Fresh Interviews

Lately, I had the chance to shadow and have interviews with fresh graduates, which was a great experience for me, I notice common mistakes that the interviewers keep telling the interviewee about it, and here I am trying to give the fresh graduates some generic common advice, most of them are basics, but people keep failing in them.

Why interview?

The interview isn't a simple process as there is a question, if you answer it correctly "You pass" or else "You failed", while part of that is true, but it's not as simple as that, good interviews have many things that affect the total outcome. If the company just wants to solve that problem it can just be sent, with no need for all this extra cost, so having interviews means that the company doesn't really focus on the solution, which means that you can solve the problem and got rejected or struggle with it and got hired.

A proper Interview process is hard to accomplish, having long and different interviews is tricky but when doing them right it will be guaranteed that the remaining candidate will have higher quality. The interviews cut from the employee's working hours to prepare, perform, and examine it, this process by its nature cost the company money and time to find someone that may join.

Comparing the Candidates is a tricky process as the company may have candidates with technical levels so close to each other and only one free position. What should they do in this situation? Working with a binary system (hire/no hire) means the company will pick FIFO, also that system will make it hard to have more than one interview, and when it comes to that company should handle some cases, like someone caught cheating in an interview or done very bad behavior with an interviewer, cases need to be handled smoothly in the hiring system, hire/no hire means many things.

Some Companies follow the level or the area system, in the level system each interviewee writes his outcome as (Strongly no hire, no hire, weak hire, hire, strongly hire), and each of these words is related to the hiring policy, similar to that some companies can divide the feedback into some areas (green(+1), yellow(-1), and red(-100)), and only candidate with a score greater than x will be considered.

Candidate earns and loses points without noticing, he/she thinks something is no big deal like ignoring instructions while it costs many points even if he/she manages to solve the problem, things like answering clearly about why we can't solve the problem using x give points.

Common Mistakes in Interviews

Most of these mistakes are easy to avoid after some interviews, I encourage you to get as many interviews as possible and never be down when you fail in an interview.

1. Silent solver: you need to talk about what you think, the possible solutions, and the complexity of each of them, thinking in silence will make the interviewer give you wrong hints, and he will assume you can't solve the problem using x algorithm because you didn't mention it, and possibly you saw the problem before and want to fake thinking.
2. Only optimal solution: giving a problem, the interviewer expects you to mention the brute force or some bad solutions first then try to improve them, not saying these solutions may mean you can't even solve this problem with a bad solution. 
3. Ignore hints: when an interviewer gives you a hint it is for helping you, following hints should end you with a solution or give you some point, but ignoring them is a very bad indicator.
4. Fitting solution: many fresh interviewees focus on getting an "accepted answer" based on codeforces.com or another website so they will ask something like what is the value of n, when the interviewer says "find the optimal solution" means that the best big o, if you give him an o(n*n) solution it can be a bad solution because optimal solution runs in o(log(n)).
5. Assume things and never ask about them: some interviewers will not say everything, to see if you can find out the optimal solution for some cases or handle the corner case, for example, someone will say "number" but didn't tell you it's integer or not, some may not mention the data value range is not large (only values from 1 to 100) asking about these things give you points and may end you with a good solution.
6. Asking the wrong questions: what is the time complexity of the optimal solution? What is the interview outcome? Where are the places you get the question from? ...etc. when interviewer ask you about your question he/she expect you to ask about the company, or the working environment.
7. Not listening to the interviewer: things the interviewer states very clearly like "Let's move from this point" or "That is enough here" are things related to the interview process, so ignoring them and deciding to keep going is an indicator that you don't listen to the other.
8. Zero info about the company: people can have little info about the company in the primary scanning but reaching an advanced stage without knowing the basics about the company indicates that they don't care whether it's a good or bad company, has a strong technical team or not ...etc., people who join a company with zero info about it more likely to leave it asap.
9. Questioning the interview process: normally the interview process isn't perfect, but it's something other people put many efforts into it, so asking questions like : why did you ask me this question? Does it really matter? ...etc. is an awful thing to do.
10. No interview preparation: always try to be in your top form before the interview, you need to read about related topics before the actual interview, relax, and push tasks after the interview.
11. Weak CV: having a CV without your projects, GIT account, LinkedIn account ...etc. make it hard for people to know more about you from your CV and consume some time at the interview to ask about unmentioned info, check careercup.com/resume for more info.

The summary

At the end of the day the interview is just meeting with someone older than you, just be a polite person and try to show your good side, 99% of the time the interviewer will not try to make you fail or give you wrong hints, some may try to trick you to test the technical fundamentals, but the majority will keep it straight forward and try to help you.

Being rejected in an interview isn't necessarily a bad thing, ask for feedback to improve yourself and focus on the next interview, there are many reasons why you don't pass the interview so don't assume things that are out of your control.

Also, never assume that if you are good you should pass all interviews, maybe the position needs different scope or the interview process at that company isn't good enough.

Books like "Cracking the Coding Interview" really helped me do better in the interviews, also here are videos (in Arabic) that may help you (some may be Generic for all levels not only fresh) : 

• How to join Fangs.
• What to do in an interview. 
• Fang's interview tips.
• Cracking algorithmic interviews.

Finally, good luck with your next interview.