Interview tips to myself (part2)
CV Writing
These days you have got literally 20 seconds to grab someone's attention when they see your CV. Recruiters will sometimes have a stack of up to 100 CV's send in for a role, many of them are people who are just desperate for any work even if they do not have the specific skills the job calls for. It's a bit like a Youtube or Facenook/Insta doomscroll, you have to stand out. It feels wrong as an engineer type person to have to put their "branding" hat on, but you are a brand, so think like a brand. Write yourself a tagline right now.
Now this is what has gotten my CV seen by recruiters. I'm going to suggest something I have always done, write 2 CVs. I am interested in embedded and electronics as well as desktop/cloud, so I have 2 CVs. The differences between each CV are not huge, but they are enough to tell a story about my key skills in each. This sometimes removes the need for a covering letter per job application too. But always be prepared to write a covering letter.
Old school works. Today lots of people write a nice list of all of their skills at the top of the CV, that works if all you want to do is play buzzword bingo. A month ago I had someone posing as a recruiter reach out about interest in my CV. Turns out they desperately wanted to get paid to re-write my CV, probably by feeding it into an AI tool for the princely sum of $20. Sure, use some AI to improve your CV, but be sure to start by listing your experience in each tool and environment. The best person to get help with your CV is someone you know who is a hiring manager.
Example:
- 14 years C/C++ experience + 18 years QA experience Python et-al. Mobile and Embedded device test roles as well as Desktop and Cloud.
Then tell the reader a bit about what inspires you. Example:
- I have worked as an SDET in Cambridge for 18 years now, and am a settled UK dual-national. Making over 32 years experience developing software, most of those in mission critical systems.
Then list all the buzzwords before diving into your job experience in reverse chronological order. Only list years not months. Example:
- Citrix Research: XenDesktop 2010 – 2017
- Contract work testing a windows filesystem device driver. CPPUnit/C++. Soon joined a team created to deploy a turn-key test-automation framework (Continuous Integration). We delivered a turn-key testing environment in a Windows Active-Directory distributed environment.
- Roles
- Support manual and automated testing by developers as well as testers.
- Using Virtualization to create scalable test environments and sandboxes.
- Projects
- Designing, creating and deploying the testing framework to internal teams worldwide. I worked directly to supporting 3 XenDesktop product releases.
- Skills and Tools
- Jenkins, Teamcity, Powershell.
- Jira defect tracking and Agile process. Perforce and GIT.
Length. If you have 30 years experience your CV will run into about 4 pages or more. Everyone will try to tell you that that is too long, but I'm going to advice against throwing away your biggest asset. Try to compress things, and when you find you cannot, stop and get someone you trust to review and help rewrite.
Be Online
Have a copy of your CV in a cloud drive, so that you can quickly attach it to a job application or an email even if you are out and about with only your phone. It thus goes without saying, make sure your CV is pretty much text only with no fonts or fancy formatting tables unless you use PDFs. Additionally you may want to publish your CV minus the contact details online too. These days text based web space is totally free.
Quality versus Quantity
If you have read this far, you are probably a quality versus quantity person. Some people I know get good results make making up to 5 job applications per day. Quantity works because 50% of the job applications you make, will be down to a lot of luck if you get someone spend more than 1 minute looking at your job application. Often it will be a computer, and you will have only milliseconds.
I am a one application per day, type person, which works against me, but also means I have to make fewer choices. I struggle to prioritize anything at all. After your CV gets noticed you still have to try get as many interviews set up as possible, because once again, luck plays a huge part.
I have walked out of more than one interview thinking that was an unwise or silly thing I said.
A common mitigation for fairness is that you will have 2 people in the interview room. It's not a bad-cop good cop thing, it's to ensure balanced views on a candidate and removes a bit of bias.
Don't kick yourself if you do screw up, interviewing candidates fairly is very hard and companies do their level best to make things fair these days.
Homework
Due to the flood of CV's most employers that do not use external recruiters will give you some homework to hand in. Unless you are earning less than double the minimum wage, don't bother with those job posts. The field is too wide and you will be judged more on how much time you were able waste polishing the homework to perfection, not on how quickly you can in fact work at all.
But that's not to say preparation is not necessary, I always do 2 kinds of preparation. Background research, and Visualization.
