If there were two things to remember about the ramblings that precede this sentence, it would be to make sure you are prepared for an interview and that the process is just as much about you finding out things about your prospective team as it is them figuring out whether or not they will hire you. The tips in this article help in both regards. Know what to expect given the nuances of different interview types. Anticipate the kinds of questions you will be asked. Think about what kind of work environment and teammates you want to have and use that to formulate questions you get to ask your interviewers. All that leads to a positive interview experience that puts you in the best position to determine if the job is right for you.

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - The On Campus or Job Fair Interview
• Part 3 - The Phone Screen Interview
• Part 4 - Technical Questions
• Part 5 - The Touchy-Feely Questions
• Part 6 - Logical Questions and Questions for you to ask
• Part 7 - Final Thoughts

Logical Questions
Instead of probing for specific technical knowledge, some interviewers will test your logical skills by asking the kind of questions you might find on an IQ test. An actual question I was asked in an interview once was, “Why are manholes round?” Needless to say, I had no idea. There are plenty of resources for IQ test questions online that may be helpful to browse during interview preparation, here is one.

Questions you get to ask
With research you have done on the company or specific group you are interviewing with, you should be able to come up with a list of questions. The intent of these questions are twofold. First, you want to stand out by asking something particularly insightful. Try to ask these as open ended as possible to get the interviewer talking. It can be as simple as, “What do you think has contributed to your stock’s recent growth?” Get them talking and listen carefully as that will lead to more questions you can ask.

Second, for the same reasons you get asked Touchy-Feely Questions, you need to get a sense for what it is like to work for this group. Ask about what it is like to work for the manager in charge, what the amenities of the building that the person particularly enjoys, or about the equipment that will be used in your job. If the answers are that the boss is never around for guidance, the roaches are getting bad in the cafeteria, and there haven’t been new PC’s purchased in 5 years, this may not be a place you want as part of your career path. Think about the kinds of things that are important to you in a work setting when creating your list and don’t be afraid to refer to something you’ve written out before hand as this may be your only chance to find these things out before you actually start the job.

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - The On Campus or Job Fair Interview
• Part 3 - The Phone Screen Interview
• Part 4 - Technical Questions
• Part 5 - The Touchy-Feely Questions
• Part 6 - Logical Questions and Questions for you to ask
• Part 7 - Final Thoughts

What kind of tree would you be and why?

OK, maybe not THAT touchy-feely, but a big part of the interview process, especially the Live Interview, is for your perspective employer to estimate what it will be like for the existing parts of the team to work with you. While you can never get an honest answer to, “So, how big a jerk are you really?”, there are other types of things you will get asked along the lines of trying to determine your personality and how it will mesh with the established veterans of the group.

There are volumes of books written on this subject, but here are some favorites you should be prepared for:

• Why should I hire you?

• What is your best strength?

• What is your biggest weakness?

• What would you do if a teammate is slacking off, putting the whole project at risk?

• How might you act differently if you were the only remote member of your team?

A great resource for questions like this (and suggestions for answers) is at Monster.com.

There is a fine line some times between personal questions that are and are not legal to ask. Be prepared for those too, especially if you don’t happen to be a white heterosexual unmarried male with no children. People not in that narrow group may be justifiably sensitive to discrimination. If you were at a party, anybody could ask you “Do you have any kids?” and you wouldn’t take offense, but if that same question is asked at a job interview, it’s intentions are potentially not innocent. Maybe it is being asked because the person is trying to take an interest in you or maybe it’s because the interviewer is testing to see if long hours might bother you. Regardless, it’s an illegal question.

To answer or avoid, is the question when asked things like this. What you do depends a lot on the specific situation. For example, if you are asked the question about kids after you remarked about a picture on the desk of your interviewer with his or her family, it might be OK to answer it. But if you are in a room with a panel of interviewers, the situation is completely different. The point is, think about those sorts of questions you might be asked and under what circumstances you may or may not want to answer them.

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - The On Campus or Job Fair Interview
• Part 3 - The Phone Screen Interview
• Part 4 - Technical Questions
• Part 5 - The Touchy-Feely Questions
• Part 6 - Logical Questions and Questions for you to ask
• Part 7 - Final Thoughts

The kinds of technical questions you will be asked obviously vary based on the kind of degree you have and the type of job you are applying for. Still, there are some general guidelines that can help you prepare.

Regardless of your experience level, anything on your resume is fair game and as a result you have to be careful about what you expose yourself to through your own description of your credentials. The worst possible scenario here is when you have some small mention of a technology you didn’t work with much that happens to be your interviewer’s key expertise. This person begins to ask you tough questions that you don’t really know the answers too. As with all interview scenarios, be honest. Communicate what you know and admit what you don’t, being sure to explain why the item occupies space on your resume in the first place. A good technique is to ask your expert interviewer a few questions about the technology in question that you know little about. This will show your curiosity and give you a chance to establish some rapport with the interviewer.

