The Insider Guide to Careers
Insider information, secrets and tips about getting hired and building careers. For employees and job candidates.
I had the opportunity to do mock interviews with students in BTech and MTech courses at IIT Palakkad, Kerala on behalf of our Careerbolt upskilling initiative.
After talking to dozens of students, I advise that students approach interviews with the same mindset that working professionals employ when interviewing for jobs. Some of these strategies and learnings are listed below:
1) Nature of the job market: Current hiring trends and the market look bearish, especially if you are looking for internships or jobs. Forget compensation, and choose companies based on skills and what you will learn on the job. The most impacted are those interested in CS and Software jobs.
Many tech companies have laid off employees to reduce operating costs and increase revenue per employee. As much as tech companies want to hire new graduates in emerging areas in AI and ML, the decision to hire is complicated. What would be the message when you are firing thousands of older, well-paid employees and hiring hundreds of younger, early-in-career employees? Somebody will get the wrong notion that younger employees are replacing more senior employees, even though the skillsets are entirely different. Moreover, as per media reports, many laid-off Google employees are demanding that they be given preference for new hires before any outsiders. They ignore that tech companies don’t follow the traditional union models of seniority and hierarchy. These conflicting expectations create much anguish for management and HR. Hence, the safest option is to wait to hire until the dust around layoffs subsides. The situation is better for traditional manufacturing, retail, and supply chain jobs.
Companies and management have not determined whether the current slowdown could evolve into a full-blown recession. The unpredictable external factors include the war in Ukraine, currency rate fluctuations, OPEC saber rattling, China uncertainty, monetary issues, and fiscal policy. The current corporate motto is – “When in doubt, don’t do anything.” Every company is conserving its cash and cutting operating expenses to play it safe because of uncertainty brought by the macroeconomic environment. It is not the private sector but the inability of governments to work with each other which is the prime reason for the mess.
2) Need to focus away from compensation: For the first couple of years, your salary will increase dramatically every 1-2 years, provided you have the right technical skills, learning ability, and a humble attitude. Every new hire who joins a big tech company thinks they have hit the jackpot. They don’t see that new hires are the lowest-paid employees in the entire company. There is always much room to grow in compensation and promotion for every new hire. Your first achievement is not a culmination; it is the least consequential. So never be blase with your first job.
If your skills are more than your current salary, that is an excellent spot to be in. Lots of companies will want you. If your salary exceeds your skills, you are months away from being fired. Your salary will quickly adjust to what you bring to the table. Compensation is an art perfected by HR over many decades of working with hundreds of millions of people. You cannot fool HR.
3) Work on communication skills: Work hard on your communication skills right from your first year of college, or even better, before high school. Being glib is an easy way to impress the recruiter. Having open body language, smiling when introducing yourself, being well dressed, and showing respect is something everybody can do, but only some people bother. Nobody cares about your English proficiency as long as you are confident. Talk slowly and loudly. Practice interviews with as many friends as possible and request your family to ask you questions over Zoom. When using Zoom, please invest in getting good lighting for your room. You should be setting the laptop brightness to maximum if you cannot set up your space for some reason.
4) Nobody is a born interviewee: If somebody is doing a great job at interviews, that could mean that they have messed up many interviews earlier and learned from their mistakes. Similarly, if students hear of friends cracking consulting and tech interviews, what is unsaid is that the same friends may have practiced for hundreds or thousands of hours brushing up on case interviews or coding skills.
Even if you gave the interview of your life, you could still be rejected. Remember, there could be people better than you interviewing, and this is something you can’t control. So focus on what you can do and give each interview your best shot. Interview selections are not always about you, so do not read too much into interview rejections. There could be valid reasons, silly reasons, or no reasons at all. I once had a job offer withdrawn by a FAMG recruiter after I had accepted the offer because the funding for the position dried up for some internal reason.
Even if you mess up a question, never lose your composure. If you blank out on an answer to a question, don’t fumble. Instead, politely say you can’t think of a relevant experience in the past and urge the interviewer to move on to the next question.
Your evaluation is an aggregate of all interview questions under one interviewer and, similarly, an aggregate of all interviewer opinions combined.
5) Practice and Practice: Rehearse answers to STAR questions many months before your interviews. Interviewing is a learned skill that is very different from regular everyday experience. For example, in interviews, you take credit for the projects you were involved in, always use the word ‘I’ instead of ‘we,’ and always paint yourself as a superstar. These answers require a lot of homework and practice.
Look at the job description of the role you are applying to, identify the skills, and work backward to identify all possible STAR interview questions. This way you ca predict up to 80-90% of all behavioral questions you will face in an interview. Please write the answers in detail for every question (preferably jot them down in a book). The challenge is to identify a unique experience in your past for each answer. Before every interview, take ten minutes to review every question and memorize which answer to provide. I have used this technique to help university grads, senior directors, and senior VP’s find their jobs. No job aspirant can escape this initial grunt prep work. If you have questions, connect with me on LinkedIn.
6) Validity of interviews: Contrary to what most people think, interviews are an error-prone way to select people. The research validity of interviews is barely above 50%. One can replace interviews with a coin toss and end with the same results. Stories of great candidates being rejected by companies and terrible candidates making it are too numerous to recount. I can think of some examples right away. Rajat Gupta was rejected by McKinsey when he graduated from HBS. He then used a recommendation from an HBS Professor to get in and rose on to become their Global MD. Bill Thomas (Chairman and CEO of KPMG) has a rejection letter from KPMG framed in his office. Most interviews are already biased by factors like GPA and university reputation. Research at Google People Analytics showed that GPA and university brand have zero correlation with job performance. Interviews are frequently biased against people who don’t belong to the ingroups the interviewers belong to – whether it be skin color, gender, religion, age, and many other protected groups. Despite all these issues, almost no one cares. Few have thought of ways to reinvent recruiting.
One reason interviews exist is that other selection processes are much worse, with their validity being between 20-30%. Furthermore, interviews give the interviewers a false sense of control and rigor. Therefore, even though I am not a fan of interviews, I do not think that interviews will ever disappear entirely. The challenge is to augment human hiring with AI hiring and predictive data analytics.
These are the problems I am trying to solve at Careerbolt. Instead of recruiters using GPA and university reputation as proxies for campus recruiting, we are providing another 10 data points which measure the exact skills the company is looking for. In short, we will be the intermediary doing an honest evaluation to make the life of recruiters easier.
Conclusion: Remember that these crazy times shall also pass. I remember that a significant market boom followed the financial recession of 2008-2010. Boom and Bust are part of the economic cycle. Even if you don’t find a job now, focus on learning new skills, picking up new certifications, and going back to college for Masters or doctoral programs. The market will pick up some time, and you want to be in the best possible situation when it does.
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