- Before and while hitting that apply button I'm doing a google on what the company does, does their mission and industry align with what I want culturally. Things like Environmental and social governance, you don't want to be working at evil-corp 5 years later. Next I start writing a draft covering letter. Not everyone asks for one, but start writing one anyway even if they don't. This is a prelude to "interviewing the interviewer" which I covered in another part. In parallel, I look to see if I know or am in any way connected to anyone who does or has worked there, and ping them of opinions or ask why they left the company.
- Once it looks like an interview will be booked, I start to prepare myself mentally. Every single interview will ask you one of a few stumper questions. Be prepared and rehearse answers to questions like:
- Why did you leave company XYZ?
- If you were an animal, which animal would you be and why?
- Describe a conflict situation you were in and how you resolved it.
- Describe a real-world technical challenge, and how you broke it down and solved it.
- (Try to come up with one or two of your own here.)
A Test plan
In my first tester job interview, I got asked to describe how to test a system that modelled traffic on the motorway that encircles London. I have even been asked in the interview to list tests for a digital watch . Once I even got asked how would I test the controller for a sauna. So in a technique called visualization I have taken this a step further. I write a draft test plan.
You get three key things:
- You have a well structured list of questions about the product and about what the job is before getting into the interview room.
- You are more prepared and relaxed.
- You have got homework to show off that shows you really want this job.
I recently learned about Arnold Schwarzenegger and visualisation as a technique to achieve goals. (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/arnolds-2024-blueprint-arnold-schwarzenegger-hzebc/) I'll summarise for now.
- Arnie wanted to be the best bodybuilder...
- Arnie wanted to be a movie star...
- Arnie wanted to be governor of California....
He did all of these things, how? He visualised himself as having achieved each goal, then broke each goal down into tiny little steps. Each day he takes one step.
This technique works well for test engineers. it might be adaptable in it's visualisation form, for other roles though. How I start preparing for interviews nowadays.
- You want this job badly, the company makes a product you are interested in helping to build. You want the product to be great.
- Imagine it's your second day on the job and your boring induction paperwork has all been done, what are you going to do next? Probably start learning about and start actually testing the product.
- Ask google AI (other AI's do exist) to write you a test plan for a "insert product type here". what this does, it get you past the writers block that impacts anyone who has ADHD tendencies. If you don't have ADHD tendencies it's a template for free at any rate.
- Delete all the irrelevant stuff in the 3 page document the AI generated. If you used a good tool there will be no repetition. Add the actual company name and change the names of some technologies that the AI got a bit wrong. You should now have about 2 pages of a pretty good template with headings that make sense.
- Mind map the product functionality now, and do a bit of research on what the product does. Adjust the test plan document headings a bit more.
- The test plan will already list some equipment you will need, amend the list now.
- Now add test cases. At this point you will hit lots of unknowns or things you are unsure about. List them all and take guesses at what you do not know. Put a question mark next to each one.
- Add a new heading at the top pf your test plan, title it "Out of scope", and dump all of the things you found out about the product, but are not mentioned in the company job description.
- Add a new heading at the end or your test plan, title it "Questions". Move all of the test cases that feel like guesswork down into that heading.
- You should now have a draft test plan, print it out onto a dead tree and review and tidy it a bit.
- Once again, break things down. Make a "tasks" or todo table of each block of testing first as a manual test, and then as an automated test. Optionally give each a size, do not estimate days, estimate relative sizes. Your days estimates will always be viewed as too optimistic, just don't, trust me.
- Take these tasks and paste them in and give them a heading like "Resource plan".
- Review and print the document again and take it with you to the interview. Be sure to highlight the sections where you wrote lots of questions and have knowledge gaps.
Don't tell anyone that you have this document, produce it when they ask you a question that seems relevant. At the end, give the document to the interviewer. Remind them that it's just a draft.
In my recent interview I got given answers to almost every question I had written into the test plan. Either because I asked it, or because the interviewer described the answer as part of their interview anyway. This way nothing is a surprise for you.
References
Have 2 people references ready, you will be asked for them if they want to make an offer, so be prepared. References are almost never used in reality, but do be sure to let the people know that you are using them as references at the time.
Rejection
I struggle to read people, and often leave an interview thinking that it went swimmingly. Then I get the rejection response. Often you will get no detailed feedback at all. It's not your fault.
Had a good chat with an ex Team leader David Doyle. He reminded me about learning to "read the room". Interviewers often have a mental image of the ideal candidate, and they are wanting you to fill that image somehow. They won't tell you how to match that image, but they will have one. You cannot guess what is in that image, and sometimes, you are just unlucky. Mostly learn from each interview and move on.
Best of luck.