Chances of you getting an interview call

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According to many recruiters that I recently talked to, the quality of students selected in an on campus drive is usually better than quality of those selected in an off campus placement.

They say that one of the reasons is the strict filtering criteria for appearing for on-campus campus interviews – first class in Bachelors, 60% or above in both PUC and Matriculation. With this perception, the recruiters seem to get convinced faster to offer a job in on-campus interviews. Whereas the candidates interviewed in off-campus interviews are scrutinized more before offering a job.

Mass recruiters such as TCS, Infosys, IBM conduct on-campus drives  before off-campus placements. Only after they are done with the process of interview and recruitment  to the on-campus students, they start the off-campus interviews. This makes it appear as if on-campus students are the priority of recruiting companies.

Personally, I feel that this perception is definitely wrong. Like I always say, good at theory may not mean good at practical. So, academics is not the best way to measure the intelligence of a person. Neither is college brand name, considering the fact that top brand colleges in India sell their seats and label them as  ”management quota”, “NRI quota” & “donation seat”.

You will not believe me, these days recruiters also seem to look at the urbanity of the place where the prospective student studied. To me, it makes no sense. How is it logical to give preferential  treatment to engineers who studied in colleges in towns/cities over those who studied in colleges in villages/less popular towns?

No matter what these recruiters perceive or think, if you are a recently graduated student looking for a job, just don’t loose hope. Keep applying for jobs. There is always a ray of hope.

Are you a college student studying MCA, BSc or Engineering in India? doesn’t matter whether you are an electronics/electrical/mechanical/chemical/civil engineer, you might be knowing by now that you can get a software job  with some efforts.

Your friend or senior or even a relative might have as well given you a brief overview of how to get a software job by now. You are told that all you got to do is register to coaching classes that teach C language or Java or ASP dotNet or SAP. And chances are that you might already have enrolled or completed such an IT course in institutes like NIIT or SSI or Seed Infotech or any other institute famous locally.

Most of the students do the classes seriously for the first week, and slowly get bored as the coaching progresses towards the more complex topics. After crossing a limit of unbearably never ending theory, few of them discontinue the classes in the middle though they’d paid the fees for complete course.

I’m sure you have few friends who claim being smart; who keep giving unsolicited advices on what to do and what not to do at every twist of life. One such friend is likely to tell you that it is okay to learn a programming language enough to write a program that outputs “Hello World” on screen. And according to your “smart” friend you don’t need to waste your time in programming practice and you can easily “manage” to cheat the interviewer by blabbering theory in an interview.

This is NOT true. IT Interviewers are really smart people. They can accurately test your knowledge and your aptitude skill in brief meeting of 10-15 minutes in the interview. And these guys have enough experience to find out if you are just a “theoretical” swimmer. You can’t smartly manipulate them like you could manipulate the external examiners in viva conducted in semester practical exams.

So, what should you do to get a software job if you are an engineer or graduate from non-computers stream?

Take up the software coaching classes very seriously. Before you jump into action and join some institute, inquire whether the branch of training institute in your locality is good enough. Brand name of the coaching class is not a great indicator to know whether the institute is good enough.

For example if I’m in Chennai city, Tambaram area, and there is a nationally popular institute called XYZ coaching, it is not necessary that their branch in Tambaram is good enough. It is very much possible that T.Nagar branch has got the best faculty. More importantly, the trainers know how to “teach”. Simply blabbering theory about computer programming in broken English is not teaching. A training institute giving to away to students, loads of training “material” weighing 5 kgs is also of no practical benefit.

At the end of the course, you should elementarily be able to compile and execute a program on your own. And be able to convert a real world logic into a working software program.

For example, if I ask you to write a program to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius, no ..no.. this program is a standard program readily available in every training material for you to memorize, let us say if I ask you to write a program to convert feet to inches, you should be able to do that. Memorizing a set of frequently asked programs is not the right solution. It can only save your face temporarily in an interview and fetch you job. But you will be embarrassed in future when you are asked to write a program to do some task.

So, don’t be lazy. Join a good training institute. Work hard and learn the practical part of programming before you start appearing for interviews.

Are you a fresher curious to know the psychology of a recruiter? Read on.

The recruiter’s aim in taking an interview is to filter candidates and choose the best fit candidates that are beneficial to the company.

