Job Interviews are much feared. People get nervous over and again in each interview they do. Few believe that luck is the most important factor for success in interview, while others believe that interview depends completely on preparation. Everyone has got their opinion, but no one knows the sure-shot secret to interview success.
In my opinion, if you know few esoteric secrets, you can succeed in any job interview that you face. In this post, I am going to reveal few of the tricks that I learnt myself and implemented them to succeed in job interviews.
You should master the skill of hacking an interview. I don’t mean hacking in the sense of hacking a website or anything, but in the sense of knowing the loop holes in an existing system and using them to gain an unfair advantage over the system. These are the tricks that I had learnt after observing behaviour patterns of interviewers from my personal experience of attending over 15 interviews with technology companies in the last 3 years in the cities of Chennai, Bangalore and Pune.
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Hack the phone interview
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Interview the interviewees
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Guess questions from job description
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Collect questions from recent interviews
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(Mis)Lead the interviewer towards you
Tell me something, is there a way for the interviewer who is on phone to find out whether you are cheating him in the interview? Before you come to any conclusion, let me clarify what I meant by cheating in a phone interview. When your phone interview is about to start, keep your laptop switched on and be ready with your loyal friend — Google. Is Google helpful? Of course it is. Especially when you are doing interviews with Indian companies.
Indian IT companies tend to test the breadth of your knowledge more than the depth of your knowledge. They will pronounce you a computer genius if you are able to recollect the names of all the Java classes and their methods without using any API reference. They would be absolutely amazed if you give an answer to all of their theory questions with confidence.I don’t mean to say that all the questions asked by the interviewers are theory, but most of the questions certainly are. And this is more true in the case of a phone interview, as there is no way to test your coding skills on phone. Google can help you out if you are stuck or if you can’t recollect something. You can easily satisfy the employer by using the right keywords or terminology at the least in case you can’t get the answer right.
You can take this hacking to another level by taking assistance of a friend. You should arrange communication with him/her in such a way that the interviewer doesn’t get a doubt about what you are doing during the phone call. A simple trick is to type the question on a notepad, show it to your friend, let him write the answer on a notepad and you construe an answer from what he writes. Another trick is you could use the ingenious and innovative design of the human body — two ears on the opposite sides of head, one ear for listening to the voice of phone receiver, other one for your friend to whisper answers in it. And trust me, I helped one my friend to successfully clear phone interview round with the company, Siemens this way.
What do you do while waiting for your turn in an interview? You’d probably be experiencing the feeling of butterflies in your stomach. And probably glancing in regular intervals at other interview candidates, wondering which of them would steal the job position away from you.You know what you actually should be doing? You should go to the candidates who have finished giving their interview and ask them for the questions asked to them. Does this sound unprofessional & unfair? Well, it might be, but all I can say is that this trick works. Works perfectly well.
Most of the questions that an interviewer asks various candidates in a day are repetitive. Interviewers don’t have separate set of questions for each candidate appearing for the interview. So, if you can gather at least say 2-3 questions from each candidate, it would be of great help to you. Especially when you don’t know the answer to those questions or when you forgot that concept. You could call up your friend and ask him for the answers to those questions. Or, why not ask the candidate who told you the questions himself? You won’t believe me, this trick saved on many occasions. This trick will only require some tact to speak to the person who comes out from an interview. Hey and you got to be careful that no one’s watching you doing this. Not everyone would like to share the questions, for the fear of losing the job to you. So, I advice you to build some friendship with the candidates around you while waiting for your turn. As you well know that every single question counts in an interview.
This sounds so obvious, guessing the questions from job profile description. But we don’t take time to do this. We prepare all those questions that “we” would like to be asked, not those questions which serve the interviewers’ interest. That’s wrong, like Dale Carnegie writes in the book “How to win friend and influence people”, know what they want from you and give it to them. Take time to think in the interviewer’s perspective. What is the job description? What are the technologies and skills that the jobs requires from candidates?
Note down the keywords from the job description. Try to guess what could be the questions asked for those requirements. Try to find out the details of the project to which the employer has advertised. What you need to collect is the exact technical specifications of the project. If you can talk to an employee already working for that project, nothing like that. Ask him what are the technical tasks he does daily. Can he show you some code that he worked on? After you collect these details, it is not hard to guess the questions. 90% of the times, interviewers ask questions related to the job involved in their project from what they do on a daily basis. Upon finishing this task, you would have already won half the battle. At least 50% of those questions that you have guessed are surely going to be asked. Wonderful, so half the question paper is leaked.For example, here is an excerpt of a job requirement calling for Flex developers.
Skills:
1) Remote object concepts using Flex and Java (preferably BlazeDs)
2) Component Design/Development using Action Script
3) Component Design/Development using MXML
4) Usage of AdvancedDataGrid including Item Renderers, Item Editors
5) Array Collection manipulation
6) Event Handling (including custom events)
It is so clear from the skills that they mentioned, what are the probable questions they are going to ask. If I focus my preparation to the above mentioned specifics, I am sure to fare well in the interview.
Head straight to interview question sites such as Geek interview, All interview, and browse the questions related to the technologies for which you are doing an interview. Candidates who recently underwent interviews post the questions asked to them in such forums. So you get the latest questions that are being asked by interviewers at such websites. It is a well known fact that most of the interviewers prepare their set of questions to ask from such websites.
Don’t stop here. Talk to your friends or colleagues who have the experience of interviewing in the required technologies. Ask them for possible questions. Also talk to friends who recently underwent interviews in related technologies, collect questions. Thoroughly prepare with the collected questions. This sound very intuitive, but how many times did you take time to ask your friends for questions asked in his interview?
As they say, “fake it till you make it”, “if you can’t convince them, confuse them.” After answering about 5 questions in the interview, you will come to know of the level of questions being asked by the interviewer. As soon as you get a feeling that you are losing the war of interview, you should quickly adopt a new technique. Wait till the interviewer asks you a question to which you know the answer well. Answer that question in a verbose manner with excessive usage of technical keywords that relate to the concepts that you know well and lead the interviewer towards your direction. Most of the cases, interviewer gets distracted and starts to ask questions from your answers.
This in itself is a good thing. As you are leading the interviewer towards what you know, rather than letting the interviewer ask what he wants to test in you. If you don’t know the answer at all or if you are confused about few specific details, mask your wrong answer with confidence and discuss specific technical details in a complex manner in such a way that it confuses the interviewer. Not that you will surely impress the interviewer with this technique, but at least you can improve the probability of your selection.
Some say that few of the hacks mentioned above are not fair practices. I ask them “Is life fair?” You have got to compete to survive in this world. There are no rules in life that are above success. Ultimately, who wants to know how you cleared an interview as long as you have successfully cleared it.
About the Author: Sridhar Jammalamadaka is the Editor of Interview Mantra. He's a typically non-typical Software Engineer from Pune, India. He likes entrepreneurship, web technologies and Micro Controller programming. He enjoys playing cricket and piano (but rarely does these activities). Through this website, he wishes to gather a large community of aspiring engineers, entrepreneurs and professionals from all parts of the globe. You can connect with him on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/sridhar.j