CodePath Career Center Workshops 2022 - 2/17: Behavioral Interviewing

So we’re gonna head and start gonna go ahead and start recording so we can send this out to everyone who rsvp’d but wasn’t able to attend it is gonna be a little I love to make this as active as possible so if you all have any questions you can feel free to yeah toss questions in the chat whenever I will get to them at the end of the presentation and let me bring some resources over that I’m going to need but yeah go ahead and toss your questions in the chat we are going to have some some activities so if you have an a behavioral interview in mind you can always give me ideas of like companies that you’re interviewing for and let’s go ahead I will be using a presentation or slides for the beginning portion of the workshop and then we’ll take it mostly to questions and we’re going to be going through a worksheet together if you have not seen the behavioral interview worksheet let me make sure you all can see this yes I’m going to go ahead and post that link in the thread okay in case you want to pull it up and just kind of like follow it as a guide but you will receive this worksheet and the slides after the workshop so let’s go ahead and I’ll share my screen you can use the chat and as always you don’t have to but I really do like seeing your faces when I present if you can be on camera but not required so I just like knowing if I tell a joke I just like to see if that joke has landed and it’s okay if it didn’t land I just like to know you know where I stand with people so behavioral interviews I like to talk about behavioral interviews from a storytelling perspective and sharing your story with confidence so at the end of the day like it is about telling a story having that story resonate with an employer really you’re marketing yourself to an employer right you’re marketing yourself through technical skills there’s less you can control about the the story that comes through your technical skills although it’s still a story that is being shared and you have a little bit more control over your story your brand your answers when it comes to behavioral interviews that’s what marketing is is it’s sharing a story about the kind of value that you can bring to an employer everything that we you know every decision that we make when it comes to like what we’re going to buy what we’re going to invest in we are buying into a particular story you all came to CodePath because there was a story that you believed about the value that CodePath was going to bring you in your career right and so it is the same thing when we’re thinking about employers making a decision about who they’re going to hire obviously you all can offer a ton of value to them every single CodePath student that I’ve met with has just been incredible you all have amazing stories amazing backgrounds amazing skills and so interviewing skills are really learning how we can convey that in a set within set parameters right a specific amount of time sometimes that time is only 15 minutes sometimes it’s half an hour sometimes it is a day of interviews or a take-home project either way we want to be conveying a consistent story about you and the value that you can bring to that employer so that they choose to hire you so today we’re specifically talking about behavioral interviews which means non-technical but I’m just going to kind of define that as non-technical questions although I know this can be kind of vague and so I wanted to hear from you all in the chat how do you know if you were in a behavioral interview or you can unmute yourself if you’d prefer just unmuting yourself but how do you know if it’s a behavioral interview if you’re not ask coding questions so good if is there any way of knowing if it’s a behavioral interview beforehand so that hopefully we can prepare I will say this go ahead all right I would say that when for example they start asking questions that has to like how will we manage certain situations certain conflicts if something like that happen yeah so you can tell by the types of questions that you’re asked it might be especially questions that start with tell me about a time blah blah blah it’s like a typical sign of a behavioral interview question yes anything that is not technical is there a way to know if it’s a behavioral interview beforehand do you know if it’s solely behavioral have any of you had like hybrid behavioral and technical interviews yeah I think there’s a usually you can ask them and the way they feel it is we’re just going to talk it’s going to be a 15 minute lights you know getting to know you think and that is indication it’s a behavioral interview usually they are very explicit with technical interviews so if they’re not explicit with it then it’s most likely a behavioral interview and yes I got mixes between like a half of technical thank you so much for sharing yeah so sometimes you can use context clues and figure out if it if it’s 15 minutes and they haven’t specified it’s technical normally they want you to normally they want you to do well in technical interviews and help prep you sometimes stuff can be sprung on you though so you really need to be prepared for both when you go in but you can assume if it’s not specified and if it’s shorter or if it is with a non-technical staff member that it’s going to trend towards behavioral interview questions harshawn do you want to tell the group how do you know it’s a hybrid interview I’m curious you can type it in the chat if you can’t talk okay harshad got an email from amazon and it’s going to be a hybrid interview amazon is really famous for wanting its candidates to emphasize their leadership principles during every step of the interview process so that is something that you will really want to work on is telling stories or even just emphasizing in the way that you answer technical questions and attack technical questions emphasizing some of amazon’s values and leadership principles did I miss anything any tricks or tips that you all have found in interviewing so far