Yesterday, I had my first call as a reference for one of my previous co-workers. He had done a great job on our team and I hoped to convey that in the call. However, like in my first technical interview, nerves got the better of me as I struggled to come up with concrete examples on the spot. Here are some tips to avoid making the same mistakes that I did.
- Research who is calling you.
I had looked up the company ahead of time but a simple Google search would have revealed that I was talking to the founder and not a HR representative.
- Think about a time you disagreed with the person and how you were able to work it out.
I was asked to give an example of a time I disagreed with my former co-worker. I was caught off guard and stumbled to come up with a good example because although we disagreed often, I had never been upset because we respected each other’s opinions. If this is the case, instead of stumbling to come up with an answer, I could have just said that.
However, had I anticipated this question, I could have taken it one step further and recalled the time when he was emotionally committed to an approach. He disagreed with our CTO at first but after listening to an explanation he quickly adapted the new tool that was suggested in his own free time. This is an application of the classic spin of a question designed to hear a weakness into a story about the candidate’s strength.
- Why did this person leave?
In this case, it was related to the revenue cuts due to the coronavirus and I never knew the true reason. However, this would have been a great time to talk about all the conspiracy theories that we come up with when we try to deal with survivor’s guilt. For example, were they unlucky that they were just switched to another project or another manager with whom they hadn’t yet fostered a sense of loyalty? Or were they willing to stand up for what they thought was right and were unfairly punished?
- Tell the truth by using your imposter syndrome.
For once, imposter syndrome can be a good thing! Based on my conversations with friends and coworkers, it seems that most people deal with some degree of imposter syndrome. A common characteristic could be self doubt created by comparing yourself to others. While you would normally try to hide that in an interview, this is the ideal time to talk about it! What are all the amazing things that this person did that you were envious of? What characteristics did you try to emulate? Where did this teammate help out in fixing one of your weaknesses on a project?
Example:
I really struggled with cleaning up code for a complex SQL query that we were making in Typescript. However, in this moment, [Name] stepped up and refactored and redesigned the code to make it more composable and reduce the lines of code. This change
- Take some time to think about his or her true strengths.
Although at the surface level, you can think of some adjectives such as extremely productive and talk about how they could churn through Jira cards, take time to dig deeper because you might be nervous on the phone and don’t want to sound like a broken record repeating the same things. If they did a good job there will be plenty of examples to think of. But it is a lot easier to brainstorm at your leisure in the shower or during your workout than while you are being interrogated.
After the phone call, I remembered that one of this person’s strengths was his ability to put on headphones, start hammering away on his Kinesis keyboard, and get extended periods of deep work done. Although I wish I had thought of it beforehand, I shot a quick email to the person who had called me to mention that I had not fully verbalized this thought during our talk.
- Prepare for other hard questions and more hard questions that might come up based on your response.
For example, I was asked to stack rank my coworker against the rest of the engineers in the company. Although I honestly ranked him very highly for his level of experience and said so, I was challenged to answer “How did this person’s greenness manifest?” It is impossible to anticipate all of these questions but at least you can prepare for the ones that caught me off guard.
What other questions did I miss? Leave them in the comments below please for posterity’s sake!