General Interview Prep

To prepare for interviews, you’ll need to make sure you’re ready for deep technical discussions relevant to the role, to talk about your leadership in past roles, and how you’re aligned with the product vision of the company.

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Research what type of technical skills assessment you may need to do‍

Most roles, especially technical ones, will require some sort of technical assessment relevant to the role. Before you start applying to jobs, spend some time researching technical skills assessments common in your field. These could include:

• A strategy document for a new product or improvement to an existing one.
• A contribution to the company’s GitHub if they have any open source projects.
• Sharing a mock go-to-market plan for marketing a new product.
• Being given a case study prompt in which they need to analyze, propose solutions, or make recommendations.
• Solving a coding challenge within a limited time frame. These challenges can cover algorithms, data structures, problem-solving, and programming languages such as Python, Java, JavaScript, etc.
• Designing a system or architecture to solve a particular problem.
• Whiteboarding problem-solving or coding exercises on a physical whiteboard or online collaborative platform.
• Engaging in pair programming sessions where they work with an interviewer to solve problems or complete coding tasks.
• Reviewing and providing feedback on a piece of code. This showcases their ability to understand and improve existing codebases.

Reflect on examples of your leadership & management‍

Spend some time writing down examples of how you’ve demonstrated leadership in past roles. What are the projects you’ve been the most proud of - and what were the results? Why were you proud of these projects? Doing this exercise is also a great way to remind yourself of your wins, which is especially important if you’ve been job searching for a while.

You can also spend some time writing down how you’d like to grow and what you’re most looking forward to as you advance in your career.

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Reflect on what you want to work on

After you’ve spent some time researching technical skills assessments and writing down your accomplishments, spend some time reflecting on the type of product, industry or market you want to work on. Do you have a specific type of feature or product you’d love to build - like something in AI, or healthcare? Are there certain companies who’s mission and vision you admire?

Again - write these down! Your notes here will be your guiding compass as you interview for roles and evaluate whether or not to accept.

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Tips for all interviews

• Accept the invite as soon as possible. Let your interviewers know you’ll be there as soon as you can.
• Research the person you’re meeting with. Include your name, job title, and how your role would interact with this hire (recruiter? direct supervisor? peer?). Any context is helpful to share here.
• Take all meetings from a quiet, distraction free place. Avoid taking calls in your car or in noisy environments. Remember - you want the focus to be on you, not on your background!

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Want more information? Some of our favorite interview question prep resources include:

• Non Technical Guide to Web Technologies
• Holloway Guide to Hiring and Technical Recruiting
• Cracking the Code, Interview Prep Guide