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THIS ARTICLE IS WORK IN PROGRESS.

Are you fresh out of university / college / bootcamp and hoping to land a job in a technology startup? Read on. This might help.

# Why write this & who is it for

After running a few hundreds of interviews, in and for different roles across three startups and getting more than a few requests for in-depth feedback and advice, I've decided to do a writeup hoping to help younger and less experienced folks on their job hunt. I was one of you not that long ago, so hopefully I can still relate.

The advice I write down here comes from my experience as interviewer and hiring manager, and applies to a wide range of technical entry-level positions, including pure software developers as well as hybrid roles (e.g. Solutions Engineer, Customer Support Engineer, Solutions Architect), though I believe this might apply to a wider variety of positions.

Disclaimer: this is personal advice based on personal experience. That means that this can't be the definitive guide™ to interviewing for junior candidates, and that I might not be right about everything I say. Read, challenge and keep an open mind.

# (TL;DR) What's important

Before we dive in deep and discuss the why behind each point, I'm going to spoil the article by revealing the ending. I recommend reading the whole thing, but if you can't do try and consider these points. This article will advise you to:

  1. Understand the hiring process from the perspective of the hiring manager, hiring team and company doing the hiring
  2. Invest in researching the position and company
  3. Communication skills are of primary importance, treat them as such
  4. Have a system in place for growing your technical skillset
  5. Learn from failure
  6. Understand the importance of rapport

The deeper you understand these points, the better your chances of a favourable outcome. But as you can tell, there's more we need to discuss here for these points to make sense. Let's do that.

# Hiring and the hiring process

First, you need to make sure you understand what hiring is. You likely already understand what hiring is for you right now: a tough, annoying hurdle to overcome in order to finally begin your career. But it is imperative that you understand what hiring is for the folks on the other side, the ones doing the hiring.

Everyone who is part of the interview process has something different at stake: the internal recruiter who sent you over to the hiring manager might be measured on how quickly the open position is filled; the hiring manager is looking for a new team member that will help them achieve their goals; the team member who you chat with later on is looking for a reliable teammate who will be able to carry their weight and possibly help them out when things get tough (and more still). And the list goes on. But if we abstract for sake of brevity and look at the company that's doing the hiring as a whole, we can summarize the core of the matter by saying that hiring is the single most decisive factor in determining whether a startup succeeds or fails. It is incredibly important and fiendishly difficult to get right.

What we are talking about here is knowledge work; we are not on the assembly line. Adding the wrong people to the team does not mean that the increase in the productivity of that team will be lower than expected - rather, it means that the overall productivity will actually decrease. And this is still far from being the worst possible outcome.

The flip side of the coin is that hiring brilliant people who are a good fit for the company and having them stick around can be incredibly advantageous for both for the company and the individuals involved.

I think it can help to look at a few simplified examples to better cement why this can be the case. In order not to break the flow of the article too much, I will leave such examples for Appendix A, at the bottom.

# The importance of research

Knowledge is power. If you find a company you'd be interested in joining, don't just show up to that first interview and hope for the best. Prepare. Learn. Do your own research.

# Research the company

Startups and businesses in general tend to be eager to talk about themselves. You will often find every company's website will have an /about and /careers page. Examples:

  1. Checkly: /about (opens new window), /careers (opens new window)
  2. Railway: /about (opens new window), /careers (opens new window)
  3. Figma: /about (opens new window), /careers (opens new window)
  4. Mistral: /about (opens new window), /careers (opens new window)
  5. Altinity: /about (opens new window), /careers (opens new window)

The /about page will normally give you an overview on the company - both what they are and what they want to be. The /careers page will show you for what position they are hiring, which is useful to understand how quickly the company is currently looking to expand headcount (keep an eye out for patterns - is the company looking to hire a new sales team in a new territory? Are they looking to quickly scale up their engineering firepower?).

Other interesting material to read up on might exist in the company's blog, product and alternative-to pages as well as social media communications. You do not need to sink many hours into this material to get a good enough introductory understanding of the space the company operates in and what it cares about.

