Gathering information about smaller business and startup needs

When you interview at a smaller company, it’ll likely have fewer employees and not as much bureaucracy to deal with. For example, a smaller company may not have a formal human resources (HR) department and may only have one person (or even an external consultant) handling HR duties.

So, you may find yourself being interviewed by the head of the department that’s hiring or the person within a department who’s either volunteered or been assigned to interview candidates. Since smaller companies have hired employees before, they may already have a set interview process they’ve developed over the years.

Just because a company is smaller doesn’t mean it’s in a big rush to hire someone. The time it takes to decide on someone, especially because a new hire has a bigger impact on the entire company since it’s smaller, could mean you won’t get a response as quickly as you expect.

It’s also possible that the smaller company doesn’t have a formal interview policy and you’ll be talking with one or more interviewers who have little to no interviewing experience. Instead, the interviewers may think of some questions they know they need answers to and ask impromptu questions based on your answers and how they feel the interview is going.

This is especially true at startup companies, which usually have fewer (perhaps much fewer) than 100 employees. You may have an interview with the only one or two programmers on staff and/or the founders of the company. A startup is moving fast because it needs to spend money fast and is on a tight timeline to get one or more of its hot new products shipped quickly.

This being so, the startup company is on one mission: to find the best programmers it can find to meet its deadline and get that big customer, the next round of investor funding, or both. If you can show the startup’s interviewers that you not only know the technologies the company needs but also can hit the ground running, don’t be surprised if you’re offered a job at the conclusion of your interview.

If you’re going to interview at a startup company, you should bookmark this page and read Chapter 14 first just in case you’re hired on the spot and you need to know how to negotiate fair compensation for your services.

Navigating the involved hiring process at bigger companies

Bigger companies have HR departments, though it’s highly unlikely any of them are run by Catbert from the Dilbert comic strip. The people who run HR departments follow specific requirements to conduct themselves and the process, but they also understand the legal requirements involved in hiring people. This highly defined hiring process means you should expect a lengthy interview process.

It also means it’ll be more likely that you’ll talk with more seasoned interviewers and/or they’ll follow specific scripts to ensure that the company not only gets the information it needs, but also protects itself from any potential legal exposure.

Yes, once again this is a situation where the networking prowess you learn about in the previous chapter comes into play. If you don’t have any connections at the company, try to add some on LinkedIn. You should also try to attend in-person meetings through Meetup or other social networking groups where developers who work at large companies gather. Press the flesh at these meetings so you can pick up crucial information about what the interview process is like at the company you’ve applied to work for.

When you scroll down the Meetup home page (www.meetup.com), you’ll find a section of categories, one of the first of which is the Tech category. Click the Tech thumbnail image to open the Explore Tech page. Meetup automatically finds your current location and lists groups within 50 miles of your current city (see Figure 2-1). Click a group name to learn more about that group and when it meets.

Many big companies have books written about them and how they operate such as The Everything Store by Brad Stone (Little, Brown and Company), which is a book about Amazon. If you can find one or more books about a company that will give you insights into how the company thinks and works, that’s one more tool you can use as you prepare for your interview.

Preparing for the interviewers you’ll meet

Your networking efforts may lead to a connection with one or more interviewers you’ll see at the interview, and so you may get some hints as to what to expect during the interview, what the interviewer likes, and, more important, what the interviewer hates. You’ll also encounter experienced interviewers, especially from HR, who know what general questions to ask programmers based on past experience.

But you’ll also likely find that in many large companies, many interviews are managed by the team that wants to hire a new programmer. And many of the interviewers from that team, especially the ones who are programmers, don’t do much interviewing for the simple reason that it’s not their primary job.

It’s certainly possible the interviewers may be as nervous as you are, if not more so. You should expect that everyone in the company who will interview you will do just as much research about you as you will about the company and the interview process.

The first logical thing interviewers will do is look at your résumé. If they’re impressed enough by what they read, they’ll type your name in Google (or their favorite search engine) and see what results come up. They’ll find your online presence on social media and possibly links to other sites that contain your name. For example, if the interviewer finds that you write a blog and/or you participate in LinkedIn groups about technologies the company uses, that will enhance your standing before you step into the interview room.

