Tuesday, April 16, 2024

What Is A Technical Screening For Interviews

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Sql Interview Question #3

The Screening Interview (Pros, Cons and Tips) – Types of Technical Interviews

You have two SQL tables! The first one is called employees and it contains the employee names, the unique employee ids and the department names of a company. Sample:

department_name

The second one is named salaries. It holds the same employee names and the same employee ids and the salaries for each employee. Sample:

salary

The company has 546 employees, so both tables have 546 rows.

Print every department where the average salary per employee is lower than $500!

New Job Requirements & Responsibilities

Questions about the available position allow employers to gauge your qualifications for, interest in, and plans for your potential new role.

Common questions in this category include:

  • Are you still interested in this position?
  • Why do you want this job?
  • What relevant experience for this position do you have?
  • What attracts you about this position and our organization?
  • The requirements for this position include x, y, and z. Briefly describe how you meet each of these requirements.
  • What is your biggest professional accomplishment, and how do you think it pertains to this position?

Be Attentive To The Questions Asked

The initial screening interview if taken in the form of a telephonic interview will be a test of your attentiveness.

Given that a screening interview is a short introduction interview, you will need to pay extra attention to what the recruiter is asking and answer in a straightforward, concise yet polite way.

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Tips For A Positive Interview

  • If you know you will be using a particular programme or system within the job itself PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE, so it’s at the forefront of your mind on the day
  • Demonstrate an eagerness to learn by ask the interviewer questions
  • If you make a mistake try not to let it throw you off guard. The questions are designed to challenge the very brightest of us
  • Be honest on your application. Technical interviews test your ability at working with a specific program or system. Do not say you are comfortable using a particular programme or coding language, if youre not, as you will only be found out which is far worse for everyone involved. Need more interview tips?

Take a look at our list of the latest technology IT and software development graduate opportunities.

Why Do You Want To Work For Our Company

4 Things You Need to Know When Interviewing for a Tech ...

Employers want to hire people who are excited about their customers, product or service as they typically are loyal employees. Research your potential employer to understand their corporate mission, values statement, community involvement, customer base and product offering. This answer allows you to show your research and passion for the company.

Example:“I recently read an article about the Habitat for Humanity project your business led in the surrounding communities. I have volunteered with them in my town and really appreciate their hard work and dedication to helping those in need. While reading the article, I was excited that your corporate values align with my own. That actually is what led me to check your website for current job openings. I would love to join your team and be part of the effort to make a difference in the community through my work here.”

Also Check: How To Prepare For A Cultural Fit Interview

Why Should We Hire You

Remember, recruiters prefer to hire candidates with the ability to solve a problem and help in building the brand more.

Your job is to present yourself as the best candidate. So, when answering the screening interview question “Why should we hire you?” try matching your qualifications to the requirements of the job role and how these qualities will play out.

This answer requires you to exude confidence, so make sure to practice your answer.

Also, remember to not sound over-confident. You don’t want the recruiter to think that you are too full of yourself.

Meaningful Questions To Ask The Interviewer

Interviews are a two-way street. You should be learning about them just as much as theyre learning about you!

Asking thoughtful questions is also a good way to stand out in the interview. The age-old adage people dont remember what you say, but they remember how you made them feel is so true when it comes to interviews, says Refael . When a candidate keeps the flow going in a friendly conversation, instead of making me feel like I am conducting an interrogation, I will remember our brief time together fondly.

Of course, you should tailor your questions to the specific situation, but here are a few meaningful questions you can ask:

  • What do you like most about working here?
  • What frameworks, tools, tech stack, etc. does your company use?
  • Can you describe the development process here?
  • How do you test your code?
  • Does the company offer opportunities for professional development, training for engineers, etc.?
  • Whats the most challenging project youve worked on here?

The other upside: while youre listening to their answer, you get a little break from talking!

Recommended Reading: What Are Questions They Ask In An Interview

Robust Analytics And Market Benchmarking

Karat helps teams confidently make strategic talent acquisition decisions using insights from from the worlds largest and only cross-company technical interview dataset. Karat delivers valuable and comprehensive hiring data while protecting PII. The result is accurate and measurable talent funnel analytics and unique insights that guide hiring process optimization.

How To Fail A Technical Phone Screen

How to prepare for Technical Interviews

Data Science and Analytics Manager at Amazon

This post reflects my experience interviewing both as a hiring manager and a candidate for several positions in the last couple of decades. It’s not specific about my current or past employers. As of the writing of this post, I work for Amazon. I may link to Amazon products below.

