Tag: interviewing

Prepare for Fall Job Fairs in 2 Easy Steps

2019-08-29 UPDATE: Listen to the Podcast Summary of this Post: Scroll to the bottom of the article for an interactive transcript of the podcast. Students are just getting back to school, but don’t get too focused on class. Remember, employers will be on campus soon! Here are the local university fairs in the ManagerJS recruiting… Continue reading Prepare for Fall Job Fairs in 2 Easy Steps

Interview Better For Boot Camp Candidates

Coding camps often yield very qualified candidates. Be sure to review your assumptions about candidates and construct a tailored interview for coding camp applicants.

For example, graduates with a university degree in computer science often have to learn basic concepts expressed in multiple languages and technology stacks. I believe this can give them resilience in the face of change. Because some coding camps turn out graduates with very narrow experience those candidates may not yet be able to apply their new skill in a technology environment even slightly different from their learning experience.

To address this, you might ask a question like ”Tell me about a technology that you have learned for your own purposes — outside of school. How did you approach your learning? How did you build on what you already knew?”

The front page of the Business & Tech section of today’s Wall Street Journal states ”Coding Camps Attract Tech Firms.” And they are absolutely right! I have been very impressed by many candidates from coding camps. On the other hand, I have seen some struggle after being hired for reasons related to their narrow experience.

I recommend embracing this new source of qualified talent. Just take another look at your interviewing process to reevaluate past assumptions.

 

Get Into Internships

Hand shake.

[I Love It] One of my favorite parts of being a manager (and I didn’t anticipate this) is recruiting interns on university campuses. Being part of offering a great opportunity to students right when they need it is very rewarding. [Good For Students] A good internship helps a student make a transition from a mostly… Continue reading Get Into Internships

Recommend: Effective Communicator and Interviewer Conference

Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Jan 2016.

Waking up in my own bed again after two days in Palo Alto for the Manager Tools training on DISC (Effective Communications Conference — ECC) and interviewing (Effective Interviewer Conference — EIC). Bottom Line: I recommend them, both. The Experience The setting was intimate. There were 11 attendees the first day and seven the second.… Continue reading Recommend: Effective Communicator and Interviewer Conference

Learn to Do

Why have one when you can have two for twice the price?

What will more effectively convince a hiring manager that you can produce results for them? Should you focus on making products? Should you complete programming challenges? Past results are the best evidence of future results. But it’s hard to beat solving a problem before the eyes of your interviewer. Here’s Raul’s question: Candidate Question: Preparing… Continue reading Learn to Do

Are You Being Wooed?

An interesting and short article went over the predictable labor shortage caused by the difference between the sizes of the Baby Boomer and Gen X population groups. It talked about Employment Branding.

The technical term is “Employment Branding,” and it’s how companies woo top talent. They showcase their company culture, values, benefits, perks, executive team, staff members, business mission, and anything else that will make a great candidate want to work for them instead of their competitor.

… Google, Zappos, Amazon, and Facebook aren’t the only hot employers on our planet. They’re just the ones that embraced Employment Branding when others didn’t. But soon, we’ll be seeing companies of all shapes and sizes strutting their stuff in hopes of catching our eyes. It’s going to be a great year!

Has this been true for you? I know I talk up our unique workplace — especially for top candidates. How prominently has “Employment Branding” featured in your recent job interviews?

My Current Favorite Interview Problem Memoize

Just added memoize to my growing catalog of interview questions.

Summary of the Challenge

Part 1 is a discussion. Part 2 gets to the code. You can skip straight to 2 when time is short. This problem is particularly useful for gauging JavaScript familiarity since it takes advantage of functions as objects and closures.

There’s a lot of jargon in the question, but that’s not the point of this challenge. Make sure they understand the question. You might gauge how willing they are to ask questions, but only gently. Don’t put them on the defensive just by the wording of the question.

Part 1: You have a number of expensive pure functions. During the course of any given hour these functions are each called with a small number of inputs. Hour over hour the inputs vary dramatically. Describe how you could improve the performance of the system.

Candidate behaviors to look for: Caches the results and bypasses the expensive function calls when the answer is cached. Memoization. (See formal write up for details.)

Part 2: Write a higher order function (a function that takes a function and returns a function) that accepts a function of arity 1 and returns an identical, memoized function. (See formal write up for candidate template and example solution.)

Good At Differentiating Candidates

You will find that some candidates will solve the problem handily, refactor, then easily run through the examples. Other candidates might have to be coached more through the implementation, but should at least be able to step through the execution of the examples.

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