To choose from, there are thousands of freshers holding the same degree, falling in a common range of academic score of 60-75% from all over the country.

How would a recruiter differentiate between one candidate and another? After all, the job applicants to an entry level position are fresh college pass-outs with no industrial experience.

How would a recruiter discern good candidate from a large crowd of students?

I had asked this question to couple of experienced recruiters. All of them consensually told that they looked for the following three qualities in students.

1. Fluent at Communication
2. ​​​Reasonably good at Aptitude
3. Ability to apply logic in real life

Fluent communication in a team is an important pre-requisite for any employee. In many occasions employees would have to directly talk to the clients of the company. So, fluency in English communication is a key skill.

The Aptitude of the candidate is analyzed by recruiters by asking questions from competitive tests such as CAT, GRE, etc. Aptitude could be broadly divided into two sub-categories – Qualitative aptitude and Quantitative aptitude; the R.S Agarwal kind of questions.

Good at theory doesn’t mean good at practical. Recruiters know that very well. In their experience, they might have seen many freshers who were selected based on their theoretical knowledge, who later fail badly in putting theory to practice. Interviewers are going to present you real life scenarios and would ask you to suggest a solution.

For example, a recruiter could ask an electronics engineer to design an electronic device that could dynamically change the duration of traffic lights based on the traffic.

The interviewer could ask a computer science graduate to design a simple database for maintaining personal, salary and project information of employees in a company.

So, if you are a fresher trying for jobs, keep these three points in mind and be sure to prove the interviewer that you possess these qualities. If you succeed, the job is yours!

I can’t emphasize enough how important the Key Skills section in your Naukri profile is!

To get interview calls to positions whose nature of work differs from that of your current profession or field of work, simply mention the keywords related to the job you aspire for.

For example, if an IT engineer wishes to apply for finance related jobs in addition to IT jobs, he would mention the following in his Key Skills.

Key Skills:

Java,C,finance,accounts,financial analyst,financial manager

Let us say an Embedded System Engineer is looking for IT jobs. His Key Skills should be something like this.

Key Skills:

Embedded systems,microcontroller,java,C,SQL

Say a developer wishes to switch role to a tester. Here is an imagination of which Key Skills that person should write.

Key Skills:

SQL,UNIX,testing,manual,automated,QTP,regression,

In a lighter note, if Sachin Tendulkar secretly wanted to become a Singer like Lata Mangeshkar, he would mention his key skills as following.

Key Skills:

Cricket,one day,test,20 20,singer,playback,artist,bollywood.

The reason why he mentioned cricket skills first is that he doesn’t want to drastically make a career shift to the line of Singing. This suggests Naukri search that Sachin is still open for opportunities in cricket along with playback singing. Sachin wants to play safe, like he does in ground.

How to give a compelling presentation

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave. ~Dale Carnegie

Presentations are ubiquitous. There is no escape; In college projects, MBA assignments, business proposals, office meetings, product reviews and  trainings.

Your proficiency is judged based on your presentation skills. That is not a fair way to evaluate a person’s knowledge, but unfortunately that’s how the world works. If you give a good presentation, people think that you are smart, they’ll buy your product, give you recommendations, bring you business and most importantly they listen to you.

Some people struggle to deliver a good presentation even after having presented a number of times in the past. And those who grab attention at presentations are tagged as “born with silver spoon in the mouth”.

Trust me, giving a great presentation that draws applause from a tired audience is not really tough. All you have to do is stick to few basics and break rules at the same time.

The pre-requisite for a presenter to be able to deliver a good presentation is to first get convinced of his argument himself. If you are not thoroughly convinced about what you are talking, you will never be able to convince others.

After all, good presentation aims only to enable the audience to understand giving them a pleasant experience and an aha feeling at the end of the slides.

It’s very surprising to notice that many experienced professionals and professors can’t give a catchy presentation even after having presented many times.

No problem. That’s a good thing for you because, now(after going through the presentation above,) you know the technique to give a good presentation. You have now become one among the elite group of wonderful presenters (supposedly born with silver spoon in the mouth)!!!

Add your presentation tips and experiences in comments.

Are you a 2010 pass-out anxiously waiting to get an IT job (in India)?

Email your resume immediately to:

freshers@infosys.com

Voila! Your resume will be stored in the database of Infosys Technologies. If you are lucky, in a couple of months, you will receive a computer generated email from Infosys shortlisting you for an off campus placement test.

