Tips and Techniques for a successful IT job interview (Part 1)
A little bit of pre-interview preparation can make a big difference in increasing your chances for success when applying for a job. Here are three, basic steps which anyone who is serious about an IT job opportunity should take before each interview.
1) Learn everything you can about the company’s business.
Spend an hour of your time reading whatever information you can find online about the company. Don’t just stop at the company’s own website – search for news items, blog posts, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, etc. If it’s a large, public company, a good place to find objective information is from investment sites. Many of these websites have free online reports analyzing a company’s business prospects, market share, competitors, and partners.
2) Check if they have posted a lot of other jobs (IT and non-IT).
This can help you get an idea about how (and where) the company is expanding. If it is a multinational, are there many jobs advertised in your country? What about elsewhere in your region? Compare this with what you learned from the research in step 1.
3) Find out who you will be interviewing with.
As you’ll see in Part 2 of this article, your interviews and your approach to them will be quite different depending on who you are meeting and what their role in the company is. At the very least, you should know if you will be meeting someone from the HR department, or if you will be speaking with a direct line manager for the position, or with some other managerial or technical staff (or all of the above). If possible try to find out the interviewers’ names in advance. You can then research them specifically, and maybe learn an interesting fact or two which might help you make a good connection. For example, maybe one of your interviewers previously worked at another company that you are already familiar with. Or maybe they graduated from the same university that you did.