What’s the Real Purpose of an Interview?
Nowadays an interview is a pretty common procedure for any company, especially in IT world. That’s why it’s a really hot topic for every engineer who wants to get a job, to be exact for an “interviewee” or a “candidate”. At the same time, there is the other side of that coin (for many, dark side) and the name for it is an “interviewer” who was vested with the responsibility of conducting an interview.
The thing is the process itself is really stressful and challenging for both sides and the outcome may be miserable and full of the frustration of not being perfect for an hour and a half of your time.
Let me explain the former motivation of the initiative. During our career, we usually change the job several times and it’s the best scenario, all of us were asked to participate or even conduct an interview at least once.
See?! An interview is a part of our career, thus we have to be good at it.
With this in mind, it’d be really useful to know how to properly organize an interview for not stressing out a candidate from the very first minute, how to find out the strengths and weaknesses, how to be well-prepared, and how to behave during an interview. All of these topics are really-really significant for any of us.
Perhaps, you’ve already faced the interviewer who wasn’t prepared enough and the interview itself wasn’t really comfortable and pleasant. So, for avoiding and reduce such cases there should be a well-structured interview algorithm inside our mind. It’s the same thing as learning new technologies, new programming languages or frameworks, it’s a skill.
Let me expand on that and give you a definition:
Interviewing skill a set of abilities that help you to reveal all strengths and weaknesses of an interviewee and gain valuable pieces of information on a positive note. The skilled interviewer represents a company in a good way that improves the possibility of hiring the best candidate. At the same time interviewing skill also includes the ability to get through interviews as a candidate as well.
That’s how it works, that’s why the skill itself is fundamental.
Cool…But what’re the benefits?
As I’ve already mentioned, the benefits are obvious: their company or team will get the best candidates, their technical skills will be up-to-date, they will understand the process internally and it might help them during the interviews, they’ll improve soft skills and so on and so forth. The list is endless. Isn’t that amazing?
Besides, we’re going to drive deeper into various types of interviews such as customer/manager and technical interviews, on-site and off-site interviews and that’s just the beginning. In addition to that, we’re going to define a “good” coding task and explain the criteria, look into the S.T.A.R. approach for checking up the soft skills of a candidate, found out what’s CV screening stage, uncover some useful tips, and so on.
So, to sum up, we’ve defined interviewing skills, roles, benefits, and motivation for further steps. I hope I could urge you to join me on this fabulous adventure.
Next steps:
Take a look at the 4 stages of a typical job interview.
Then, learn how to assess soft skills effectively?
Use the spices: Tune up interviewing skills with spices.
