- Yung-Yu Lin uses Google Search alerts to stay informed about company news before interviews.
- Sarra Bounouh suggests making separate lists of questions for the hiring manager and team leader.
- Anthony Mays advises creating unique project portfolios to stand out.
In his two-decade tech career, Yung-Yu Lin worked in Taiwan and the US, in hardware, software engineering, and product management roles.
Through career and company changes, preparing for interviews has been key, the senior product manager at Google told Business Insider.
“When you get to the interview, people always get nervous — it doesn’t matter who you are,” Lin said. “The only thing you can control is just trying to practice and get yourself a little bit more familiar with the interview process.”
He and two other tech employees from Meta and Google shared their top tips to prepare before heading into an important Big Tech interview:
Mock interviews
Lin said that one of his top strategies is to do mock interviews with peers.
He uses career-building platforms such as IGotAnOffer, where people role-play interviews with people working or applying to the same companies.
“I scheduled four different mock interviews with other candidates also trying to apply for jobs at Google,” Lin said.
Lin said it was helpful because he not only got a second opinion on his own answers, but also learned from his partner.
Subscribe to company news
To have a good discussion, and to be able to ask informed questions at the end of his interviews, Lin said he sets up Google Search alerts for the company at which he is interviewing.
“Before the interview, I would take a look at whatever happening in the past week and if there is any significant or big change, I ask interviewers or ask recruiters what does that mean for the company or for the industry,” he said.
That shows you are interested in both the company and trends in the domain, Lin added.
Plan a list of questions
Sarra Bonouh, a product manager at Meta who has worked at Accenture, Microsoft, and Snap, said that she prepares a list of questions to ask at the end of the interview.
Her questions change based on whether the interviewer is in a leadership position or a hiring manager.
For a leader:
- What is the strategy of the team and the company? How do this team’s objectives and key results fit into the overall mission and strategy of the company?
- What do you have in mind for the team in the next six months and the next 12 months?
- What would make the person in the role that you’re hiring for stand out?
For a hiring manager:
- Who are the people someone in this role will be working closely with?
- What does success mean for this role?
- Tell me about a project the team worked on recently and the impact it had?
“I like this question a lot because it helps me evaluate the scope of work that the team has,” she said about the last question. “This one I ask actually to all of the hiring managers.”
Prepare a portfolio
Anthony D. Mays, who worked at Google for eight years before becoming a tech career consultant in 2022, said that it’s key to prepare a portfolio that stands out.
He said there’s a big influx of talent coming from coding boot camps, where everyone is given an identical project template. “I can see that you didn’t actually put in the effort to make something of your own.”
He suggests creating a portfolio of coding projects on Github or other platforms that emulate what the role entails in real life and talking about them in interviews.
“Pretend that you’re working for a real company with a team of other engineers,” he said. “Nowadays, I encourage my clients to build portfolio projects in pairs or with a team of other people, and to think about how you build within a team, because that is the thing that hiring managers and recruiters are looking for.”
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