that help you figure out if it’s behavioral or technical okay and if you’re not sure if the person that you’re meeting with is has a technical background or is more from a recruiting background you can normally find out by going to LinkedIn and that can be a way of kind of discovering that okay perfect so interviewing is is all about storytelling like we said so some things that help me think about storytelling some visuals that help me this may be different for you all but I’m just telling you what works for me I think about like the the human how humans are all drawn to really good stories and I think about the quote great stories happen to those who tell them so it’s not about having the best story it’s not about having the best project it’s not about having the best example where you are the hero when you come in to save the day a lot of it is about how you tell it how you frame it and honestly as a career coach I feel like that is most of the secret value that I bring to you all when I meet with you is that you all come in with seeing your stories in a very specific way because you might have some imposter syndrome about them you might have like some some shame about different things that happened in your past or like how hard your journey was but to me I see it as a story of resilience where I see it as a story of coming from a unique background where I see it as someone who has not just like faced a lot of challenges but someone who has overcome a lot of hard things and that makes your story even cooler and more interesting and more exciting because it stands out so you get to the whole point of like practicing interviewing practicing your stories is that you get to control that narrative so something may have happened so like for example we could look at my career journey which is looking at my career journey I’ve had to move around a lot for my husband’s job right so it could look like I’ve been job hopping it could look like I’ve like had to change jobs many times or I could own that story and not feel shame about it and reframe it that I have constantly been up skilling looking for better challenges like wanting to grow in my career constantly adapting to new situations new industries taking on new challenges and have been really willing to learn and dive into things that I’m not 100 confident about you know so there are kind of two different ways of looking at it and I could tell that story one of those two ways so I really want to empower you to when we talk about like kind of framing our stories and owning them there are many different ways of looking at your story and if you need help reframing it or you’re getting kind of stuck on the examples that would be a great time to make an appointment with me or to work with the coach at your career center or even talk to your friends about it and see maybe how they would reframe that example so another way that I think about it is kind of like elementary school storytelling format where you think about like the beginning and the plot and then the rising action and then falling action and resolute resolution so I in the back of my mind when I’m thinking of the star format which is what I’m going to teach today I’m constantly thinking of that little like you know that little slope and upside down you to like land that story and make sure that it resolves and make sure that there’s a result and an ending but also make sure that there’s a little bit of drama with that action in climax so that is the visual that I constantly have in the back of my mind and I might even map it out since I’m a visual person if I need help thinking about the arc of the story or my answer another thing that I think about a lot is stand-up comedians and how skilled stand-up comedians are this is a picture of ali wong how skilled stand-up comedians are at telling stories and how they just kind of control the audience’s reaction they know exactly how to time things they’ve really practiced their stories they have even memorized a lot of their jokes I don’t know if you know this they’ve memorized a lot of their jokes but for the most part they will like make some make some changes while they’re like telling the jokes live and they are really just paying attention to the audience’s reaction and tailoring it to the audience as they can so I also think about stand-up comedians and how they are kind of they have the audience in the palm of their hand and that’s how I want you to feel like like you are almost on stage in front of the panelists and you’re really taking them on a journey and on an experience with you so formats and formulas for telling great stories you already have one for a structure for answering technical questions and this is actually when you think about it not that different from umpire so I’m going to teach you star which is situation task action results and many larger companies will actually designate that this is the structure that they want you to use when you’re answering their behavioral questions however you can also think of it as soar which is a little inspiring and uplifting situation obstacle action result or you could think of it as car challenge action result whatever is easiest for you if it is not a behavioral question and you can’t really think of a story to answer it I always want you to think bring it back to what am I featuring about myself what is an example to back this up or a story to back this up and why does the company why should the company care about that what is the benefit to the company we always want to emphasize why the company should care about this story you don’t necessarily have to tell a relevant story as long as you can tie it back to why the company should care so you may not have the most relevant example and if it’s not a relevant example I want you to still be able to tie that back to a quality a characteristic a strength of yours that the company should care about okay so what we’re going to do right now is think about strengths and weaknesses so we could boil every behavioral interview down to strengths