Have you ever feel too surprised being rejected by a company,
after doing well in the interview?
Have you ever feel difficult to communicate with the interviewer in an interview?
If you answer to any of the question is,
yes,
you are in the right place.
In this video,
we will be talking about five different types of interviewers,
as well as how to deal with each of them to land
a job offer. Stay tuned.
It can be very discouraging that you have put in lots of effort to prepare for an interview and you feel that you did pretty good in an interview and you end up being rejected.
Many people are facing with this issue.
Going on to data science interviews,
you will encounter different types of interviewers,
some are great,
and some are not so helpful. Because interviewers play a critical role in the hiring.
decision making,
It'll be helpful for you to learn those different styles and come up with strategies to deal with each of them.
Let's now over the five different types of interviewers that I have summarized based on real interview experiences.
I will also provide suggestions on how to work with each of them.
First of all,
we have the "What do you think" type of interviewer?
This kind of interviewer refuses to be helpful.
And whatever question you ask
even for clarification questions
they just direct the question right back at you.
The difficulty of working with this type of interviewer is you never get any feedback.
Especially during metric interviews, getting feedback is a very important because the questions are open ended.
And it's impossible to do well without narrowing down your answers towards a certain direction.
To deal with this type of interviewer,
you need to find ways to force them to give you some feedback,
and here are two things that you could try.
The easiest way is to directly ask yes or no questions such as,
does it make sense to you? Or is there anything I could explain more? Under those questions is unlikely for the interviewer to still reply
What do you think?
The second way to get feedback is to give the interviewer some options to choose from.
For example,
you can say here are a few reasons that caused the problem.
Which one would you like me to explore more most of the time the interviewer will give you a direction.
However, interviewers may still say
What do you think? In that situation
You need to prioritize the options based on your reasons and assumptions,
and make sure you clearly communicate those and it's helpful to confirm with interviewer again.
once you are done with explaining your approach.
The second type of interviewer can be categorized as this is not what I expected type.
This type of interviewer usually gives you some positive feedback,
such as OK continue
through most of the interview.
But after half of the majority of the time has passed,
the interviewer suddenly says This is not what I expected.
Or I was expecting something else.
It is very frustrating when it happens because it seems that the interviewer was fine with your approach,
and suddenly he or she denies it.
But it's not the end of the world
and you could be able to pass interview with the following tips.
First,
ask for feedback.
Since the interviewer mentioned that is not what he or she expected,
you could simply ask,
What are the expectations and which part there were missing?
Second,
if you have other ideas in mind,
but you didn't get a chance to talk about them,
you could communicate those with the interviewer and ask for a confirmation.
You can say there could be other approaches to this problem,
such as A, B and C.
Does any of those makes us to you. Let the interviewer confirmed the direction before going any further.
Another thing you could do is to ask the interviewer for clarification of the problem statement.
Say something like,
OK,
let's get back.
My understanding of the problem is such and such am I missing anything?
So these are a few things you can do to change the situation where it happens.
But this is not a pleasant experience and we definitely want to prevent it from happening.
So during an interview,
do your best to keep the interviewer on track with your thought process.
The best strategy is always state the high level overview of your approach before going into details.
Also, after finishing
dive into some details confirmed with the interviewer that your approach is correct and whether you should dive deeper or move on to the next topic.
The third type of interviewer is very different from the first two types.
Instead of not giving you any feedback or telling you that your answer is not as they expected,
the interviewer shows positive feedback to your solutions and appears agreeable during the interview.
But they have very high expectations of the candidates and they do not hesitate to fail you if your answers don't meet their standards.
The interview becomes a tricky because the interviewer didn't show any negative feedback explicitly during the interview.
Even if they notice flaws or lack of depth in your answers,
they may still say that's great.
That's awesome.
So you end up failing the interview without knowing the actual reason.
Therefore,
you don't know how to improve.
To deal with this type of interviewer,
you should be alarmed when you notice your interviewer is too agreeable or you always receive positive feedback.
Make sure in a double check with the interviewer,
whether your answer is comprehensive.
Whether he or she wants you to consider more aspects to the problem,
or dive deep into any of the factors you mentioned earlier.
For example,
if you are asked to diagnose the issue that an important metric shifts to the negative direction you want to confirm with the interviewer
whether is enough to only provide potential causes to the problem or you need to provide suggestions to fix the issue.
We have talked about three types of interviewers that requires you to be very proactive in the interview so that you can get some useful feedback.
The following type of the interviewer is on the opposite side of the spectrum.
the always cut you off type.
Those interviewers usually are very experienced,
and they pay close attention to your answers and to find every opportunity to question your answer.
This sense that you are following a framework and intentionally the structure you and to test whether you could be organized and to perform well under stress.
It's completely normal that you become nervous and a few are being grilled on the pressure of constant disruptions and the questions.
But in fact,
if you are able to defend your answers and a convincing the interviewer.
The interviewer will give you a strong yes and the hiring decision.
The strategy here is to focus on the followup questions. You could take a deep breath and try to clarify the full of a question first.
If the question is a very straightforward,
but you don't have an immediate answer,
You can say something like this is a good question
and I need to take a few seconds to collect my thoughts.
You could get some time to think about how you want to approach the problem.
It's always better to provide a structured answer.
then throwing random ideas.
After you finished answering the following questions
you can come back to your framework.
And continued answering the original question. Now you may ask
what if I don't remember where I left after answering all the following questions.
you can always ask for a few seconds to jot down
a rough framework or some keywords before answering any questions.
If you are asked to stop for a followup question,
make a mark on where you are so you could come back to it
after finish answering the followup question.
The upside
when you encounter this type of interviewer is that you get a lot of signals and the feedback from the interviewer,
It'll be more like a real discussion session with a sharp colleague
when your ideas are constantly challenged and you have to defend them.
We have talked about four types of interviewers who may make your interviews harder and more challenging.
What should an ideal interviewer look like.
First, the ideal interviewer should give you the right amount of information about the questions. And tell you what the expectations are.
For example,
when you ask for clarifications, they
will tell you what the metric is defined if the questions to diagnose the changes of a metric and they should tell you what a product does
when you are asked to improve a product.
Secondly,
the ideal interviewers provide useful feedback for you.
They pay close attention to your answers to steer you towards the right direction when needed.
And you don't waste time in the wrong direction.
It's completely common for good interviewer to say,
what do you think in order to test your ability to lead the problem solving process.
But the interviewer also tells you whether your assumptions are correct.
If your answers make sense and whether
you should dive into other factors.
It would be great if all the interviewers are ideal interviewers But in reality you may interview with different types of people and it can be discouraged the being rejected after all the efforts.
Don't blame yourself if you have done your best in the preparation and in the interviews.
Because there are many factors
go into a hiring decision.
And some of them are out of your control.
It is totally possible that you have ace the interview but other factors of affected that the decision making,
For example,
there is another candidate who has more relevant experience and the fits job better,
Or the candidate has a very strong referral.
So the hiring manager choose them over you.
It's also possible,
even though the chance is very low that the hard decision was made before the interview.
The reason could be there's no head count due to reorganization or cut in the budget.
With that being said,
you as a candidate should focus on things that you are able to control that the interview preparation and your performance during the interview.
And on the most of situations,
The biggest deciding factor of the hiring decision is your performance
in the interview.
We have talked about five different types of interviewers and some tips to deal with each of them.
Hopefully you can use those tips in your next interview.
Comment in below
and let me know what types of interviewers you have encountered,
what was your experience and what advice you would give to others.
I do read every single common myself and your comment may be helpful to others as well.
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Stay tuned,
I have you see you in the next video.