February is job hunt month if you’re in co-op, and interviews are just winding down now. I was fortunate enough to get interviewed by a handful of really cool companies, and I was surprised at how smoothly the interviews went. I was nervous as hell before — and during — my first interview, but even that one went well.
One thing that I found useful was my blog. Really. People say you should have a blog so that employers can find you, or so employers can tell that you’re passionate. That’s only half the story. The other half is that if an interviewer skims your blog for a few minutes before your interview, they already know you a little.
Think of it this way: in an interview, you have an hour or so to tell your interviewer that 1. you are a nice guy they could handle being in a room with for hours 2. you are generally competent, and 3. you know more than you are letting on. Number 3 is the hardest. You don’t have enough time to tell them everything you know, so you have to make sure they know that you know more than they know that you know. Right?
Example: I know at least one employer read my post on applying to SeatGeek. That means they know in advance that I know enough about web development to know:
- how sessions work,
- how to edit a cookie,
- how to change my useragent string,
- what CSRF means,
- how to understand and edit HTML.
These are the sort of things that may be too trivial to talk about or test thoroughly in a job interview. That’s five fewer things I need to convince my interviewer that I know. Which is awesome.