Early Career Job Interview Tips

This post is based on what I have observed over a number of years in the industry.

It is more relevant to an engineering professional and to an early career scenario, that is, when one is seeking an employment immediately after graduating (or professionals with about 1 to 3 years of experience). However, it also holds significance for more experienced professionals too.

A face to face personal interview is the defining criteria during a selection process by any company, big or small. In an early career scenario, the number of positions available are typically lesser compared to the number of eligible candidates. Hence, how you perform during a personal (face to face) interview has a significant impact on your chances of being selected.

An early career scenario is also where a candidate’s exposure to industry and his/her maturity levels are on the lower side, and also, there could be a gap between the skills which the candidate has acquired and what industry expects.

So, I am writing this article to build a basic awareness on how to go about preparing for your interview so that your probability of success is higher. 

What is the expectation from a fresh engineering graduate?

The fundamental understanding of the concepts, ability to apply fundamental concepts to simple practical situations, and most importantly, building a confidence in the interviewer(s) that you have the right capability, aptitude, and attitude to get on to a fast learning curve and be a good team member.

In current times, organizations are becoming global, and there is an increasing dependence on telephone, e-mails, and facilities like video conferencing for carrying out business. Hence, communication has become a very important factor. Along with right technical skills, you must also demonstrate good communication skills and willingness to work as part of a larger team. So ability to read, write, and speak good English is very important, because English by far is the most common language across globe.

The knowledge of engineering tools is necessary for working out solutions. But for a fresh engineering graduate, it is not expected that he/she should have hands-on ability to use engineering tools. However, a basic level of awareness about various important and relevant tools, and how engineering computations are done using these tools will certainly help.  Eventually, it gets down to a good fundamental understanding, and if one can demonstrate that, it is generally presumed that learning and applying engineering tools will happen as a natural progression.

If one has an experience of one or two years, it is expected that candidate should have a fair understanding of relevant engineering tools. In what scenario a certain engineering tool is used, how to set up a problem, how to choose a solver, how to obtain and process result, and how to interpret results – a certain understanding of all these aspects will make a good impression on the interview panel. But again, I would like to re-emphasize – it is always the fundamental understanding and ability to think through clearly which is far more important. 

So what does the interview panel looks for?

The interviews are conducted in quite a friendly and informal environment, and they normally last for about an hour. Most likely, the interview panel (or the interviewers) will put in a fair effort to make you feel comfortable and relaxed, so as to reduce the level of your nervousness, and creating an atmosphere where they can bring out the best from within you.

The interview panel tries to explore what you know, and how good you can put across your views. In parallel, they also try to assess the relevance of what all you are talking and the way you are talking, to their goals and objectives. Your answers should be precise and brief, without missing out on important points, and if you are courageous enough, don’t hesitate to go to a blackboard or a whiteboard and explain your views with the help of equations or a figure. 

You must understand that emphasis is not on trying to assess what you don’t know. The questions are drawn from what you have written in your resume and your initial discussions with the interview panel, so normally they are familiar to you. The emphasis is more on your ability to listen and understand the question, and then answer accordingly. It is about testing your fundamental understanding, ability to apply your fundamental understanding to simple practical situations, your communication, and the confidence you build in terms of your ability to learn new things and grow your skills.

The interview panel may also pose a few situation based questions to test your behavioral skills, like your ability to work in a team, your ability to extend cooperation to others or to seek cooperation from others, how to make way forward in difficult or ambiguous situations, ability to take a decision, ability to learn something new all by yourself or with minimal hand holding, ability to learn from mistakes and implement lessons learnt for future works and such similar aspects.

There could be a written test before the personal interview and the results of written test could be used in two ways; (a) weed out the candidates who haven’t done well and interview only those candidates who have attained a minimum standard in the written test, or (b) have a certain weight for the written test and a certain weight for the interview while working out the final interview results. 

Preparing for the interview:

• Read the Job Description (JD) very well. Clearly understand the nature of job and all the technical and behavioral competencies that are required for the job.

• Review the website of the company and build a high familiarity with the company in terms of its lines of business, nature of work undertaken, its people, its customers, and its reputation etc.

• Brush up your concepts and have full clarity and understanding about your projects.

• Try to consolidate things like your course work, your seminars and projects, and various other events which will help you to build a relevance to the given JD.

• If you were to do your seminars or projects all over again, how you could have done better?

• Think of situations where you didn’t know much or there wasn’t much clarity or not much support was available to you – so how you moved forward and on what basis did you take decision?

• Have some understanding of various products as well as existing and emerging technologies in your area of study.

• Think as if you are the most eligible candidate for that job and with that, build a picture in your mind, correlating you and your skills with regard to what is required for that job.

General tips: 

• Answer various questions clearly and loudly enough so that all the members of the interview panel can hear you clearly. Don’t speak too fast.

• If you are on phone with a person within India (or outside of India), it is all the more important to be loud and clear while expressing yourself.

• Don’t interrupt a panel member when he/she is speaking something,

• Listen to the question properly, and if you haven’t understood a question or comment clearly, don’t hesitate to ask again.

• Try to give brief and precise answers.

