Could you describe the process of learning the skill of being interviewed?
I was very fortunate in that my girlfriend helped me a lot here. But quite frankly what she did was very straightforward. She would do a 30 minute mock interview with me, and ask me pretty standard behavioral questions. Questions like:
- Can you tell us about a time when you had to work on a project with a tight deadline? How did you handle it? - Can you give an example of a project or initiative that you spearheaded and the impact it had on the company or team? - How do you prioritize and manage your tasks and responsibilities when faced with competing demands or tight deadlines?
I answered these questions on my own in a notes app, and then when she would ask me I would then draw on my previous experiences and figure out how to answer question that tells a story as best as possible.
This really helped me a lot.
One tip I would give is to generate these questions, try copy/pasting the job description into ChatGPT and ask it to generate a list of interview questions for that role! I found that much better than sifting through the SEO spam for interview questions.
To practice interviewing you need to firat get details about the job and company and develop a list of questions. If I really wanted a job I'd get 30-40 questions prepared, from job specific to behavioral ("tell me of a time you had to deal with a difficult stakeholder"). Then add variations of the question so you get used to being asked the same thing different ways.
Then always use STAR (situation/task/action/result) to answer the question. This will help the interviewer remember you a lot better and it will also highlight what YOU did.
Practice going through your CV/resume back to front and front to back. Be prepared to highlight what you learned at each role and why you left from it/got made redundant.
With sufficient grind you will become proficient at this and it will make a world of a difference. I can now confidently say "I wont get this role because I messed up X, so if they were paying attention they will reduce my score for this". You will still get rejected (sometimes there is just someone better than you) but the goal is to improve your odds at being the one that gets the job.
Hope this helps!
The other aspect is that I will view a company the same way they view me - a resource and a means to an end. I've been asked in several of those interviews "You don't seem to hang around a lot, how do we know you won't leave in a year" and I tend to answer that "You don't. The same way I don't know that some economic downturn isn't on the horizon and that you would instead scrap me a year down the road.". Some don't like it and engage in that discussion more and some accept it.
At the end of the day, I'm here to do a task you hired me to do, I'll do it well (they can check a ton of references in this respect) and when I'll find something better I'll leave. If I don't get hired because of this, it's not a job I would want anyway. I'm pretty tired of how capitalism and "the market" applies only to workers but it never seems to apply to companies and when it does then you're "not a team player" or "not in it for the long run" or, as we've seen recently on HN, "not part of the family".
So to do my part I always advise / suggest to friends and family to quit. Start looking for something else, get some practice, see what's out there, see if you could get paid more for your skills and see if you could do more interesting work. Those are all possibilities. Unfortunately, most people like to stick with the devil they know and then end up scared and shocked when they get made redundant. Hope that this explains it. PS - the job I most recently accepted seems great, the team and the product seem interesting and I'm looking forward to getting stuck in. However, that doesn't mean that if I start getting bored, if change isn't being effected at the rate I push for and if the product/team turn out to be not great, I might decide to move on.