We don’t mind if you bookmark this page so you can read Chapter 15 for ten ways you can stand out when an interviewer looks you up online. Go ahead, we’ll wait.

Finding out how the interviewer is approaching the interview

One or more interviewers may think his or her role is to ask you only technical questions. Some answers to those questions may be only a few words, like the responses to questions about when something in history happened that you had to answer in grade school.

You may not know the answers to some technical questions because you haven’t memorized (or your brain can’t bring up) the answer or the questions won’t highlight your strengths. In this case, you should steer the conversation by providing answers that highlight your experiences with similar technologies and how you used them to provide value at a company you worked for in the past.

For example, an interviewer might ask you what base class all classes derive from in C#. You could give a one-word answer — System.Object — which would technically be correct. However, it’s much better to talk about why they derive from System.Object and to mention that even value types derive from that base class. You could also talk about the functionality that all classes get because they derive from System.Object. The point is, you want to take opportunities to steer the interview in the direction that is going to highlight your knowledge and strengths.

Other interviewers, especially one or more who have non-technical backgrounds, will likely focus on getting to know you and finding out if you’ll be a good cultural fit at the company.

For example, an interviewer may ask, “How do you feel about doing work that isn’t quite in your job description?” This is the kind of question you should answer by talking about how you wore many hats at your last job or how you’ve always been interested in marketing as well as software development.

What’s more, it’s easy to banter back and forth, but it’s also important to add stories about how you worked within teams, the role each team member had, the technologies you used to create projects, and how you helped the team succeed in completing projects.

The moral of this story: Telling stories instead of giving rote answers or light banter will give you the chance to shine a little brighter.

Volunteering the right information to make you shine

When you conduct your mock interview, you need to work on finding opportunities to volunteer important information that will make you stand out to the real interviewers. For example:

• If you’ve created an iOS and/or Android app that’s available in the Apple App Store or Google Play, respectively, let the interviewers know you developed the app and talk about the problem the app solved for people.
• Talk about a solution you and/or your project team came up with that saved the company a lot of money, helped the company meet a deadline, or even caused a project to finish early.
• If you’re asked why it’s been a while since you worked at your last job, tell your interviewers about events that paint you in a positive light. For example, explain that you wanted to go online to learn about a technology you felt you needed more experience with before you entered the job market again. Showing that you’re constantly sharpening and mastering skills will impress your interviewers more than a brutally honest answer such as saying you also spent part of the last few months wandering around trying to find yourself.

You don’t need to brag about your accomplishments or blurt them out at the beginning of your interview. All you need to do is have these stories at the ready when an interviewer asks you about your experience or a specific question about something in your résumé such as the aforementioned gap between jobs.

What’s more, when you’re asked about your experiences at companies you worked for in the past, always paint the companies in the best possible light. The companies you worked for were always the best companies, and the people you worked with were the best people. When an interviewer asks you the inevitable follow-up question about why you left, don’t lie. If you were fired, say so. But if you felt that you weren’t being challenged enough at a company, say so.

Never presume that an interviewer is going to know everything about you before the interview starts. For example, interviewers may not even know that you developed an app because they overlooked that information on your LinkedIn profile or couldn’t look at your app because they had to do their real job of working on a project instead. Don’t miss any opportunity to show that you’re a winner.

Showing other ways you’re the right fit

Researching the company thoroughly will show your interviewers that you’ll also fit right in with the company culture and its objectives. In other words, show that you know the domain in which you’re working and that you’re prepared to conquer any problem within it. (This concept of a “domain” is not to be confused with the very different model portrayed in a famous episode of the Seinfeld television show.)

One example is if you’re applying for a programming position at a healthcare company. Perhaps you have experience working at a healthcare company in the past, or you previously worked in the medical field before you decided to make a career change and become a programmer. Maybe you worked in the medical field because your mother was a nurse and your sister is a doctor. So, you can mention these experiences to show that you’ve always been interested in healthcare and in recent years you’ve been focused on how to make technology work in the healthcare field.

Our point is, if you’ve continued to study and even build software for the field that the company is invested in, and you can show the time and skills you’ve invested to learn more about the field the company operates in, you’ll show that you just don’t want a job — you want to make an investment of your time and skills in the company.