Tips to rock your next software job interview

Going through interviews can cause the person to be very nervous and stressed, it can give you that weird feeling of being ill but yet you’re fine,
there is no such thing as defined steps to a successful interview, but there are some tricks to help you increase your chances to get the job, in this article, I will try to give you some tips that hopefully will help you, let’s get started.

Relax

First of all, you need to take a deep breath and relax, being stressed and nervous is not going to help you, you have to train your self to stay calm in all situations no matter how good or bad the interview is going, I would say it’s OK to be a little bit stressed but you don’t have to show it, staying calm will give your interviewer a good picture of the person applying for the job, it simply shows that the person is a professional and confident, here are some tips to stay calm and relaxed :

1 — Arrive early to the interview location, get used to the environment, grab a beverage that you love, and take a deep breath while you enjoy it.
2 — Be prepared, before going to the interview you should read about the company in general, and the position you are applying to specifically.
3 — Look at the interview as an experience, after it ends make sure to take notes of what did you did well and what went wrong, this way you’ll work on your mistakes, and you will do better the next one.
4 — Always stay positive, and make sure to focus on your best skills.

Let your personality and skills shine

Trust me no one would like to interview a person, and end up hiring a whole different person, let your interviewer see a good picture of who you are, point at your strong skills, and don’t pretend to know things you don’t know, simply be YOU.

make sure that you know all the basics of your field of expertise, and remember that no one knows everything, during the interview you might receive questions that you don’t know the answer of, it’s fine just say you don’t know the answer and be open to learn new things and improve, always!

Don’t complain

I know that some of us have had bad experiences before in previous companies, so when you are giving the reason why you want to change your current job, make sure to phrase your sentence in a way that doesn’t seem that you are complaining, and you are only being logical and reasonable.

Ask questions

But before you do so, make sure that you read about the company and the position you are applying for, knowing about this will help you to make a decision if this company is right for you or not, and also will show that you are really interested in the company and want to work for instead of just looking for a job to fill, after getting the famous question “Why did you choose this company?.

and about the questions it’s relative so I can’t tell you what questions to ask, it’s up to you, feel free to ask.

Technical interviews

This part is the half of the interview, during this, you must be totally calm, you will be given some problems to solve while being monitored by the technical interviewer who will be most of the time the tech lead of the company during a defined period of time, you might feel that the timing is not enough but you must learn how to perform under pressure, this process might be so stressful for most of the people it’s not because the problem you are solving itself, it’s the fact that you are being watched,
before you start make sure to read the problem very well and understand what you are going to be solving, and always feel free to ask questions if you don’t understand something.

I will tell you a small story of mine, this will show you how stress ruined one of my technical interviews, it’s mainly because this company is a big deal to me, I was given two problems to solve which was not that hard, in 15 mins, long story short I did not manage to solve it because I was so stressed it was affecting my thinking, after the interview was over I got up and went to get a coffee, then I came back to the problem just for myself, and I managed to solve it in 5 mins just because I was feeling comfortable, after that one I go to technical interviews ignoring the fact that I’m being monitored, just being my self and solving the problems.

I would like to share with you two platforms that will help you to practice solving problems for your technical interviews, in fact, one time I got a problem that I’ve already solved before in one of these two, and I managed to finish it in no time.

1 — Codesignal

2 — Hackerrank

In the end, I would like to say that the more interviews you do, the better you get, and don’t give up just because you didn’t get the job, you are not losing anything but you are gaining experience, and eventually, you’ll get a job that might be even better than the previous ones that you’ve applied for.

Keep practicing and sharping your skills!

Thank you for your time.