What you should know before your next interview
By Kevin Ko
Author of Hired Fast: The Junior Developer's Guide to Getting a Job
Two Halves: Preparing and Running
Preparing:
1. Nutrition/diet
2. Tooling (shoes)
3. Practice
etc.
No one shows up to a marathon and runs 26 miles without preparing.
But we do this all the time when we interview.
Engineering applicants per month:
Total Google applicants:
2 million per year
(http://www.forbes.com/sites/stanphelps/2014/08/05/cracking-into-google-the-15-reasons-why-over-2-million-people-apply-each-year/)
You want to be introduced like "we have this candidate we're really excited about..."
You want to show off your skills but:
Getting Ahead:
Impress Hiring Managers with techniques no one else is using
Imagine reading multiple applications a day:
Hiring Managers want to feel like their organization and time is being respected
At AnyPerk:
Demonstrate you're not just copy/pasting applications.
Nina Mufleh and Airbnb
nina4airbnb.com
Loren Burton and Airbnb
http://thewc.co/misc/loren-wants-to-work-for-airbnb/
Philippe Dubost and Amazon
http://phildub.com/
I did this with Uber (on accident)
Two engineers reached out to me afterward
Feross Aboukhadijeh and YouTube Instant
Hint: Build something using their API, e.g.:
https://www.twilio.com/blog/2015/03/how-my-dog-sends-selfies.html
Great for other, non-dev disciplines:
Getting a job is easy if you're highly experienced
Until then, you can use skills you have now to help land your dream job.
You have the creativity and time right now. Sometimes these approaches will only take 5 minutes or a day, but have high ROI.
5 Minutes: "Hey this is broken, here's a fix"
A weekend: "I built this site that helps people do X using your API"
(P.S. I go over many more approaches and examples in my book)
Email: kevin@kokev.in
Twitter: @kokev
I wrote a book called Hired Fast: The Junior Developer's Guide to Getting a Job:
kokev.in/hired-fast?promo=meetup
($10 off promo via query parameter)