Accepting a job offer from an unknown quantity has many consequences down the line on your career. Good managers/teams/companies will help you build up a network of assets and resources long after have moved up and on in your career. To look out for you long term career goals and aspirations you need to go beyond the “I’m willing to take any job or position that I am buzzword qualified for.” You need to identify the best managers/teams and companies that are thinking about their long term vision and understand how new employees fit into that. Here are seven questions I will work into my future interviews for full time employment.
Why are you interested in Hiring me and what do you know about me?
Managers that truly have an interest in hiring the best person for the job will take the time to research their top candidates. They will do a google search for you, check you out on LinkedIn and consider the skills you have that can make their team or organization successful. Uninterested managers will either not consider you a top candidate and be interviewing you to meet an HR requirement or, they will be looking to associate your skills with the buzzwords that describe the role they need filled. Associating skills for a role with buzzwords on a resume is only a tier one filter. If they cannot do more to filter the list of prospective new hires, how much effort do you think they will put into integrating you into their team or helping you advance your skill set and thus your career?
I see that your company uses
. How does this role use on a daily basis?
An answer to this question will tease out useful knowledge that you can use to make an objective decision when you get an offer. In programming it might tell you if the company sees its work as making yet another crud app or applying knowledge to solve problems creatively and address real human problems.
What do you like most/least about my experience or skills?
This will tell you what type of a manager or team you are interviewing with. Good managers will know and articulate specific reasons why they are interested in having you work for them. Good managers will also be able to voice their concerns with hiring you. This tells you several things. What type of communication and management skill your potential employer has. It could also help you identify your weak areas that you have not identified. As someone who is very big on self reflection and introspection, I find the most useful feedback comes from people who can critique my work/idea/performance and offer suggestions for improvement. The least useful feedback is criticism. It is s fine line between the two. Perhaps what separates them is that (I think) critique will focus on the work/idea/performance and integrate tips for improvement and criticism will focus on the person. “You did this or can’t do that” instead of “That’s an inefficient way to solve that problem because you were using technology unknown to you in a relatively new environment.”
What is the most interesting and creative aspect of this role? Of this company?
You want to work for employers who have motivating challenges to work on. Even yet another crud (create, read, update and delete - information from the database) app can have interesting business logic and open up opportunities to apply a little bit of creativity. You want to work with a team that can find and describe the interesting aspects of the problem and focuses on that over the mundane aspects that all things called work have.
Why did the last person leave this position and may I speak with them? Or, who was the last employee or team member to leave your group, why, and, can I speak with them.
Hiring managers and teams that are well run will have an ample supply of ‘references’ that will be able to tell you why the opportunity is such a great one. These will be folks who have moved on through advancement or career change but they will not be able to say enough good things about the manager or team you might be joining. Managers and teams that experience high turnover do so for a good reason and they will not have nearly the same level of enthusiasm from those who have moved on.
How would you descrive the environment for this role/team/company?
From a web development I am looking for a high level description of the development process that includes - development philosophy (agile, scrum, waterfall, none???) to the tool chain used to build the product. What kind of source control do they use, why? How did they arrive at the infrastructure (servers, databases and programming languages oh my) that a product is architected with? This gives you insight to the soft skills that complement the technical ones. Are their business processes clearly defined and can the manager or team talk about them comfortably at a high level? This important to identifying good managers, teams and companies.
Tell me about one failure or mistake you (or the tema if it is a group interview) have made in the past year.
Employers always ask prospective employees this question but it works both ways. Managers and teams that are willing to admit to failure (technical, managerial, or otherwise) will aslo be able to tell you what they learned from it. This tells you that they understand the dynamic nature of problem solving and that they will be able to support you when you make a mistake to help you learn and grow from it