which are your selling points right things that we want to emphasize to the company and weaknesses things that we want to de-emphasize that we may be asked about they could ask about a weakness they could ask about a failure they could ask about something you’re working on they could ask about a time something went wrong what I want to focus on first is the strengths because you will be asked more likely open-ended questions where you have the opportunity to emphasize your strengths so each of you ideally if I were to go around this chat I should be able to ask you for one of your strengths and you should have a strength that you could emphasize have a story to back that up and tell me why it would benefit my team or why it would be valuable to me if you were in this internship job etc but first what I want you to do is I just want you to think of brainstorm a strength of yours it could be something that other people have told you that you’re good at it could be something that you just know that you’re naturally strong in and then I want you to tie it into the jobs that you’re currently applying for or the job that you are next applying for so job or internship so think of a strength first so for I’m going to use an example for me in career coaching one of my strengths is empathy so I’m just going to give that a name so I can quickly name it identify it one of my strengths is empathy I could explain that differently in an interview and a benefit that that will offer in my role is that I can understand the perspective that students I’m working with are coming from better understand so I want you to quickly write down jot down or just think of a strength of yours and if you’re comfortable I would love for you to write it in the chat and explain how it would relate to a technical role does not have to relate perfectly it could be you know it could be a non-technical part of a technical role but related to a technical role share it in the chat and if you are stuck on how to relate it to a technical role just identify your strengths and it doesn’t have to be one word it can be multiple words but I would love to see from you all things that you think that you’re strong in and how you relate that so I’m just going to give you a couple of minutes to to do that and type it in the chat and then I’ll comment on what you all say if you need again if you need help tying it to tech just leave it blank and say I need help okay I see communication super helpful in tech right relating to others working on a team overcoming conflict also especially working remotely or having to do a lot of documentation clear documentation clear communication super super important cannot cannot emphasize that enough even like when you’re working with your engineering manager right and they give you a task and they think that they’re being clear and communicating that task if you are also not clear and and asking any clarifying questions maybe your your manager is not the best communicator right but if you are a good communicator you’re going to make sure that you understand what’s expected of you you’re going to clarify what they’re looking for that is going to make sure that you get the work done on time which is going to give you better performance reviews it’s also going to make your manager it’s managing up and helping your manager do better as well super super helpful being resourceful yes steven so so gathering information needed and even like okay I want to explain resourcefulness so a way to a way to emphasize resourcefulness could be talking about like a time that you had to learn something new on your own or even if there’s a question that you’re asked in in an interview setting and you don’t specifically know the answer to it you could talk about how you would go about getting the answer to that and really outline the process by which explain how you would be resourceful on the job essentially that is something companies are really looking for because you’re not going to know everything and you’re never going to learn everything before you have to do it so that’s really really awesome adaptability is wonderful as well so being able especially if it’s a growing company or a changing company which tech is constantly changing the ability to work with new people new cultures and having lots of stories to emphasize how you’ve done that as well resiliency I love resiliency and I’m sure you’d have a lot of examples for that listening and rephrasing I love I love listening skills and I don’t know if if I hear people emphasize listening skills as strengths enough so I think even like listening is a form of communication right it’s a way of making sure like checking for understanding making sure that you’re understanding people and I think if I heard someone list listening skills in an interview I would be really I would really respect that and find that just so interesting because it also kind of shows what you value about yourself too and shows that you value that as a strength or a skill practicing organization strengths and weaknesses great question does not need to have the star method although it can for strengths and weaknesses is best if we’re just talking about a question the best way of selling that is future example benefits so this is a strength here is a story about how I use my strengths here’s why the company should care but right now we are just brainstorming strengths and weaknesses in general ownership critical thinking amazing so every single one of these and hopefully this also gave you all some ideas of strengths maybe that you could borrow or maybe you share some of these strengths with with some of your peers with each of these strengths knowing that these are one of your top selling points right you want to emphasize this in the interview as soon as possible so timothy if you if detail oriented is one of your your top selling points the thing that you think that you do better than other candidates because it’s one of your strengths right if you do not mention being detail-oriented at all during the