I wrote before about the hiring process for technical positions at big technology companies. The three main steps are: 1) resume review, 2) technical phone screen, 3) on-site interview . This article is about the technical phone screen and how to fail it.

While usually disappointing, failing is not necessarily bad: it’s sometimes better to fail fast. You may get more time to focus on positions that you’re better suited for. I have myself failed several phone screens.

Recommended Reading: How To Ask About Pay In An Interview

Codelysis For Campus Hiring

Mercer | Mettlscoding platform is embedded with a list of simulators that evaluate a freshers essential coding skills in various languages. Simulators give recruiters the liberty to test real coding skills in over 20 programming languages with a supremely user-friendly interface. Codelysisenables assessing and hiring the best freshers at scale.

Simulator assessment is incorporated with a few much needed state-of-the-art features such as:

  • Plagiarism checker- It detects partially similar coders as well as copied codes from the Internet. It ensures better decision-making.
  • Intellisense It is an auto-complete feature that automatically recommends language-specific context-driven suggestions at specific syntax points. It can be activated if required.
  • If youre looking to know the candidates thought process and how they executed the entire program, a full video of code recorded at each keystroke is available using Code Playback. This feature shows the video of the codes evolution at each compilation. Hence, another way to evaluate on-the-spot proficiency and coders ability to code in the desired language.

Screening Interviews: Everything You Need To Know

A screening interview is a great opportunity to set yourself apart from other candidates and impress an interviewer. Even in a brief phone interview, you can emphasize your genuine interest in a position as well as your enthusiasm for an organization and the value you could bring to a position. Successfully preparing for a screening interview takes time and research. In this article, we discuss questions you should be prepared to answer during the screening interview along with tips to ensure youre prepared.

Related:22 Most Common Interview Questions and Best Answers

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Common Technical Interview Questions

  • Interviewers ask technical questions to learn your skill levels and how you process information.
  • Prepare to discuss your approach and explain your reasoning.
  • If necessary, ask for a moment to collect your thoughts. Ask clarifying questions if needed.

If you are considering a career in the tech industry, it is important to know that a technical interview is often very different from any other traditional job interview. Technical interviews typically include behavioral questions, situational questions and technical problem-solving questions.

Whether you are just starting out in the technical field or are a seasoned professional, knowing the types of questions to expect during a technical interview can help you prepare your answers carefully to showcase your skills and experience.

In this article, we discuss the most common interview questions asked during a technical interview with tips and example answers for technical questions.

Begin Preparing For A Second Interview

Does your tech interview process stop you scaling ...

You never know when youll be asked to come in for another round of interviews, so youll want to be ready at a moments notice. Research more to find information not readily available on the company site about company milestones, award-winning projects or recent initiatives that you can work into the interview.

Read Also: How To Succeed In An Interview

Practice Articulating Your Process

Lets assume its a given that youre already updating and practicing technical skills: language-learning, code-writing, bug-testing, and problem-solving. But are you practicing voice-to-voice communication?

Its one thing to know what you know in your head. Maybe you can build a webscraping application in Python that catalogs 30 years worth of Canadian hockey statistics in your sleep. Awesome. But if you arent able to thoughtfully and succinctly articulate this skill, youre not going to make it to the next round.

The only way to practice talking about what you know is to talk about what you know.

Now is the time to ask a favor from friends, classmates, or peers who have similar skills and technical knowledge. Have them dial you up or meet you in person to practice voice-to-voice question-and-answer conversations over technical information.

Keep in mind, one thing interviewers are listening for is an articulation of your thought process. Go ahead and think aloud, which demonstrates your comprehension and logic jumps while problem-solving.

*Lemons to lemonade tip: it may take several tries with real-life technical phone screenings to make the cut to an interview. This is normal and you can view each technical phone screening as an opportunity for more practice.

Onsite Vs Remoteshare Section

Typically, the large part of the interview process happens onsite, but this is changing as more companies build remote teams or wish to accommodate candidates who are not local. You can use many interview formats either in person or remotely this includes even live coding challenges. A companys resources and the candidates availability usually determine whether a particular part of the process will be conducted remotely or onsite.

Remote interviews have a few specific use cases:

  • Typically , remote interviews are concentrated earlier in the funnel and may include:

  • Online challenges and take-homes.

  • Phone screens, both general and technical.

  • Technical screening questions, questions where the candidate can code in the browser during a screen share, and light behavioral questions. Note that while you may encounter binary decision points or spikes in the signal during remote interviews, this is not a useful format for making more fine-grained decisions.

