Handling interviews

You perfected your resume and cover letter. You customized each one for the selected few positions you are interested in. You submitted your resumes and now you wait.

Generally speaking you can expect to hear back from companies within a day to a week after you submit. If you don’t hear anything for a week it is worthwhile sending a follow up email to see if they have received your application, but if you don’t hear anything back then they have probably not shortlisted you. It would be nice if every company would reply back and follow up with you, but the reality is that most places won’t do that. They get lots of applications and it can be hard to keep on top of them all, especially for smaller companies with smaller HR departments. This is part of why having a short and to the point resume helps a lot. Long unfocused resumes are hard to evaluate, so they tend to be skipped over. Some companies will have an internal policy along the lines of having 95% of all applications looked over at least once within a week of submission, but others will not, especially smaller companies since they will be reviewed by staff who are also tasked with competing priorities.

Try not to take it personally, and don’t overreact if you don’t get any immediate results and resist the urge to change your resume too quickly. If you have worked hard on your resume and had friends vet it for you and the consensus is that it’s good then stick with it. If you don’t you risk chasing your own tail by simply changing your resume and not necessarily improving it.  At the same time if you apply for 20 positions and don’t get any results whatsoever, then it’s probably time to re-evaluate things - either your resume itself or the types of roles you are applying for.

Your first contact after submitting a resume, beyond a mere acknowledgment of receipt, will probably be a request or schedule a phone screening. These are usually fifteen minutes to a half hour long, and they tend to be very focused. The recruiter or HR person will try to get a sense of who you are, they will try to determine if you understand what the position they are hiring for is and validate your continued interests. You will probably get some more questions about your work experience and why you are trying to leave academics. Most job applicants are not former academics, so you should be prepared to explain why you are a good fit for the role but doing so in layman’s terms. A liberal use of jargon won’t help you - speak in clear terms and keep the details to a minimum. You don’t get bonus points for additional words, and your idea of speaking precisely will be difficult for them to understand. They will press you for additional details if they want them during an interview. It is important that you have done some soul searching and figured out why you want this job, and understand why you are taking these steps now and be able to communicate these effectively. I recommend practicing this conversation with friends who are in a related field so you can get comfortable with your answers. You would be surprised how hard it can be.

Additionally, make sure you know about the company, about their product, how it places in the market, etc. This should be pretty obvious but often it isn’t. If you are truly interested in working for this company you should already want to know these things. The screener just wants to make sure that you are truly invested. If there are acronyms or keywords you don’t understand, research them, otherwise you’re just wasting their time and yours.

Usually at the end of the call they will provide you within opportunity to ask questions. Take it! Ask questions about the team culture, the product, the company as a whole, etc. Ask about the location of the office. But don’t do it because you have to, do it because you are genuinely invested.

If things go well they will schedule a follow up phone interview usually with the hiring manager. That interview is usually an hour long and more technical in nature. It definitely helps in this case to review the technical description from the job posting and be prepared to discuss how you meet the defined job characteristics using real life examples from your experience. Oh and also, it’s okay to say “I don’t know” as long as you follow it up with “but here is how I would try to solve that”. No one knows everything, but being dishonest about your knowledge base and skill set is a catastrophic and unforgivable mistake. Typically when that is encountered or suspected your application is over, even if the interview continues.  So instead emphasize your training has taught you how to learn how to do new things. It is a totally reasonable thing to say. “I don’t know, this seems similar to this other thing I did previously. I would go and read about how other people have done this, replicate their work and then move on from there”. If that isn’t good enough for them, then it wouldn’t be a good fit anyway.

After that there is the in-person interviews. These tend to range between a few hours to all day! The all day interviews seem a little daunting, but you shouldn’t be. It means they are really going to be sure you are a good fit for them and then you can also be sure they are a good fit for you too! Be prepared to have similar conversations to the first two phone interviews but in more depth. Again, always be honest and be yourself. These are not inquisitions, they are generally just conversations and you should treat them as such. Do your best to relax and enjoy them. You will learn a lot about the company as you go, and that will help you decide if you want to work there too!

Later this week there will be another post about salary negotiations, but time has run out to get that completed today and it’s already two days late.

Have a good week,

Brad