interview that is a missed opportunity because that again that is something that you do uniquely well so we need to somehow mention that you’re detail-oriented the best way of doing that is to have a story that emphasizes it and we can then find what no matter what questions they ask we’re going to find a question to work in your superpower which is that you’re detail-oriented so that question could be tell me about one of your strengths perfect I’ll use detail oriented it could be tell me about it could be tell me about a challenge that you faced in your in your academic career and how you overcame it and maybe the way that you overcame that was a story about how you were detail-oriented and you really like outlined the requirements and then you adjusted like features on the fly or something like that so no matter what question they ask we want to emphasize your strengths I hope this makes sense like mario so if you’re never asked a question about your communication skills you still need to bring up your communication skills because that’s like one of the best things about you that sets you apart from other candidates so we have to find a way to work it in even if it is like tell us about a time something went wrong in a project right we want to ideally tell a story where maybe your communication skills saved a project something went wrong and then your communication skills saved the day so no matter what they’re asking we’re emphasizing your strengths now if they specifically ask about weaknesses which is a little bit scarier we want to do a few things we can talk about how you are overcoming a weakness we can talk about how your we want to choose a weakness that might have like a flip side of a strength which all weaknesses have kind of a flip side of a strength right but we also want it to be a real weakness so we want it to show that you’re self-aware because being self-aware is a sign of maturity it’s a sign of wisdom it’s a sign of coachability so we do want it to be real but we also don’t want to share a weakness that is like my weakness is that I can’t empathize with anyone that I work with ever we don’t want to say something that makes it seem incompatible with the company so I would love to hear what would I love to do someone first of all let’s take a second let’s look at the strengths that are listed well what do I want to do you all might be better at coming up with weaknesses for yourself so if you feel comfortable sharing a weakness that you would like me to reframe into a strength go ahead and list it in the chat and it doesn’t have to be one for your own it can just be a weakness in general one that maybe you you’ve used in interviews before one that you thought about using one that you’ve heard other people use then we’re all going to try to reframe it together wanting things to be very perfect okay I’m glad you brought this up edward because people will often use perfectionism as a weakness and I’m going to encourage you to not use perfectionism as a weakness because everyone uses it because they freak out on this question and they’re like I just have such high standards right so first of all we’re going to make this sound a little bit more unique than just like I’m a perfectionist which I’m sure you all are high achievers and have high standards right okay so mario says I tend to say yes to every project in responsibility okay that’s another it could be another I like that you said that mario because that’s a more specific kind of perfectionism so it could be that like taking on to perfectionism as sorry it’s saying my wi-fi is a little unstable so sorry if I cut out but let’s label this perfectionism as like wanting to optimize or wanting to build an optimal or ideal version of a project right so maybe instead of like mvp of a project you want like all the features all the design like you see an ideal in your head and you really really want to go for all of that at once so we could call that performance we could call it lots of different things but it could be a weakness if you just need to focus and prioritize a few things right so what what could be some ways if you’re trying to answer this question and that is your weakness what are some ways that you could say that you are working on that weakness or you’re trying to manage it if you can think of any of those why don’t you toss them in the chat or you can just to mute yourself hi hi so a go-to weakness I usually go with is time management then like I say but however I’m starting to use a planner or a calendar and I start down start writing down dates or anything I’m given the second I get them so it shows like I’m working on the weakness that I just said yeah so a way we could make time management like a little more unique and specific is we could say that in a way we could make it sound less bad a lot of competing priorities you you are juggling a lot of different things in college and because you have so many things on your schedule so many projects whatever you’ve had to get really good you notice some things slipping through the cracks during your semester and you’ve had to get really good at managing your time well and using experimenting with some different tools experimenting with time blocking and experimenting with putting things on your calendar especially so that your priorities stay top of mind and top of focus and that sometimes other things do have to be deep prioritized so you could if that makes sense and then that makes it sound more like oh you’re just a person who has to be good at time management and obviously has struggled with time management because you’ve taken so much onto your plate this semester which I know a lot of us CodePath students have a lot on your plate you know so yeah you could one of your ways of dealing with weaknesses could always be seeking mentorship and advice from people who have more experience in that area that shows you that you’re someone who is constantly looking to learn from those who have more experience that’s a great way of dealing with a weakness so asking for help