Recommended Reading: What To Ask A Financial Advisor When Interviewing

The Right Way To Read Resumes & Design Questions

Every job search starts with a resume or web profile whether it comes in as referral or through a proactive sourcing strategy. While current wisdom suggests that resumes arent all that important compared to what a candidate actually knows, Roseman argues theres a lot to be gained through careful review.

The things that most teams have the least experience in is how to read a resume, identify the areas worth probing, and determining how to probe into them.

While screening resumes, Roseman keeps an eye out for areas where he can push candidates. I always look for things where they have a measure of their success, especially if they make comparisons or use percentages. For example, “grew revenue by 50% or decreased downtime by 30%.”

This is how he develops most of his questions. You want to find out what somebody really did, as opposed to just being an observer or a participant, Roseman says. Even at the greatest companies, theres a gap between those who get the most stuff done and those who dont get much done. You need to try and figure that out during an interview.

As an example, here is a resume snippet Roseman recently received, Led a team of 3 engineers in creating massively scalable storage infrastructure used by various Google products. Roseman took note of this and during the interview, had the candidate whiteboard the infrastructure, and then highlight his main contribution, where Roseman could dig down and see if he really knew his stuff.

They Don’t Try To Show Perfection During The Phone Screen

How to ace your technical interviews

I always try to tell my candidates that I don’t expect perfection, using different words. Although perfection may happen – I see it about once a year – most candidates will not get the answers completely correct. They will forget some condition, have some syntax problem, provide a solution that is not optimal. That’s usually ok.

Trying to be perfect is likely to make candidates focus on the wrong things during the interview and get nervous if they can’t be perfect at that time, which will in turn prevent them from showing a lot of things that they’re perfectly good at.

Read Also: How To Start An Interview As The Interviewer Example

Prepare For Sql Tech Screenings By Practicing

If you managed to solve all these questions properly, you are probably ready for a junior or even for a mid-level Data Analyst SQL technical screening.If not, let me recommend my new online course: SQL for Aspiring Data Scientists where you can level up your SQL skills in only 7 days. When you finish the course, just come back to this article and I guarantee that you will be able to solve these questions!

And if you are just about to start with SQL, start with my SQL For Data Analysis series on the blog!

Who Is An Interview

The person who does pre-employment screening is an experienced person who knows a lot about the niche they are hiring. Theyre usually IT professionals who can dig deeper into potential employee knowledge.

  • Technical interviews know what type of experience, knowledge, and personality the potential employee should have, so they will ask them a number of questions in order to see if youre the perfect fit for a company and a job.

For example, if a company wants to hire Java developer, the interview will ask candidates technical interview questions such as How does Garbage Collection prevent a Java application from going out of memory? or How is Java SE related to Java EE?.

Also Check: What Are Some Good Interview Questions To Ask

Sql Interview Questions: 3 Tech Screening Exercises

Over the last 6 years Ive been part of many job interviews on both sides of the table. The most fun, but also the most feared, part of the process is the technical screening. In this article, Ill show you three SQL test exercises that, in my experience, are quite typical in data analyst job interviews.

Preparing For A Technical Interview

Practice Questions to Prepare for the Technical Interview

Technical interview preparation is key to being successful.

Candidates should not assume that they will know all of the answers just because they have a degree in the subject. In a technical interview, candidates are likely to be asked questions that:

  • Relate to specific knowledge about the companys technical activities
  • Relate to understanding the technical work required as part of the job
  • Relate to work completed as part of a degree course
  • Require candidates to solve actual technical problems that they might face in the job.

The best way to prepare is to first go through all of the details provided in relation to the job .

Brush up on any equations you would probably never use in the workplace, but that you had to learn when studying for your qualification.

Do as much research as possible into technical interviews job-advice websites often provide examples of questions you might be asked, as well as technical interview tips.

Practise, showing your methodology. You might be able to do 90 multiplied by 80 in your head, but for the purposes of the interview, practice reverting back a stage when you would have calculated:

9 x 8 = 7272 x 100 = 7,200

Its unlikely you will be asked a question you have seen before. As such, have a go at keeping your mind under control when you read a completely new question.

Try and replicate interview conditions as much as possible, and work on trying to keep a cool head so that you can digest the question and start crafting your answer.

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What Is A San And How Is It Used

This interview question is testing your technical knowledge related to a specific network you will need to be familiar with to be successful in your role. When answering this question, it is important to clearly define what SAN stands for, what it does and how you would use it in the role you are applying to.

Example:“SAN stands for a Storage Area Network. This is a high-speed, specialized network that gives block-level network access to storage. SANs are used to improve application availability, enhance performance, increase storage utilization and effectiveness and improve data security and protection.”

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