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7 front-end interview processes I did in December 2021

anabella on December 31, 2021

I recently went through the task of getting myself a new job and, to do this, I took part of 7 simultaneous interviewing processes for front-end ro...
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Michael Knopke

Thanks for sharing your experiences in such detail. I recently went through a similar recruiting process as the one from the company that you finally chose. Although I had multiple first talks with recruiters that probably would have lead to real interviews I rather chose to go with only one. The one that looked the most promising and concentrated on it (I still had a full time job and family next to it). Bringing your own work was new for me and felt a bit like cheeting to be honest. You know the code and usually can talk about it with ease. I did enjoy the technical talk as it made clear that they know about the topics and the questions made sense (I could not answer all of them but did explained why which was probably ok). What I wished I had done like you was to ask if I could meet the team as this is indeed the most important factor (for me). I did accept the offer (I can't yet say if it was a good choice as it starts early next year. Regarding your choice, I hope you will enjoy working for the company. Personally I would have been cautious regarding the fact that the pair programmer wasn't very skilled (at react) and that you are the frontend reference but as you said that you can gain knowledge about backend that might make for it. The main reason for me to quit a job is if I feel that I won't learn much from my colleagues (anymore). Anyway, good luck and have fun.

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anabella

Thank you!

It shouldn't feel like cheating, imo. On your every day job you're rarely asked to work with code you know very little about and I think there's much more to learn from discussing something that's well thought through!

I am a bit scared about the BE challenge and being the only FE-experienced person in my team. But I trust this type of work methodology enough to know it's the best scenario for a situation like that!

I'm starting early next year too! Thanks for the good wishes and good luck to you too!

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Raí B. Toffoletto

Thank you for the amazing reading! I wish I had read that in 2020 when I was looking for my first job as FE dev. In my experience from that time the very small companies are very lost/or very outdated in how they interview and look for people. The company that ended up hiring me was definitely not clear of what they expected from me and the way they worked (nor their current stack), they just said "We are looking for a React or Angular developer". It was also the only one to conduct in person interviews in a pandemic year. What I really did the past year was: 2/3 of my time writing dotNet for BE and the rest developing from the ground a new design system (with a fellow designer) for the React FE.

It's being challenging and a great learning opportunity, but I wish I knew what to ask beforehand to fill the gaps in their lack of infos. So thanks again for the great tips 🎉 I'll definitely keep them in mind for my next job hunting.

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Raí B. Toffoletto

** Don't get me wrong, I'm very glad for the opportunity they gave me. They took a chance on someone over 30yo that didn't have a CS degree nor working experience in the field. And as I understand I was the only one that actually delivered the homework assignment that has an API not properly configured for CORS and not documented at all....

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Joel Brighton

Anabella,
A really excellent article. Thank you for sharing!

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Ian Dickinson

Train people on how to interview candidates

😍

I'm always surprised that more companies don't train people to be interviewers. I used to work for a multinational tech company, and they had us take a 1-day Behavioural Interviewing class. It was so useful, and something I still draw on now, many years later. Your point about interviewers being the UI for the company at that point is bang on. And the clarity about what the team is looking for and how they are going to fairly and accurately compare different candidates. Plus, there are - in most legal jurisdictions - questions you just can't ask a candidate for legal could-get-the-company-sued reasons!

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anabella

Thank you!

I know from my own experience I can sometimes feel weird and even nervous when interviewing a candidate, and I'd love to get real training in that. Most companies have many employees and candidates will only meet ~5 of them while at interviews. You need to make them count!

I liked your point about being clear on how they evaluate and compare candidates. I've gotten that from external recruiters prep'ing me up, but almost nothing from companies.

The most common deal breaker last month for me was unclear/unexciting projects, bad vibes from leadership or them just seeming inexperienced. I think there might be a curve in which for the first half of the process it's mostly the company evaluating a candidate, but the 2nd half it's much more mutual, and it's definitely the candidates choice on the last sprint. I think companies fail to make a timely switch to become more attractive and stand out in time, maybe?

Anyway thanks for reading and for your comments!

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Michel Tomas

Thank you so much for sharing this feedback. Being the recruiter for my very small company when it's needed, I'm always struggling between building a saavy process and not making it too cumbersome for candidates to avoid making them lose their time for nothing. A lot of your feedback will be actionable for us and our candidates.

Something I like to do, but don't see a lot in interviews: instead of doing a live coding session (which I think can lead to too much stress, and is not realistic, just like when at school they ask you to write code without Internet access), I ask candidates to write a LOGBOOK.md in which they explain what they are doing, explain their choices and blockers, and even tell us about their mindset and feelings at the moment.
This gives an opportunity to also test their written communication skills - useful when they will communicate with a client, a stakeholder or write documentation - but also, they can explain why something we asked wasn't done, so we can judge how they think instead of their skills. Very useful for more junior profiles.

The real pair-programming session is a great idea though ; the "Bring-your-own coding challenge" too. Will definitely include those in our next recruitment process !

Thanks again and wish you the best at your new job and your personal life ;)

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Vaibhav Khulbe

Definitely one of the better ways to start 2022 on DEV with this article! Thanks for sharing the process and your thoughts with us. This is all an immense value for those who want to get a front-end job. 🤩

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anabella

Thank you! and good luck!!

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squidbe

Sounds like you dodged a bullet with company #4 -- lots of red flags coming from the CTO.

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anabella

Yeah, I mean, he's probably wel intentioned and not aware of it, but the moment I felt like I was avoiding having calls with him I knew it wasn't a good match, being such a small team.

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Akhil Kala

Very helpful!

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anabella

Thank you! 💖

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Live Trends

very helpful