even though I lack trouble asking for help so you could say yeah I have some trouble reaching out for help so one thing that I’ve been doing try to name like a specific tactic or strategy one thing that I’ve been doing is although I like working on problems on my own as long as I can and I take a lot of pride when I’m able to solve something on my own I realize that’s not the most efficient way of solving every problem so I’ve started using the 20-minute rule to reach out for help or whatever rule you you want to say to reach out for help when I’m getting stuck with a problem because I know that having outside feedback is normally really helpful in getting unblocked so you all have some great examples and I want you to keep thinking about this as we talk about some hard and specific questions that come up so one question that often comes up is walk me through a project you’re proud of so we’re going to use the star format with this with the situation I want you to think about specific project context specifications timeline the task what was really hard about this project that you had to overcome action what did you specifically do about it so if I know a lot of your projects are team-based projects and so you probably haven’t thought specifically about what you’ve done you did bring a key ingredient to the team and so if you need help thinking about this maybe talking to some of your project mates or talking to a peer or someone who has an outside perspective who can help you take ownership over a little bit more of how the project went and a result always make sure to end up emphasizing what ended up happening so when students talk through these answers what happens what which parts of the answer do you think they tend to gloss over or skip the results the results yes and the action normally it starts off really strong with the situation and then there’s a little bit of rambling that occurs and then they hear themselves rambling and then they get very nervous and then they start to gloss through the task in the so make sure in your head I want you to think about emphasizing the action and the result as the most important tell me about yourself is another hard question and if you came to my elevator pitch workshop we have a really helpful worksheet on answering the tell me about yourself question to go through this quickly though a helpful formula is thinking about present past and future some people can go past present future but your present you being a student you being a computer science grad that is the most important and most relevant part about who you are as a candidate so that’s why we ideally want to emphasize that first so let’s say your present is that you’re a recent cs grad or you’re about to graduate this may your past could be I decided to major in cs after like getting exposed to it at a hackathon in high school and I was really interested in it and started doing all of these things to explore and fell in love with building in this area you also want to emphasize what your superpowers are and some of your strengths in this answer as well and then when we talk about the future it’s very similar why should the company care about you as a candidate why do you like the company like what name something that connects you specifically to the company so that is the format that we want to use for tell me about yourself some trickier questions can you use self introduct introduction here can you can you clarify that question edward you can clarify it in the chat or in yourself yeah I mean can we use the introduction in in last question which is tell me about yourself yes they may not always specifically ask tell me about yourself it could be like hey I’m so glad you’re here I’d love to hear just a little bit about you before we get started or they could say could you walk me through your background and resume just I’ve looked at your resume but could you walk me through your background real quickly again but the thing is when whenever they that is your chance to say whatever you want to say about your background and so you don’t have to walk them through your your resume like point by point you know you can tell them who you are why you’re there what is uniquely good about you tie that to some of your experience and then make sure that you wrap it back up with with them you know what that self introduction is like so I hope that answers your question there are some tricky questions that can come up salary is a tricky question and I want your go-to answer oh sorry did you hear that at all or do I need to repeat myself we heard you your salary is a tricky question and you want this to be our defense answer and then you said did you hear us or not okay more of the tell me about yourself questions so I will link that in the follow-up email okay just delayed tricky questions that could come up you could be asked about salary as early as a first-round interview and so we went to the question I want you to say something similar to I don’t see salary being an issue as long as it’s within the market rate if you’re forced to give a range we need to have a research range that of about like a 20k difference 30k difference that we can give the recruiter but for the most part I don’t want you to give any numbers until you’re negotiating an offer another tricky question could just be tell me about your skill level when it’s something you don’t have experience with that sounds kind of terrifying don’t for salary you can either say I don’t see salary being an issue or you can give a well-researched range of 30k no sorry let me change no I also have a salary negotiation guy that is in the student handbook basically you don’t want to answer the question or you want to give a really wide range so you’re not being narrowed down if you’re asked some of these other questions like your skill level was something that you don’t know instead you can say I’m this is how I would go about getting experience in this framework or language while I don’t have experience with it here’s how I’ve learned or picked up