- How to get ready for an interview?
- What to do before a phone interview?
- What materials should I cover?
- Is it OK to postpone an interview?
- What should I do on the night before the interview?
- …
This section will provide you with some tips to help you better prepare for your interview. While other pages on this website focus more on technical questions and how to tackle them, this section mostly covers the general stuff.
I will not focus on the job hunting process. No tips for the search and apply phases are provided here. The initial assumption is that the reader either has a phone interview scheduled already or he/she is in interview mode. When you are in interview mode you are ready for an immediate interview. You don’t need time to study. Whether it’s a recruiter contacting you or a friend mentioning that there is an opening in their team always have one thing in mind: there are other people that are contacted for this position too. Most of the time, in the fast paced industry environment they need to fill the position ASAP. Meaning that whomever needs less preparation time might get a better chance.
When is a good time to start getting ready?
Well if you ask me, a good engineer needs to constantly study. Education doesn’t end on your commencement day. Your degree is just a starting point. You are now qualified to self-study and teach yourself. For the case of interview preparation you need to get into interview mode early enough. Our market is a tough one with not so many openings and you cannot afford to lose any interviews. We often see people who apply for hundreds of jobs, ask for referrals, call recruiters and when they finally get an interview they remember they need to be ready for questions.
What material should you cover for a phone interview?
It really depends on what type of position you are applying and the nature of the company and also the hiring manager. One thing that really helps is to research the company, the group, and the interviewer as much as you can. Find out what kind of background your interviewer has. If you are being interviewed for an antenna position and the hiring manager has a strong background in antennas, studying the RF questions should be the last priority. Now don’t get me wrong. You still need to be ready for RF questions. Just that the chance of being asked detailed questions on antennas is much higher in this scenario. In general and statistically speaking most of the phone interviews focus on your personality, very basic technical questions, and usually extensive questions with regards to your resume. They just want to see if it is worth the investment/time to invite the person onsite. This is why you need to know your resume word by word. Consider a case that an experienced engineer is interviewing a student who is just a few months away from graduation. When the student is asked about the details of a class project listed on his resume he answers: “well this was last year and I don’t really remember the details”. This is such a turnoff. You want to be on top of every single line of your resume. Know which lines are the weaker ones and try to have answers for different questions. Try to put yourself in the role of an interviewer and ask yourself questions from your resume. See how appealing you sound. Avoid listing stuff you have not done in your resume (DO NOT LIE). They will ask you questions and they will know you lied.
During a phone interview
So you got that phone interview you were waiting for, you prepared yourself for it for a complete week or two and now is the time. This is your window to impress the interviewer on the other side of the call. Yes, it is very hard. Usually you only have 30-45 minutes and you are nervous. But always remember this is your only chance if you want that cool job you were dreaming of. So be calm and focus on acing the interview.
1) Always listen carefully. Interviewers hate it when you don’t listen carefully and want to guess their questions. Be quiet and wait for the interviewer to finish the question. Sometimes if the interviewer is a nice person they might even give you a hint before you start your answer. But by interrupting them you just miss that chance.
2) Never try to Google the answers! I mention this as the second item as very often I hear interviewees typing right after I ask them a question. Your interviewer will hear your keyboard noise. Chances are they searched for their own question too and will know the first couple of links that shows up on Google (Or any other search engine for that matter)! They will know you are searching for answers and you will not get an onsite interview for your dishonesty.
3) Never say “I don’t know”. Do not babble irrelevantly or go in circles either. This is always true. Whether you have a phone or onsite interview. Instead say phrases like “well, that is an interesting question, I never thought about it before”. Continue with expressing your thinking process loud and clear. Most of the time, interviewers don’t care what you know but instead it is very interesting for them to see how you think. Show them your analytical thinking abilities by thinking loud about the problem your don’t know the answer to right off the bat. Hopefully the question you don’t know is not a basic question such as “What is IIP3”, or “Describe the difference of gain and efficiency of an antenna”.
4) Never try to switch the topic. Or if you do make sure you are the master of the second topic. In general trying to get away from a question by switching the topic has two drawbacks: 1st) your interviewer is a smart person and will understand you are not comfortable with the topic and are trying to change it. 2nd) there is a good chance that they ask you even harder questions in the second topic you brought up. If you don’t know the answer to the first topic you might get away with it. However, if you bring up the topic and don’t know the answer to it, result of the interview will be a pass of candidate sadly.
After the phone interview
Do the routine. Just a quick search online will teach you the required etiquette. Send a thank you email to your interviewer if you got the chance to get their contact info. Some companies do not share the complete name of the interviewer. If not you can send a thank you email to your recruiter. Mention your experience and express your interest. This is pretty much what you have to do. Afterwards live your life, stay sane, and wait for two weeks. After two weeks if you don’t hear back there is a good chance that the position is filled. At this point sending just one follow up email is usually recommended.
If you get invited for an onsite, start preparing ASAP.
You got invited to the onsite interview, now what?
This is it. You are given a chance to sell yourself. Research and study. None of these will work on its own. Researching and studying together increase your chances of being the winning candidate. This is a very simple but yet very effective advice. You need to research the company as much as you can. Research the team. Look up their products. See if you can find any documents online. Look up their team members and see what their expertise are. There is a good chance by looking these up you sort of anticipate what kind of questions you’ll be asked. For example, let’s say you find three of your interviewers on LinkedIn and find out they are all PhDs. Try to take a look at their papers, their thesis, and what their skills are on LinkedIn. Lots of times people ask questions from the fields they are experts in.
Read the job description a hundred times. It is a negative point if you are asked about a term on the JD and you’d answer you never heard of it. Look up the terms you don’t know about. At least build a basic knowledge on them.
In terms of studying. Waste no time. Study as much as you can. You will be grilled on the day of your interview. You need to be super ready. Of course if you want that job anyway 🙂
Note to fresh out of college graduates: “But my research was on a different topic, they should evaluate me based on my research.” Never think this way. Usually it takes 3 or 4 interviews for fresh grads to face the truth. No one in industry really cares about your research. They need someone who can get the job done. Your research was on new techniques of breast cancer detection using impulse-radar and you are applying for an OTA engineer at Apple. Do you see much relevance? You will be asked basic questions on OTA measurements.
If you liked what you read send us a quick note through this link and ask for more info. We will continue contributing to this page in response to the feedback we receive from our readers.
Disclaimer: The material provided here is not necessarily true. Interview processes differ significantly on a case-to-case basis and readers are encouraged to take everything said on this page with a grain of salt. Most of the stuff written on this page are based on authors' previous experiences and might not be true for every single case.