You can surely count on this technique as I have known friends who are working for Infy who had got placed by emailing their resume to the above mentioned email id.

Ensure that your resume includes your date of birth, aggregate academic credentials of standards 10, 12 Engineering / Graduation, Post Graduate and E-mail ID for communication.

Send in your resume, mentioning the following in the subject line:

Job Code – Preferred Location of Selection Test
Example: “SWT-01 – BANGALORE”

Good Luck to you!

I know a person who works for a reputed IT company in India, he has got 4 years of experience in IT industry. He works very hard at work, goes to office in the morning at 9 am and invariably leaves office at 10 pm. Routinely goes to office on one of the days of weekend, sometimes both the days.

He does his best to ensure timely delivery matching reasonable quality standards. But from the past three years, his appraisal rating remained a constant 3 (on scale of 5), was never 1 or 2. Rating 3 out of 5 signifies that the work done by the employee was just OK.

When I had asked him what he thought was the reason for getting a poorer grade than that he actually deserved, he told me that he had no idea whatsoever. His philosophy at work was to deliver on time, try to do his work individually without interference and to silently accomplish the tasks assigned to him and wait for magical results.

He expects the boss to notice his work, acknowledge the efforts he puts in and appreciate him. In a very rare case, you will get to work with such an ideal boss who keeps his eyes wide open and constantly evaluates you based on the amount efforts you put in rather than on the high level results.

Do you find yourself in same position as that of this person? Read on for some tips that can boost your appraisal rating next year.

Give micro updates to your boss (every day)

Frequent & short updates are better than infrequent & lengthy updates. Update your boss with your progress via email or phone call or face-to-face chat. Giving updates is one of your most important untold responsibilities. Don’t wait until your Boss sends you an email or comes to your desk to find out your progress. Send daily updates to your boss. Make it a habit to go to your boss’s desk at least twice a day. Discovered something interesting, show it to your boss. Solved a critical bug, boast about it to your supervisor. Daily reports are more effective and powerful than bi-weekly or monthly status reports.

Change your seat nearer to the team

I can tell you out of my personal experience that I had a bad performance review just because of the reason that I was sitting in a cubicle which was far from where my boss and rest of the team sat. Though this was not the reason that was given by my boss in appraisal, it was the obvious to me why all my hard work went unnoticed. I spent most of the time in my cubicle and rarely met team mates or the boss face to face though they were on the same floor. If you are sitting in a seat which is away from where rest of the team sits, then change your seat immediately. Sitting in the proximity of the team helps in many ways. You can ask for help by just dragging your chair to the next desk.

Socialize with the team

Human relations are far more powerful than professional relations. Try to befriend your colleagues, specially your team lead and your project manager. Friends help you, they forgive your mistakes easily, they even cover your mistakes at times. But you can’t expect any such favour from your professional colleagues or your boss. Grab every opportunity you get to socialize with the team. Never miss a project party. That is the best time when you can see the human part of your team mates. Your boss will forget his superiority and will interact with you like your colleague. Joke, have fun and enjoy. Don’t feel shy to socialize in such events. These casual meet-ups make a great difference in the team, they build rapport between individuals and improve friendly relations.

Never say that you don’t know

I don’t know if this applies to the rest of the world, but I know for sure that in India, if you admit in public that you don’t know something, you are instantly classified as a fool. Being too straight forward and frank is a bane in India. If you don’t know something, you should never accept that fact. You should cover it up by either confusing others, or by diverting their attention towards something you already know or by asserting something that they can’t verify.

Volunteer to speak in meetings

May it be a daily standup meeting or a quarterly progress meeting or an annual meeting, grab the mike and speak. In any industry, extroverts are usually more successful than the introverts. If you keep it to yourself, people will think that you are an ignorant person. In corporate world, verbosity is a gift, reticence is a curse that hampers your career success. Given a chance, speak at every event. If you are team of three who works together for a specific goal, volunteer to speak on behalf of others in status meetings. Human tendency is to think that the person who speaks is the one who does the work. When Bill Gates speaks to press about a latest Microsoft technology, common people tend to think that he developed the complex product all by himself. The reality is that the technology was created by hundreds of brilliant computer engineers working for Microsoft.

Learn the technical jargon before the technology itself

Every now and then you will be asked to rationalize issues that crept up in your module. If you fail to use complex technical words in your explanation, your project manager and team will tend to think that you know nothing or that you are an idiot. There are so many people in IT industry who are covering their technical incapability with their gifted skill of twisting technical words into complex sentences. Simplicity is not ultimate sophistication in India. Obfuscation is ultimate sophistication here. Remember the scene in movie 3 Idiots, when Aamir Khan answers a question put by his professor? Aamir replies in simple words and the professor doesn’t appreciate his answer. That is the truth. Don’t be in a false belief that simple communication impresses people.

Help others’ solving their issues (and highlight yourself )

Help others whenever possible. But do not entertain casual requests for help. Be strict to tell your colleagues to drop an official email copied to your team lead and/or your project manager. This is helpful in two ways – your boss gets to know that you are busy doing a task and your help will be noticed. If you don’t go through the official channel, you will invite trouble by getting stuck in others task. If the help or assistance is oral, then you can give it casually without any official request email. This will help you grow your importance in the team and build your brand in the team. People will remember that this person is dependable and can be approached for help. He is capable of helping people. Though you may not solve their problem, you will be remembered for volunteering to help them..

Give updates to your boss (not to peers)

This is one of the unethical sounding tip. But then, not following this tip is the biggest suicidal mistake that you can ever commit. This world is filled with smart people, who are waiting for every chance to steal your credit, claim your analysis. Especially the technically less capable ones who don’t know how to explain when there is an issue. Give update to your boss, and then to your peers. The order is very important. If you update your peers first, there are chances of them going to the boss’s desk faster than you and claim your analysis as theirs. You don’t want to allow charlatans to do such things to you. Do you?

Build rapport with your Lead

Some people exaggerate this friendship and crudely call it “boot licking”. I prefer to call it “rapport building”. Team Lead plays a key role in deciding an employee’s appraisal rating. He is the second most influential person after the project manager in your team. He can do wonders by giving a good feedback about you to the project manager. On the other hand, he can screw your salary hike by presenting you in a bad shape in front of the project manager. As the project manager does not directly interact with you, he has little idea about your performance and skills. Team leads are project manager’s eyes and ears. Befriend your lead.

Don’t feel shy to ask what you want

Tell in advance to your supervisor what you want. Do you want an onsite opportunity? Do you want to get the best rating in appraisal? Are you looking forward for a salary hike coming year? Are you wanting to get a promotion? Tell it straight to you project manager, an year in advance. This approach has several advantages. Firstly, your boss would know that you are going to be upset if he doesn’t give you what you want. So the risk of boss trying to fool you by giving you a bad rating in return for good performance is minimized by this approach. Secondly, it is like commitment with your boss that you will do a great job in return for the reward that you expect.

Ensure you are doing a happening task

This is the most powerful tip of this lot. Always work in a module which has direct impact on the live environment. Do not spend more time in tasks that have little significance in the project. Insist to work in the module that has great importance, that has client’s concern. A mediocre job done in an important module is more appreciated than a great job done in an unimportant one.

Encounter a problem? Escalate it asap

Remember the Exception handling mechanism in Java? What should a method do if it catches an Exception? It should delegate it to the next level so that top level code can handle the Exception. What happens if the exception is caught right inside that method and no action is taken? The application will act unusually as the Error dies before warning the user. The user of that application gets frustrated as he has neither has control of that issue nor does he have information of the error. Similarly when you encounter a problem which is not in your scope and power, immediately delegate it to the higher level of management. By delaying escalation you getting yourself into deep trouble.

Don’t wait for your boss to assign work

Like typical Indian project managers insist in a performance review discussions, “Be Proactive”. If no work has been assigned to you, jump to your feet and ask for work. Show your boss that you are interested in taking up a new task. Let him know that you are free. Though it is your boss’s job to keep you busy, he may blame you for not pro-actively asking for work. This can become a big minus.

Never quarrel with your boss

This sounds very obvious, but very few realize the true importance of not getting into any verbal fights with bosses. Remember this simple rule, “He is your BOSS.” He would be pleased to screw your ratings and sympathize you post appraisal innocently trying to help you. It is a well known fact that, there is no way that you can challenge the appraisal grades given by manager in India. In case you already have fought with your boss, all you can do to save your performance review is to pray. The best way to handle this is to avoid arguments in the first place.

