Mock-Technical Interview

These mock interviews serve to prepare the trainees & graduates for a real.-world technical interview, based on a take-home assignment.

Preface

Through this interview training we want to give the trainees a realistic impression of an interview situation that uses a code assignment as the point of departure for the conversation. It's important not to sugar-coat your feedback. For some trainees, this will be their very first interview experience before they encounter real-world interview situations where they will be evaluated on the same terms as all other job applicants. Therefore, a realistic assessment of their own performance will be most useful for their learning & success.

Career mentors performing "Mock technical interviews" with HYF trainees. (April 2023)

Process

The following instructions are designed for both an online meeting, or an in-person meeting. We aim to involve 3 people in each interview situation. 2 HYF trainees and 1 Career Mentor will be paired up and the two HYF trainees will rotate through the roles of both interviewee & interviewer. The idea is that the HYF trainees will be able to understand the perspective from "both sides of the table", adding to their overall experience gained.

As an Interview Trainer, you will bring your real-world experience into the process and assume the role of a Hiring Manager or Tech Lead. Run the interview as close to how you would if you were hiring at your own company.

(if online) Contact a HYF Staff member to get connected to 2 job-seeking HYF trainees who are eligible for this type of training. We will provide you with their contact info on Slack.

Let's get started

1. Check with HYF Staff about the tech challenge that should be used. If you are working individually with a specific trainee, you can also pick your own challenge. We suggest www.codementor.io for inspiration.

2. Send the challenge over to trainees via Slack or email and make a fixed plan on when to have the interview day and then prep the trainees with the following instruction:

💡 We will be doing a mock technical interview where you are given a technical challenge that you can do within [a given timeframe depending on the assignment size]. Before the interview, you should send back the Github repo link at least [X days] before the scheduled interview so it can be reviewed by the interviewers. During the interview, one of you will be the interviewee and the rest of us will be the interviewers. You will be asked to do a small demo of the code you wrote and then we will start the interview questions.

2. The interviewers should review the code and prepare some questions (either as review comments or personal notes) based on the given code.

💡 Note that all the participants will also be acting as interviewers, so they are expected to review the code beforehand as well.

Interview

1. The host (usually a mentor) will explain the process and set the agenda for the in-person meeting or call

2. The first interview will start with a small introduction round just like a real interview

3. The interviewee will be asked to give a short demo of their submitted work

4. The interviewers will start asking questions (both general questions and specific questions to the work)

5. The interviewers should write down the feedback and share the feedback at the end

6. At last, the interviewee will be asked how this process went, what their input could be

7. If it’s not the last participant, the interviewee will now switch to the interviewer role and continue the process

General question catalog for the interviewers

1. What was the most difficult part of the challenge?

   1. talk about the problem and how you overcame the problem

2. What was your proudest implementation?

3. What have you learned in this challenge?

4. Why did you use the tools you chose for the challenge?

5. Which part did you spend the most time on and why?

6. What surprised you the most when you were doing the challenge?

7. If you have more time, which part would you improve and why?

8. In your past developer experience, what is the achievement that you are most proud of? What did you do?

9. What are the most important qualities to be an excellent developer, in your opinion?

10. What do you want to improve the most?

General question catalog for interviewees

1. What is the tech stack of your company?

2. What do the internal processes at your company look like? (workflow, growth, onboarding plan)

3. What is the team composition? (the team you are interviewing for)

4. What is the most important trait of the position?

5. Questions that matter to you (depends on your personal circumstances, maybe you would like to work remotely, maybe you would like to have a mentor, etc)

🤓 Tips & Tricks

1. If you feel nervous, ask one of your prepared questions.

2. Talk about technical and non-technical interests and passions (hobbies) because technical interviewers very likely will be your teammates in the future, and they would also be interested to know who you are.

3. Use the interviewers’ question catalog to formulate answers and maybe record them to see how they sound.

What's next?

The trainees should spend more time on improving the project so it can be a good portfolio project, and share it in the relevant channels on Slack to get feedback.

As an Interview Training Mentor, our staff will appreciate it if you provide feedback on how the interviews went and what feedback you provided to the trainees.