4 Tips To Prepare For Your First Important Tech Job Interview

Job interviews can be daunting.

Particularly when you’re new to the industry or you’re interviewing via video call. When you finish up at Sabio bootcamp and embark on your software engineer career, you’ll almost certainly have to do at least one important job interview.

Luckily, Rob Levine, the senior technical recruiter at Slack, gave some excellent insight about this topic when he was recently featured on our Sabio Speaker Series. Rob is a highly experienced recruiting professional who has contributed to extremely innovative organizations including Pandora, Autodesk, Apple, Twitter, and LucasFilm.

During his talk, he shared some useful tips for acing your first important tech job interview as a software engineer, after completing the Sabio Coding Bootcamp course.

1. Show off your skills and training

At Sabio, all of our bootcamp students get to work on projects for a range of companies. This real world experience is valuable leverage during interviews. After Sabio’s bootcamp, you’ll have some serious experience and skills under your belt. When it comes to applying for software engineering jobs and other technical positions, the skills you possess are your number one asset!

Don’t worry too much about modesty. This is the time to go ahead and talk up your qualifications, relevant projects and key skills. It’s important that you make sure the employer understands the value you can bring to the company as a software engineer.

2. Be yourself

Rob points out that “if you dress too formally when you’re usually casual, it will feel unnatural and awkward.”

As long as you appear clean and tidy, you can dress pretty close to how you normally dress. You’ll feel more comfortable this way, which will help with your confidence. When it comes to hiring software engineers, the focus is definitely on skills, not outfits.

3. You don’t have to be too serious

Rob points out that it’s “always good to bring a little humor and humility to your discussions with people.”

Tech certainly isn’t the most corporate industry in the world. If you have the right skills for the software engineer or developer position you’re applying for, that should be enough.

It will be a bonus if you can connect with the interview panel by being a little personal. This helps you to seem human, and shows them how well you’ll fit into their company culture.

4. Smile!

Even though it can be difficult via Zoom calls, try to make eye contact with the interviewer. Job interviews can be daunting but when in doubt, smile: seeming friendly goes a long way.

Rob reminds us that an organization is like a second home. Most of the staff spend a lot of their career and time there, so it’s very important to hire someone who is going to “play nice in the sandbox.”

The Sabio Speaker series is a moderated conversation between Sabio and industry professionals to provide opportunities for industry professionals to interact with the Sabio community and build long term relationships.

Rob Levine is a Senior Technical Recruiter with over 20 years of experience. He now recruits for Slack and has recruited for other amazing companies such as LucasFilm/ILM, Pandora, Autodesk, Apple Inc., and Twitter. He's a proven professional that will find, engage and recruit the right high-quality talent.