Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Disclaimer: Yes, I know every company has a unique interview process, but let’s talk about averages.

No matter how many years of experience you have - it is always hard to pass interviews. Why?

I have been thinking about this question for a while now. I worked as an external technical interviewer and also helped testers prepare for interviews. In this blog post, I wanted to share my view on this problem and a possible steps we can do to make interviews less painful.

Knowledge: yours and theirs

Every person has a unique knowledge, background, and experience. It can be big or small. The more you work in an industry - the wider this circle of knowledge becomes.

It includes a set of fundamental knowledge of computer science or testing principles, approaches, and tools.

It also includes domain knowledge from past projects.

But we do not use all of our knowledge daily at work. At any given moment, we use only a subset of it.

For example, we pull-push from the git repository, use a few terminal commands to run some tests, and use a few clicks here and there to understand logs or monitor results.

So, you get to an interview. The company (or a given project) has its requirements for a position. Requirements may be adequate. But requirements also may include all possible “may be’s” that the manager plan to have in a years from now. (The candidate need to have testing, automation, coding, performance, security, usability, management, devops skills…)

An interviewer (a technical or a manager) may or may not have knowledge that covers all these requirements.

However, to pass an interview, you and your interviewer also need to have a special kind of knowledge of how to do a job interview. It includes special knowledge like STAR methodology, fundamental knowledge (like algorithms, data structures, etc.), system design, and behavioral questions.

So why it is hard to pass an interview?

The main reason we generally fail at interviews without preparation is that our knowledge for interviews has very little overlap with what we use at work (in most cases).

Passing interviews is an entirely different set of skills that may not show how you actually work.

An interviewer uses interview knowledge to find an overlap between the position requirements and the candidate’s experience and expertise. An additional challenge is to see this overlap in an hour or so.

What can we do about it?

Our main goal as a candidate is to get interviewing skills and to show this match for requirements as clearly and fast as possible. We can get those skills by preparation or trial and failure at multiple interviews.

• The more experience in the interviews you have - the better you will be at it. (But only - if you carefully reflect after each failure)
• Request a feedback after an interview. Write down your impressions and questions you missed to answer just after the interview end. Learn the missing parts and practice it.
• Think about your experience and how it matches with requirements. Prepare a clear examples that highlight your strengths
• Be honest if you do not know something. (It is not possible to know everything). Admit it, but think on where you possibly can get missing information and try to find similar cases from your own experience

Remember: each time we go to an interview, the requirements and the interviewer’s background also change. Your task is to mix fundamental knowledge, current knowledge, and experience from past projects, add a drip of interviewing skills on top and show the value you can bring to a company as a specialist.

You may find that it is not possible to find an overlap — that’s totally okay. Requirements may not be adequate. The interviewer may lack the skills to conduct an interview (and desire to prove that you do not deserve a job). The job may not fit your needs.

Do not forget: there are many companies on the market. There is always another company that will help you to succeed.