• If you don’t know the answer, admit that you are not in a position to answer this question, rather than keep talking (or explaining) without really building clarity. May be interview panel will give you some hints and if that encourages you, then try using the hint to answer the question. But if you are not sure, it is always recommended not to make an attempt to answer that question as it might lead to a difficult or embarrassing situation.

• If you go off track while answering a question, chances are a panel member may interrupt you. So, try to catch hints in such situations.

• At the end of the interview, the panel will quite likely give you an opportunity to ask any question that you may have.  In such a case, this could be your opportunity to know more about the role, the nature of work, work culture, what support company provides for learning and development, and what is expected from a person who is joining fresh out of college or with limited experience.  But limit your questions and don’t keep asking. Ask only the relevant questions because the panel has to interview lot more candidates other than you.

• Don’t ask questions like “how I have done in the interview” or “will I be selected”.

• Discussion on salary aspects is generally not the responsibility of an interview panel. So, don’t bring in any aspect related to salary, unless asked specifically about it.

• Whenever you have a salary discussion, don’t get too specific about a particular salary. Instead project a balanced picture where learning, building your skills, and contributing to the company should be the primary drivers, and a fair compensation in line with company standards is what you are looking for. If you find salary rather low, you may negotiate, but keep in mind, it is the opportunity to start your career and build your professional competence which is more important.

• Wear decent formal shirt and trouser with leather black or brown shoes. Have a neat and sober appearance. No flashy combinations.

Typical Questions: 

1. Could you please take us through your resume or could you please tell us about how your career has progressed from the time you have joined the engineering college:

2. How your education has matured you, has enhanced your skills, and has prepared you to take on a professional career.

3. Any engineering domain is a vast field – so is there something specific that interests you and why?

4. There could be questions on the relevant course work you have done, what was the content of those courses, and there is every possibility that panel member may ask few basic questions based on those course contents. The questions could be direct, and at times, you might be required to apply your basic understanding to a practical situation, for example, a certain fault has occurred in a mechanical system – what could be the reasons for that fault and how it can be rectified?

5. Most likely, there will be a discussion on your project, and it could include aspects like:

• The objective of this project and why you chose this project

• Whether it was an individual project or a team project

• If it was a team project, what role you played?

• Did you take decision that influenced the course of this project?

• Did other team members have good confidence and regards for your views and your decisions?

• Technical aspects of the project – could lead to an in-depth discussion. So build a good and clear technical understanding of your project and all the steps required from problem definition to problem solution (problem definition, literature review, problem formulation, obtaining results and interpretation of results). Key findings of this work.

• Did this work lead to any publication. If yes, you should be able to summarize that publication.

• Failures you faced, how you overcame them, and what you learnt from the failures.

• If you were to do this project all over again, how you will do it better?

6. If you are slipping on pre-agreed schedule, how you will go about managing it?

7. If you face some unexpected problem during the course of executing a project, what actions you will take to get over this problem?

8. Why are you particularly interested in joining our company?

9. If you are changing the job (after working elsewhere for a year or two), the panel may ask reasons for that and how joining the new company will fulfill candidate’s aspirations.

10. Presume that you have completed a project and your next project is of similar nature – so what improvements can be expected?

11. What are your career goals and where you see yourself in two years from now?

12. What are your plans for higher education?

13. Your two or three strengths.

14. Your two or three weaknesses (or opportunities for improvement). How you can improve on them?

15. If selected, how soon you can join?

16. Would you like to ask us any question?

 

Note:

How to answer the question - Could you please take us through your resume? 

• Start with your interest in pursuing a career in engineering, how you got admission to engineering college, and why you selected that particular branch.

• Talk about relevant courses, about your seminars, and project work.

• You should also include any extra-curricular activity.

• Having completed your degree (or now that you are about to complete), add one or two sentences on what you aim to do and what brings you to this interview.

• The people with experience can talk about their projects and various other learning that are relevant to this job and why they are looking for a career move.

• This question basically gives you the allowance to relax, and build an initial familiarity with the interview panel. Typically, don’t take more than 5 minutes for answering this part.

 

In the early career years, the focus should be on building a strong technical expertise, by way of strengthening your existing skills and adding a few new skills. Focus on your planning, execution, communication, and presentation. Learn to write good technical reports. Strive to build a good reputation, that is, you do your work well, in time, and correct first time. A lot of you may aspire to take on engineering manager or engineering leadership roles, but that is for the later part of the career. The first three to four years should be all about building a strong technical base.

When the interviews are conducted for the mid to senior level positions, there is a greater element of discussion towards candidate’s ability to understand the requirements and flow it down to the team, technical supervision and mentoring, manage projects from a planning, execution and delivery perspective, and managing quality aspects like cost, schedules, defects, lessons learnt etc. The discussion could also include aspects like building competency and competency frameworks, creating knowledge base, ability to support new business initiatives, and engage/interact with existing or potential customers.

Most of the engineering companies tend to have a bifurcation in terms of career progression, that is, a technical career progression and a managerial career progression. This typically happens six to seven years later from the entry level, and an employee is normally given an option to choose a career path. The nature of interview may change based on your career aspirations, and if you are seeking a managerial position, there could be additional discussions on people management, performance assessment, budget, profitability, and day to day operational issues.