# Try the product

You can learn a ton about a product by just trying it out. This is not always possible as the product might not be SaaS, not have a free plan/trial that you can get started with on your own, require complex implementation before it is usable etc. If that is available though, do explore. Few things beat actually getting your hands on what a company is building and taking it for a spin.

Aside from getting an understanding about how the product works, how well it has been built and so on, trying it out will also give you an array of additional benefits, including:

  1. If someone in the interview process asks if you're familiar with their product, you will be able to answer with a resounding yes - "Sure, I've used it myself."
  2. You will likely have interesting questions to ask, e.g. "why did you build the product this way?" or "I tried to do x but didn't manage to understand how - do you support x today?"
  3. You might bump into bugs, ideas for improving the product or any other kind of specific feedback. This can be quite valuable for a company. Politely share your feedback and observe how the interviewer reacts. This might tell you how strongly feedback is valued in the company's culture.

# Research the position

You need to have a good understanding about what the position that you will be applying for entails. First and foremost, to make sure this is actually a position you want to be in.

There's more. You also want to be able to formulate a couple educated guesses as to what characteristics interviewers will be looking for in candidates. Some of these will be written in the job listing itself, some might be left implicit. So take a look at listings from competitors, read up on what the usual responsibilities are for the job title, research those as well and don't forget to see what the average pay looks like for that position in your area. Make sure you factor benefits and equity into any comparison or negotiation you might have.

# Communication is everything

tbd

# Technical prowess matters

If you are applying to a technical position, you'll be expected to be technical. That might mean being able to read, write and debug code in one or more languages using one or more frameworks. It might mean knowing how to use design patterns, network protocols, development processes and existing software products. It goes without saying that you should take the time to hone your technical skills and look to match them to whatever niche in the market you are trying to enter.

If your hard skills are strong, make sure you show them. That take-home programming test you are given? Don't just send the first solution that comes to mind. Ponder the problem, research it, try out a few possible answers, test the outcome thoroughly and, if possible, explain why you took the path you ended up with. Polish your results. Keep an eye out for the small things like stale code, copy-pasting mistakes, stray comments, typos. If you can be depended upon, show the reviewer(s) that you can ship quality and won't settle for mediocre results.

Have you built, or are you building, something cool? Maybe something other people are either using or building together with you? Bring that up, link the repository in your CV and then bring it up again in the interview for good measure. Most people out there do not build. If you do, you have made the first step in showing that you can turn an idea into something (metaphorically) tangible.

# Fail well

Even if you prepare, you might fail to land the job. This is not always a bad thing - sometimes you would be a bad fit for a position and would be miserable working in it, but you just don't know it. Sometimes something better is just over the horizon. Just before I got hired for what back then was pretty much a dream job, I got rejected for worse positions with worse pay at worse companies. Fancy that.

When you fail, realize this is not the end of the process. This is part of the process. You prepare, you are put to the test, then you either succeed or you grow. And if you haven't succeeded but you've grown, you get back into it and prepare some more, get put to the test and so on. This principle also applies outside of the job search, and can serve you well in life.

Even if you've been rejected, keep in mind every interaction you go through can be the beginning of a relationship of some kind. Be respectful to the interviewers, first and foremost because it is the right thing to do, but also because they might keep you in mind for a future opening. Just because something good is unlikely to happen, do not make it impossible for no reason.

If you've been rejected, don't just leave - ask for feedback! Do so with humility, go back to it and address it. If someone takes the time to get back to you and give you pointers, this is usually because below the surface they are cheering for you. So make the most out of what they give you and don't let ego get in the way.

# Build rapport

Take charge of interactions that happen as part of your job search, including interviews. You want to be judged on the merit of your skills and talents, but keep in mind that everyone involved in evaluating these is a human just like you. When your paths cross they might be stressed, bored, anxious, tired or any of the opposites. They have their own strengths and weaknesses, ambitions and fears, doubts and certainties. Professionalism can abstract away a lot of these complications, but it never turns people into robots. Keep that in mind and get in touch with the human on the other side.

