Interview Hack #125

Keep the Discussion Rolling

I’ve conducted interviews for almost every possible position in the tech industry. Each interviewer has their own style of interview, and each position has its own pre-defined questions and items to go through to get to know the other person, and learn about the candidate’s skills. For me, there is one trick I keep doing, no matter what the job description is, or the amount of experience, and it keeps on surprising me how well it works.

“Send an informative email during or after the interview.”

This isn’t about sending company details, or links to blogs. I usually send emails related to the topics we just discussed. For example, if we talked about technology choices — I will share a post around limited innovation tokens, and I will also add my point of view. Of course I am not limiting it just to posts; sharing related videos is also part of this process.

While the sending is not the interesting part, the one thing that distinguishes great engineers from the rest of their fellow friends are the responses. Great engineers will respond quickly and with a deep understanding or POV, while others probably won’t even answer.

There’s even a bonus for this trick; working in a place with strong engineers means that almost every subject has a relevant post or video out there written by your own employees — which also helps the candidates get to know the company better, and to learn faster about the talent in the team.

While writing and reviewing these lines, people have asked me why I’m sharing this, as others may read and do exactly what I am expecting. Well, this most likely is not going to happen, since those who read this are on Second Base already. More importantly, answering, by itself doesn’t bring you back home, as we are looking for qualitative answers and interesting discussion. Which is not something people can fake easily or without a deep understanding and really fast learning skills.