Non-Technical Interviewing

Projected Time

About 1-1.5 hours

Motivation

Behavioral interview questions and technical experience are a chance to provide the audience with some insight based on your past behavior in certain situations. Consider your most important projects / features / initiatives that you worked on and identify the relevant talking points to answer the most common questions. Take the time to practice and prepare the narrative around each of your experiences so that you have them handy for a wide variety of questions. Ensure that you answer the question with the specific action you did, provide the context of your actions, and concretely describe the (positive) results or learnings from your actions.

Objectives

Participants will be able to:

• frame their experiences and Techtonica to a variety of audiences
• answer questions about their work experience and how it will apply to future roles

Specific Things to Learn

• Preparing a “personal narrative”
• Framing experiences to prepare for different types of questions - Action - Context - Result response
• Questions to ask interviewers

Materials

• Personal Narrative
• How to talk about yourself in an interview

Lesson - Personal Narrative

Your personal narrative is a prepared ~2min response to the question “tell me about yourself.” It should tell the audience who you are and why you are relevant to them. Specifically, it is the storyline of how you got to that exact conversation – why you are in that interview or at that event, speaking to that person.

Take some time to think about how you got to Techtonica and what you’re interested in next. This guide can help you think about and format your response.

Use and adapt your personal narrative with your apprentices and/or at tech talks, conferences, and recruiting events.

Common Mistakes / Misconceptions

• Focus on what is relevant to the recruiter or interviewer and their goals
• Provide context for your work experiences

Guided Practice

Consider questions like:

• Tell me about a time you completed a challenge as a team.
• Tell me about a time you helped a client.
• Tell me about a project or feature you completed.

Think about what experiences come to mind to response to these questions. Pick a few significant projects you’ve done and frame them within Action - Context- Result format:

• Action - “Punchline” of the story, one-line answer to the question
• Context - describe the situation in which your actions took place
• Result - reiterate the initial answer to the original question, clearly defining the results you produced

Use this format to help focus your responses and ensure you answer the question. Once you have your major experiences outlined, you can map different questions to the experiences and prepare for a variety of questions.

Independent Practice

General Questions

• What is the unique strength you bring to a team?
  • Sometimes this is just asked a “What’s your greatest strength?” but I suggest you answer it as if it was asked as above, since it’s assumed everyone is good at coding, detail-oriented, a team-player, etc
• Tell me about a time you completed a challenge as a team.
  • How did you decide how to divide the tasks? Was there a formal or informal leader?
  • Was someone falling behind their tasks? What did you do?
  • Did you disagree with the group/leader about the direction? What did you do?
  • After tasks were divided up, what’s an example where you took on something that “wasn’t your job” but you saw needed to be done (maybe it was no one’s job)
• Tell me about a time you worked with someone difficult.
• Explain a time when you helped a team member?
  • How did you know they needed help? (ideally, use a case where you offered help without being directly asked which shows you are proactive)
• Describe a time when something about your team’s process wasn’t working.
  • What did you do? (e.g. raise the issue at retro, discuss with peers or manager, ideally bringing up a solution to try)
• What are your goals for your career? (frame as how this role will help you get there)
  • Every junior person wants a place to learn and grow their skills, so try to be more specific
  • Mention if you have interest in exploring other roles in the future based on career week (e.g. PM)
• When did you need to give someone difficult feedback?
  • How did you approach the conversation? How did you prepare?
  • How did the conversation go? What was the outcome?
• The flip side of this is describe a time when you were given feedback that was difficult to hear
  • How did you react?
  • What did you do with the feedback?

Technical Questions

• Tell me about a bug you fixed.
• Tell me about a project or feature you completed.
• What do you think the relationship is between product managers, designers and engineers?
• Tell me about a mistake you made.
• Draw out the architecture of your product.

Questions for Them

Do some company research and prepare some questions for the recruiters and interviewers.

• What is an example of a client challenge you have recently faced?
• How do you on-board new hires?
• How do employees ask questions here?
• Where do you see the company going in the next year? 10 years?
• What impact would I have on the team if I get hired?
• What would make someone really successful in this role?
• What does “crunch time” for your team look like?
• What are the success metrics of your team
• What projects are in the pipeline? What projects are you excited about?
• How does code get to production at [company x]?

Independent Practice

Take an hour think of answers to as many of the above questions as you can. Later on, as you prepare for more interviews, work towards having an answer to all of them.