Presence is always appreciated. If you take a short interview, concentrate on what is going on in that moment. Pause as much of your inner monologue as you can and fully listen to what the other person is saying and notice what their actions are telling you. Feeling the tension of an awkward moment? Chances are they feel it too, so break it with a simple joke and be in that situation with them, taking charge of it.

Show your curiosity - use the interview as a way to learn. You could ask something about the challenges and rewards of being in the interviewer's position. Or go deep into the competitive situation, business model or tech stack of the company. Or maybe just about what they'd recommend to see if you were to visit their city.

Share a couple of things about yourself and be genuine. Don't stress trying to impress: if you put in the work as highlighted in the other points, you won't have to.

# Appendix A

Simplifying a whole lot, but hopefully not too much, let's look at some examples of great and terrible hires:

# A real human being

A junior support engineer is hired. They are dedicated and learn fast, also thanks to adequate mentorship from their manager. Over the course of a few years they exceed all expectations and move into a product development team. By now they have both absorbed the company's positive culture and contributed to shape it. Fast forward a few more years and they are promoted to Senior Backend Engineer. They keep shining in the role and are now mentoring newer developer hires as well, accelerating their growth and enabling them all around.

In this case, the return on the initial investment for the company was absolutely incredible. They hired someone with no experience, chose well and found themselves with a grizzled veteran with incredible product and field knowledge after just a few years. The once junior engineer has built a skillset, connections and now knows the field the company operates in. They can capitalize on this however they choose.

# Daggers in men's smiles

A junior marketing manager is hired. She is able to ship mediocre results for a longer time, remaining unchallenged by management. Her knowledge of her field and work increases as the time goes on, but she struggles to build trust with her colleagues. For personal reasons, she finds it hard to assume her colleagues are motivated by good intentions, expecting deceit and wrongdoing to be in the back of their minds when everyday professional interactions take place. She remains defensive and sometimes become aggressive to proactively fend off threats that only she sees. Now she is promoted to team lead. If before her propension to project her fears unto others led to friction with her peers, now it precipitates abuse on her more junior team members. A series of junior marketing hires are brought on, then crack under the pressure and are subsequently dismissed or leave. Eventually management catches on and decides to let her go.

In this case, hiring the wrong person (and promoting her) led to continued underperformance in a key department, a degradation of company culture and much needless stress among new hires.

# Chameleon

A senior engineering manager is brought on board. His credentials are impressive, and he is put in charge of, among others, the core engineering team behind a strategic product for the company. Somehow his behaviour is erratic: he spends most of his time in 1:1 conversations with his people, which could be a fantastic thing, but he spends that time to further his own political plan to advance within the company. Not only is the team not receiving support, but their already demanding work now has artificial hurdles added along the way. Progress slows down and an already stressful job becomes intolerable. After several months, two thirds of the engineering team leave the company with no one ready to replace them. The engineering manager is finally fired, but the damage is done.

In this case, hiring the wrong person in a position of great responsibility led to a myriad of issues in the development and maintenance of a key feature of a live product, which translated to lost revenue and a massive loss of morale, which in turn led to other key employees leaving the company as a knock-on effect.

# Steady under fire

The first senior engineer joins the company. Outside of scaling a key product and making it stable and performant, she leads research into ways to rearchitect it based on a new open-source technology. Even though the job is demanding, she exhibits a particular resistance to stress and remains kind and controlled even when things are on fire. This draws in a few of the more junior engineers, whom she begins to coach effectively. She is promoted consistently across the years, first to engineering manager, role in which her leadership skills now also shine, and eventually becoming a very hands-on, very respected VP of Engineering that takes the company on a new level of engineering excellence.

In this case, hiring the right person for a key position resulted in a series of improvements to the product, to company culture and to several people's development trajectory. The value add this person brought over the years shaped the company into a different, better organization.

All these examples are here to hopefully illustrate in a few lines just how big the impact can be when hiring a great versus a terrible fit for a given role.

# Help me make this better

Are you in the process of applying for a junior position (as described at the beginning of the article) and found anything unclear or missing from this article? Reach out to me and let me know. I'll happily discuss ways to make this guide better.