From Answering Questions to Asking Them
How fast time flies!
Just a year ago, I remember getting nervous as I was about to sit for the first-ever interview of my life and guess what? After one year, I’ve taken the first interview of candidates on behalf of my company. From giving interviews to taking interviews.
All praise to the Almighty, I cracked all the rounds and was selected for the internship just a year and a month ago. During my team, I was nervous as hell. I took as much preparation as I could, went here and there to collect as much information as I could, to get prepared and confident. That went pretty smoothly, and the journey continued. After this long but not so long journey, now I have a team that will be supervised by me, so I'm on the task of being present in the interviews and evaluating the candidates as per my requirements.
So yeah, again I'm nervous, like what to ask, how to proceed, went through the CV over and over again, trying to align with the Job Description to bridge the gaps and get started with questions.
There were two interviews today on the list, and guess what, there were multiple times I got stuck, hahaha. Another interviewer had asked me if I was excited or not. He helped me at that time as I waved him and carried forward. But yeah, I did complete my portions.
These interviews got learning for me as well. I might implement them when I sit to face interviews in future. From an interviewer's perspective, we were asked to focus mostly on the CV of the candidates to see what they have claimed and if they are valid or not, if yes, then how deep. Among the two, the first guy made a huge CV, showcasing tons of stuff. But in reality, when asked for keywords collected from his own CV, he kept struggling. I felt like he got the high-level overviews, knows the key stuff, and while creating the CV, maybe took help from AI to beautify. And that guy AI took the effort to add relevant descriptions that were overlooked by that guy and got caught. The first one didn't go well. But the second guy was pretty straightforward, made a simple and compact one. Also, he was very organised and confident with what he claimed and the relevant areas. Got stuck and couldn’t answer many questions, but those he did were good explanations.
One trick I learnt from him is that, suppose we asked him ten questions, he answered five and rejected five. But in reality, those five questions he answered took the effort to give a structured and well-organised answer. And the ones he didn’t know just said, “Sorry, and I don't know this,” and moved on. So the whole time it felt like he was answering everything on and on as he took the time to well describe the answers he could, an impression that he was explaining the whole time. This behaviour drew my attention and left me with a good perspective.
Overall, we were looking for an intern who would be smart enough to adapt to new and challenging tasks. So one is in the next round, hopefully he will make it through the remaining ones, as we will be taking more interviews of other candidates.
So for me, looking back, it's a pleasure of the journey. Not bad if I am to track myself. I just hope and ask for your prayers that I keep this pace and keep moving on and on. Let's see what's coming in the days ahead of me…..