about the product and the roadmap).
- Demonstrate that you’re following the industry. One candidate asked questions about the Sam Altman CEO situation during the interview the day the situation happened.
Demonstrate passion in your craft
Self explanatory. e.g. you code outside your job, you read software blogs / articles, you write about what you’re working on, you have a personal website, you use vim, etc.
TODO:
Don’ts
Talk for over 5 minutes.
The interview process is designed to be a back and forth conversation between you and the interviewer. Don’t be afraid to give a high level overview at first and allow the interviewer to guide the conversation into more details.
Be too high level or miss the technical details.
This usually happens with senior and tech lead roles. Even if we’re hiring for tech leads, we’re still looking for builders and you’re 100% expected to code, so don’t only focus on the high level and dive into the technical details when necessary.
TODO: