Acing the interview

It’s kinda scary. But don’t worry

You have finally landed an interview at your dream company.

But how do you make sure you can impress the many people who may interview you and convince them you are the best candidate for the job.

Landing your dream job isn’t just down to perfecting your portfolio, website, resume and cover letter. It’s about how you present yourself the right way.

There is an art to interviewing. Especially within tech.

The types of interviews that you may encounter

Behavioral interviews
Technical interviews
App Critique interviews
Portfolio and Project interviews

Behavioral interviews

The behavioral interview can take on many forms and can appear at multiple stages within the interview process.

It consists of questions focusing on your ability to react to certain industry situations

Before the interview

You are likely to succeed in your interview if you are familiar with the

Research the company

Look your interviewer up on LinkedIn, GitHub or their personal website to see if you can

An interviewer is more likely to remember a candidate that htey can connect with.

What’s your why?

Construct a short elevator pitch, 30-second snippet of who you are, what you do and where do you see yourself going.

Example: “Hi I’m Christina. I’m a musician that took her love of practicing, mentoring”

“I’m currently a technical writer, creating blogs and articles for beginner to professional level engineer”

You can also use your personal brand statement as your elevator pitch

There are several interview questions, that always seem to pop up in interview situations.

Common questions:

What is your greatest strength?
What is your greatest weakness?
Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a coworker
What makes you unique
Why should we hire you?

Other things

Know the market rate for the role in your area.

If you don’t know what to say, respond with “What is the budget for this position?” and see what the recruiter has to say.

The STAR Method

This framework provides a solid model for answering any question by breaking it down into Situation, Task, Action, Result

You can answer questions using the STAR method:

S: Situation is the context in which a problem or challenge arises. It could be a time when you worked with a team
T: Task is the responsibility that you had over the situation. It could be helping someone meet a deadline
A: Action is where you get to describe the specific steps you took to tackle
R: Result refers to the outcome that your actions produced. This is where you get to talk

Give an example of a goal you reached and tell me how you achieved it.

When I started working at XYZ, I had to increase the number of active users on our platform by 5% each month. To do so, I was assigned to work on the new notification system for our mobile app.

In my work, I first identified opportunities to send notifications to users. Then

EX2: Tell me about about a time when you effectively worked under pressure

Technical Interview

The technical interview is all about assessing your approach to problem-solving.

The questions that may arise are dependant on the role.

You may be asked to solve technical problems or complete coding challenges to demonstrate your abilities

How you should do to prepare for a technical interview

Understand the requirements of the position and the company’s products or services.
Review your technical knowledge and skills, especially in areas relevant to the role (programming languages)
Practice your communication skills
Stay calm and focused

The key to approaching

STEP 1: Make sure you fully understand the problem before attempting STEP 2: Brainstorm possible solutions to the problem and evaluate the trade-offs between them. STEP 3: write clean, efficient code STEP 4: Test your solution STEP 5: Explain your thought process to the interviewer as you solve the problem

App Critique Interview (for product managers and designers)

Your interviewer wants to focus on how design decisions impact users and the business.

Your interviewers are looking to evaluate your:

1/ Design skills: typography, hiarchy, color theory, information architecture
2/ Product thinking: can you identify, can you analyze
3/ Communication skills:

The process

Interviews will most likely be held over a video call. Make sure to talk aloud and show the interviewer your screen.

Interviews will most likely select an app for you to critique

Yelp, Uber, Spotify
You may be given a choice but the interviewer will most likely select an app for you to critique
A successful app critique will need to be thorought and touch on nearly every facet of design

Your framework should:

Highlight both good and bad designs.
Consider all design perspectives (visual, interaction, branding)
Demonstrate both high and low level

Solving app critique interview

Pick an approach to structure your critique: app driven, person driven or problem driven.

App driven: as there is no specific flow to follow, it allows for a broad evaluation where you can analyze different elements of the app, screen-by-screen.

Questions for App driven:

Why are ‘Add’ and ‘Cancel’ buttons in navigation tabbar?
What are your thoughts on

Persona Driven: this approach enables you to position yourself as an advocate for the user and communicate how a user-driven approach can influence product design.

Questions for Persona Driven:

Which features will a reviewer use on Yelp and how do these features achieve business goals for Yelp?
Go through the flow of creating a playlist on Spotify and share with a friend.
Analyze the Reddit home screen and the options it has. Go through the flow of creating a post.

Problem Driven: this methods involves focusing the critique session on a particular problem or use case that you or the interviewer want to explore.

Questions for Problem Driven:

If you are planning a party with friends, how will you plan to create a playlist on Spotify
You found it difficult to create a playlist on Spotify because (insert your reasons and go through the flow)
This is how I will improve it (explain your intended solution and go though the flow).

Ensure you perform the general UX audit:

The user and the problem
Structure
Interactions

Questions to ask yourself when thinking about the user and the problem:

What is the primary problem they are trying to solve?
What was the company’s

Create a mental model of the information architecture

Questions to ask yourself when thinking about the structure:

Good use of space? Is there enough negative space?
How does the IA help users accomplish their tasks?

Understanding established interacction patterns enables you to communicate the app’s interaction efficiency and assess whether it enhances the user’s experience.

Questions to ask yourself when thinking about interactions:

How
What animations are they using and how do they make you
What are the gestures required to interact with the app? Do you believe they are suitable for their situation?
Does the app suffer any interaction problems? If not, why? If yes, how will you improve it?

User Interface

Visuals serve as the initial point of contact for users, and as a result, hold the ability to influence the user’s

Questions to ask yourself when thinking about the UI:

How is the app maintaining design consistency?
What is used to set user expectations and guide them to perform an action?
How
Does overrall

You will want to practice and warm up your critical thinking muscles before your interview

Narrow down a few apps to practice:

Target apps with a broad audience
Avoid apps with paywalls
Avoid apps with sensitive data
Choose apps with high complexity