Don’t put your boss in trouble

On the occasions when your boss counts on you, ensure that you don’t fail him. His failure is your failure. Remember one thing, any project manager in the world keep his appraisal goals above anyone else. His performance review is more important to him than yours is to him. If he does well at his performance review because of a good job done by you, he will give you a good review. Conversely, if your bad job screws his appraisal, he won’t spare yours.

Just give him what he wants

Don’t expect that your boss will give you One Minute Goals and define what good performance according to him is, like a One Minute Manager does. You should find it out yourself. Not just once in an year, but every single quarter. You should request him to tell you clearly what he is expecting of you. Every manager has a standard answer for this question. Try to extract his expectations beyond what he says. Patiently ask him to clarify his expectations from you. Once you know, just give it to him precisely what he wants.

I don’t know how it works in rest of the world, but this is how it works in India. I have articulated powerful principles, which I have collected over years in my personal experience, and from successful IT engineers who managed to get great grades year after year. These tips when applied for an year without fail will assure you a good performance review the coming year.

Apologize for not maintaining gender neutrality in the article. Though I used he/him/his, it was not intended to refer only to males.

Ever wondered what is the most important section in your naukri.com profile?

Which input do you think is the key deciding factor for the Naukri search engine to send you the most relevant jobs to your email inbox?

For those who don’t know Naukri, it’s India’s most reliable job search website. Something like what is Monster.com to the world.

If you hold an account with Naukri.com and remember the credentials, login right away, I have got something interesting to show you.

Steps to follow:

1. Login to Naukri.com
2. Go to Preview and Update profile screen
3. Edit the section Current Professional Details
4. Edit Key Skills
   

Current Professional Details

Focus your attention on the input Key Skills. Read, re-read what keywords you have mentioned here. This tiny section is going to determine your future. Yes, this will have a significant impact on your future. Read on to know how.

The software sitting on Naukri servers simply reads this section, notes down the keywords and sends you jobs relevant to the keywords that you entered here. Naukri software also uses this information to decide whether to forward your profile to the recruiters who post new job positions relevant to your skills.

Use this Key Skills section with caution. Though it is not specified in the update screen, use the first 100 characters to fit in all the skills related to your current job separated by a comma.

For example, this was what I wrote in the Key Skills input of my Naukri profile.

Key Skills

Flex, Java, J2EE, C language,assembly language & C in AVR micro-controller, 8051 micro-controller, PIC micro-controller, Keil U vision micro-controller

I made several mistakes in my “Key Skills” section:

• Don’t exceed character limit: I exceeded the tacit 100 character limit, the total number of characters in my key skills is 153. Which means the skills beyond 100 character mark are being ignored by Naukri.
• Mention skills in order of importance: I did not mention my skills in the order of importance to me (left to right). I guess it is safer to mention your core skills first, because it’s natural that the software would have been written to scan from left to right. Also can avoid the risk of crossing the character limit.
• Use Comma as the separator between key words: I used ‘&’ as a separator. So “assembly language & C in AVR micro-controller” is processed as a single keyword that will match with nothing alike. Don’t use any special character other than comma to separate two keywords.
• Use more frequently used Acronyms as keywords: Instead of “C language”, I could have mentioned “C” as a keyword, as it is more likely to be a keyword.
• Test the keywords in Naukri Search: Instead of “micro-controller”, I could have mentioned “microcontroller” as it matches more closely with the jobs posted at Naukri. When you are in doubt, test the keyword using Naukri job search engine whether any jobs match that keyword.
• Split lengthy keywords: Comma should be the only separator between any two key words. Instead of “8051 micro-controller”, I could have written “8051,microcontroller”. Splitting into two keywords, helps the software to understand your skills better.

After reading my own advice and following it, my Key Skills should look like below.

Key Skills:

Flex,Java,J2EE,JavaEE,C,assembly,AVR,8051,PIC,Keil

Update:
To add to this article, resumes get searched based on the title of the resume. Like whenever you upload your resume into Naukri profile, you have to give a name to your resume. When the employer search for Naukri resumes, the results are pulled out in the list of resumes based upon the title of your Resume Summary section.

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.

1. Hack the phone interview

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.

2. Interview the interviewees

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.

3. Guess questions from job description

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.

4. Collect questions from recent interviews

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?

5. (Mis)Lead the interviewer towards you

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.