Especially if you are entering a new sub-genre, it is a good idea to review general technical topics in your area of interest. Besides any old school notes you might have laying around, a great source for concise technical information are the Shaum’s Outline series. Having a few of these in the right topics can give you an easy way to brush up on concepts you may not have worked with in awhile.

The main source for your answers is your job experience. Read through any performance evaluations you might have had to refresh your memory of different projects you may have worked on. Try to remember the challenges you faced and the solutions you created for each, including solutions that may not have worked out. This gives you a good baseline of data to work with on top of any trade journal or technical website reading you might do to better match your knowledge with that of the job you are applying.

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - The On Campus or Job Fair Interview
• Part 3 - The Phone Screen Interview
• Part 4 - Technical Questions
• Part 5 - The Touchy-Feely Questions
• Part 6 - Logical Questions and Questions for you to ask
• Part 7 - Final Thoughts

Once deemed qualified by an on campus interview, a job fair interview, or a resume submittal, most hiring processes involve a phone screen interview of some kind. There are often more qualified applicants than the team with the opening wants to bring in for the Live Interview (detailed below). This is especially true if travel is involved, but even when it’s not the hiring team will want to minimize the time they spend figuring out who to hire so they can continue to do their real jobs.

The Phone Screen Interview typically does not involve as many people asking you questions (usually no more than 2) as a Live Interview will, but it can still be an intense experience. Make sure you are in a quiet setting where you won’t be disturbed when you take the call as hearing your roommate playing the Nintendo in the background will not give a good impression to the interviewer. Just because the medium being used for the conversation is less formal, that doesn’t mean the questions will be. Approach the Phone Screen Interview as if it were a Live Interview. The advantage you have, though, besides not having to dress up is that you can have materials at your disposal in front of you that you cannot have in the Live Interview.

Have a copy of your resume handy for your reference or even the information you collected when you constructed it. During a Live Interview, you will have to answer questions about your resume from memory but in this setting you can read it yourself, which takes some of the pressure off. The same goes for research you have accumulated on the company, which can be a little awkward to have in your hand in person but is freely at your disposal on the phone. You might even be able to get away with having some technical outlines handy to assist you.

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - The On Campus or Job Fair Interview
• Part 3 - The Phone Screen Interview
• Part 4 - Technical Questions
• Part 5 - The Touchy-Feely Questions
• Part 6 - Logical Questions and Questions for you to ask
• Part 7 - Final Thoughts

These experiences typically are coordinated by a campus career center of some sort and usually the interviewees get selected by random draw, by the company interviewer based on resumes before hand, or some mixture of both. This is a typical method used by big companies or local companies of any size.

Similar to the On Campus Interview is the Job Fair Interview, which can target both veterans and less experienced job seekers. These are usually a little less formal and routinely don’t have any sort of pre-selection process. Queue up, hand the person your resume, and start selling yourself. These sorts of gatherings can be hosted by career centers, local recruiting agencies, or chapters of national engineering associations.

In either case, the situation is similar. The person you are talking to probably doesn’t have a specific job for you. Instead, they act as a pre-screener for the pool of jobs the company does have. Getting sent to one of these things is usually a perk for the interviewer since it involves free travel back to their alma mater or some place else desirable to them. As a result, well-rounded engineers with solid skills get selected for these sorts of assignments by companies that participate in them. The interviewer is typically looking for a general set of skills as opposed to ones oriented towards specific jobs. While you won’t be able to ask them questions about a specific job, you won’t have to answer them either. General questions about the company go both ways, though, so be sure to do your research as appropriate.

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - The On Campus or Job Fair Interview
• Part 3 - The Phone Screen Interview
• Part 4 - Technical Questions
• Part 5 - The Touchy-Feely Questions
• Part 6 - Logical Questions and Questions for you to ask
• Part 7 - Final Thoughts

In Great engineering resumes, suggestions were made that hopefully get you in the right stack that moves on in the hiring process. In one form or another, the next phase is the interview. Here, I’ll discuss the different formats an interview might take on, focusing mostly on the logistics and intent from the employer’s perspective of each type. Then, there are a number of sections detailing the kinds of questions you can expect to be asked, regardless of the type of interview.

Overall, the best advice about interviewing is simply to be prepared. Know what you are likely in for, research the company the job is for if not the product line when possible, and think ahead of time about potentially sticky situations so that you don’t have to react to them under pressured circumstances when they occur. Be yourself, be honest, and relax. Remember that this is your opportunity to get answers you have about them too. It’s not just about getting them to offer you a job, it’s also about you wanting to accept it when they do.

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - The On Campus or Job Fair Interview
• Part 3 - The Phone Screen Interview
• Part 4 - Technical Questions
• Part 5 - The Touchy-Feely Questions
• Part 6 - Logical Questions and Questions for you to ask
• Part 7 - Final Thoughts