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Interviewing Tips

 Here are a few tips I recommend.

1. Practice your pitch.  Start with what you want to accomplish in your next role.  Then, highlight your career and accomplishments that build your career testimony to today.  This will be in every interview.  You should even right it down for practice.  The higher the role the better the pitch needs to be.  

2.  Research the company and ask questions about them.  Hard questions.  Make them squirm and show they need you.  I asked one panel of senior leaders, can you tell me about your financial stability and budgets for the next year.   In a more technical panel, I asked how they were managing and deploying their containers in the cloud.  They weren't.  There are plenty of jobs out there and you have to find the right fit for you.

3.  Don't talk about what you did or do.  Talk about what you will do.  Don't say "We" do this or "We" use this tool.  Say, "I am a big fan of .... because .... but I am familiar with ...."   

4. Apply for jobs on LinkedIn, Indeed, and the Ladders.  Ladders is my favorite because they make it easy.  After you apply, try to find the recruiter and connect with them on LinkedIn.  Try to find the hiring manager and view his profile.  He might get notified and remember your name.  See if you have other connections to the company and ask them to refer you.  

5. Say things that will wow them.  Once company asked me to tell them my perfect DevOps pipeline.  This is a trap for a Director or above position.  If you just start off, Git, jenkins, artifactory..... security... Puppet, they are going to remember your tools and judge that against their tools.  The right answer is there is no "Perfect" pipeline or solution.  It depends on the team, process, and the technologies right?  First, thing I said, "There is no perfect DevOps tool set" and I gave them an example where I convienced a leader to consider another tool because it aligned with another department.  This allowed us all to learn and scale the solution faster versus adding another tool to the company's "tool soup".

6. If it is a leadership role, you should be talking about your core principles throughout the discussion.  Growth Mindset, Fail Fast and Learn, Empathy, Continuous Improvement,...  DevOps is about maturing to a great culture and they need to see your passion for that kind of culture.  Then, if you don't get hired, you know they didn't align with your values. 

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