You get asked a simple linked lists question "How will you detect if elements in one linked list occur in another linked list?". You write a quadratic time working code in C-programming language in about 10 minutes. The program works well and covers most of the corner cases. You optimize the quadratic time algorithm to the linear time algorithm using the hash table on the interviewer's request to optimize the time complexity. You explain why the hash-based algorithm may be sensitive to the hash function used by the hash table. You still get rejected after this phone screen. You wonder why you got rejected despite doing well in the technical part of the interview. And you scratch your head a little more since there were only technical questions on coding and data structures and you had answered them well.

Job interviews remain the most intriguing and mystifying activity for interviewees. Also, most interviewees are under pressure to land a job given various kinds of constraints like time windows within which they need to land the jobs or urgently provide financial support for their respective families. But the harsh truth is that landing one's dream job is not only dependent on one's skill level for the job but also on the perception of one's personality to the interviewing team. I have interviewed as an interviewee with various big technological companies in the past and I have interviewed various candidates to hire in my teams. Experiencing the interview process from both sides, from the interviewee side and interviewer side, has been a very enlightening experience. When you are an interviewee, you sometimes have little idea as to how and why certain decisions are made in the recruitment process. Once you graduate to being the interviewer yourself, you get enlightenment on some of the more important details of recruiting job candidates.

Being an interviewee could be an unnerving experience, especially when you are right out of college or if you are desperately looking for a job change in your professional career. Following are some important things to be mindful of as you go about your interview process:-

Know your technical skills

You must know your technical skills inside out. There is simply no way around the technical part of the interview process if you are interviewing for a software engineer position. More so now that companies have hackathons and online time-bound exams on portals like hackerank.com and hackerearth.com. There is simply no excuse for not knowing how to solve complex problems on topological sort of graphs to simple problems on bit manipulation on integers and characters. Practice and revise even if you have to pick up Galvin to brush up or relearn your operating systems fundamentals no matter if you are an experienced candidate or a candidate who is straight out of college.

Answer to the point

It is advisable to answer what the interviewer has asked for. For instance, if the interviewer asks about the time complexity of dictionary data structure in Python, you should not give references to C++ vectors. You lose the interviewer's interest and attention by answering un-clearly. You should simply pass if you do not know an answer. This buys you time so that the interviewer can ask something else which you may know.

Never lie about your skills in your resume

Mentioning a skill that you have not worked on or that you have just browsed through on the internet on your resume is a strict "no-no". Interviewers get a very negative impression of you if they ask you a simple enough question on a skill and you come out way short of answering their question. More so, if you are an experienced worker and you lie about a skill on your resume, then for sure the feedback will be very negative. For new graduates, the feedback may not be as negative as in the case of experienced professionals but still, you should not be lying anything on your resume.

Be polite to your interviewer and respect him/her

Interviewing should be considered as a business activity. You need to approach another company to grow professionally in your career. At no point in time should you display an attitude that betrays disdain. You burn your fingers by not showing enough respect to the interviewer's questions even if the questions are elementary and are no match for your skill level. If you exhibit such behavior, you tend to lose your bargaining power with the hiring manager.

Exhibit receptiveness while interacting with the interviewers

Being unnerved and tense in an interview is normal. Interviewing is your best chance to gauge where your skills stand in the job market and more importantly, an opportunity to know yourself a little bit more. So you should show interest and be receptive to what the interviewers are talking about. Ask clarifications and questions whenever you need help. Interviewers typically like candidates who think loudly enough so that the interviewers can hear them.

Show that you have good social skills and soft skills

Hiring managers typically are not so concerned about the technical skills but they are more worried about selecting a candidate who may not gel within their team. A technically outstanding candidate with low team spirit will rank lower than a candidate who is just above average technically but a better team player. So do not show yourself as aloof and abnormal during the interviews. Showing aloofness and wearing a facade over your usual self gives a strong red signal to the hiring manager and lowers your chances of getting selected.

Know what you need from the job position

There are times when you need to interview for practice or gauge how relevant your skills are in job market or how much is your current worth in the market compared to your current compensation. Even if you are interviewing for practice, you should interview for job positions that offer you career advancement according to what you desire. Do not interview if you know that the job position that you are interviewing for is not something that will benefit you at all. In case you know that you will not accept the offer from the company that you are interviewing with, do not show the interviewers that you think that they are doing some unimportant or uninteresting work. You may not get called for a further round of interviews if the interviewers sense that you are simply wasting their time and that you will not accept an offer from them.

Follow-up material

• Hiring right candidates in software engineering roles

• Interviewer Experiences: What to do and what not to do?