Always always have a copy of your resume in front of you during a phone interview. When they suddenly surprise you with a rather expected first question like “tell me about what you did at your last job” and you momentarily you blank in panic, you can stop and take a breath while you glance at your resume and remember the “better” words you carefully chose about how to articulate it.
Always have questions prepared to ask the interviewer. They will ALWAYS ask you if you have questions. And from everything I’ve read and heard, “no I don’t have questions” is never a good answer. You need questions to show them you are evaluating the fit of the job/company to your needs. I’ve found useful questions for initial/screening interviews are usually along the lines of “what would I be actually be doing at this job”. eg:
- What team would I be on, what does that department do, what would my role w/in the team be, how large is the team, is the team mostly local or remote, etc.
- What would the responsibilities of my job be, what would I actually be doing on a day to day basis? Would I mostly be coding or would I be responsible for other things such as design, documentation, mentoring interns, integration testing, etc.
- What does the project do, how would my role fit into that project, how is the work divided amongst team members on the project, would I be given ownership over a part or under the leadership of someone else?
For the in person interviews preparing for this question is doubly important because every single person you interview with (the hiring manager, peers, random techie people not on the same project) will ask you if you have any questions.
If they’re not on the same project, a good area to ask about is company culture or what the relation is between what they do and what you’ll be doing
- What do you like or dislike about working here, how long have you been here, what drew you to this company (that can be telling, because I’ve found what drew people and what they like about where they work you’ll get a lot of the same answers from person to person w/in the company)
- Will I be working with you directly, how does what you do relate to what I would be doing, would we get to interact much, etc.
However, I’ve also had it come up multiple times where over the course of the interview there’s already been opportunities to ask so many questions that I run out of questions. Be prepared with ideas for how you would handle that scenario (say, get to know the interviewer better), lest the interviewer start making up more technical questions on the spot to stall for time!
Never ever confirm your availability for an interview without checking your calendar. You will forget something you committed to that wasn’t noteworthy and double book yourself, even if you think you have a pretty good grasp of your schedule. I almost double booked myself an interview once while I was supposed to be picking a friend up from the airport. By a stroke of luck, one of the interviewers wasn’t available that day and they rescheduled it. But it would have been awkward to have to call them back and say “Could we reschedule the interview? I realized I forgot I had a commitment on Friday…” That would be super-awkward.
Studying for interviews is a lot like studying for finals in college…having a good cheat-sheet with likely interview questions (especially for technical interviews) to review before the interview will make you sound a lot more polished.
- For programming interviews, for example, there is almost always a question or two about insert and/or lookup time in a data structure such as a hashmap or binary tree and/or a similar question about the efficiency of a good sorting algorithm in the average or worst case.
- If they ask about multi-threading, they are likely to ask how a deadlock happens, how a semaphore works, write some code to synchronize this, what is a race condition, etc.
- They love asking about what object oriented design patterns you’ve worked with.
Take notes on what technical questions you got asked on the interview. The same questions are likely to come up again. Some topics just lend themselves well to verbal interviews, others don’t. Wouldn’t hurt to take note of some of the behavioral or experience related questions you’ve been asked. They’ll almost always start with something open ended like “tell me about what you did at your last job” to get a sense of your background. If you’ve prepped in advance, you’ll know what you want to highlight about that position aside from just the big picture of what you did.
Don’t forget the accessories.You want a watch so you can discreetly look at it and know whether they have a lot of time left to keep grilling you or whether they’re almost out of time and about to ask if you have questions. Pulling a cellphone out of your purse != discreet. “I thought I had some jewelery” is not what you want to discover the morning of your interview. Nor is “I thought I had” nylons, clean clothes, makeup, deodorant or anything else something you want to discover and have to do without. And don’t forget breath mints, might want to freshen up partway through in person interviews.
Learn about your interviewer. Sometimes you can find out something about the background/interests/etc. of the person you’ll be interviewing with if you search for them on LinkedIn or a search engine.
Go to the bathroom before a phone interview, have a glass of water handy in case your throat gets dry. Don’t let yourself be distracted by trying to hold a full bladder or coughing from over-talking. Those can be bad. Have a piece of paper and pencil to take notes about what you talked about and what they said about the team. Typing makes too much noise, its distracting, take notes by hand.