other technologies really quickly in the past in fact here there’s a story I can tell you of that you could be asked I want you to always think about what is the company trying to like what is the company trying to figure out behind that question like why are they really asking a question if they’re asking tell me about a time you failed are they really trying to figure out like like oh my gosh what’s this become failure in the past so always try to really this is where listening skills will come in handy try to really understand where your interviewer is coming from and it is easier to understand where your interviewers coming from and to empathize with them if you can calm your nerves a little bit and understand that they’re just you do want to have go-to stalling tactics if there’s a question asked that you need to think about you don’t need to pause and then just like not say anything you can always say that’s a really great question thanks so much for asking that I always like I sometimes I actually say I always get really nervous when this question comes up and I laugh about it because I do get nervous and it is hilarious and I can never if someone asks me about a book I’ve read recently I cannot remember literally any book I’ve read in my entire life and that’s funny and so sometimes I’ll take a second to pause and I’ll just acknowledge the fact that I’m nervous sometimes I will also say let me take a second to gather my thoughts think through this question and like thanks for asking it so you can always use some of those stalling tactics if you’re feeling stuck with a question there’s no okay I do have a slide that is about what questions answering what questions that when they are asking what questions do you have for us or is there anything I can answer for you this is the wrong accompaniment with it so I’m going to show you that that to you all in a second okay after process my post interview nerves with someone like a friend a coach a family member I just have to like finish processing how nervous I was during the interview and like to debrief it with someone so if you ever want to debrief with me you can always send me a snack message and say hey do you wanna I’ll look over this thank you email I’m happy including the person who scheduled the interview if you’re not able to get their email what you need to do is send an email to the person whose email you actually have and ask if they can forward your thank you to everyone or ask them if you can get the email address for the other people that you interviewed with most of the time you can’t if you didn’t get it somehow but you could also send a LinkedIn connect action request put a reminder on your calendar to check in after a week but do not think about it again until then and so don’t stress about it just put a calendar reminder to check in after a week because we don’t want people to forget about you you also want to take notes really quickly after the interview because you’re nervous and you’ll probably forget them soon but there were things that came up during the interview that you want to remember to work into future interviews maybe they gave you some insights about how the team is structured maybe they hinted to maybe one of your answers they were like oh that sounds so cool and really interesting we’re so glad you have that experience and so you know that’s something that they like about you and you might want to bring it up in future interviews okay I am going to walk through it is okay to ask for some time to prepare for answering behavioral questions and it can be really intimidating to think of an example so you can take time I think that it is helpful to kind of talk through getting to that answer so for me if I’m just like silent this is me so it might be different for you if I’m like great can I take some time to think about that and then I’m just silent for a really long time that like makes I hate silence it makes me feel a lot of pressure so what I would probably do is say that’s a really great question I would just keep talking to my question and I would kind of like you know how in when you’re answering technical questions they say that you should talk through your process sorry for my wi-fi it keeps telling me that that it’s unstable but they say that you should talk through your process right so talk through your process for answering behavioral interview questions too you could say something like I’m thinking of a few examples for this would you prefer an example that’s more technical or less technical but of course you can always take time so let me bring up this interview study guide this interview worksheet and I see that a couple of you are looking at it for this I want you to you can make a copy of this worksheet to your own drive anytime that you have an interview and I would rename it like oh microsoft microsoft interview worksheet or amazon interview worksheet and really try to tailor your answers as much as possible you might be able to copy this every single time and just tailor some of your examples but these are the ones and you can also change these questions over here that you think you could be asked so maybe maybe you go on that you’re interviewing with you don’t even have to use this worksheet but I would love for you to draft out some possible responses so that you can practice them I don’t want you to memorize the the way I do this for my interviews too so the way that I normally go about answering these questions is I type it out first of all like I would say it just so I can try to find the right words and time how long it will be then I gradually take away some of those words and make them just bullet points so for this one for example I might say like I might make different bullet points of cs students innovative tech solutions and like excited about summer internship and so I wouldn’t memorize the words I would just like memorize the cadence and the story and remember to emphasize the most important thing which is my superpowers about me like my strengths as a candidate right so that’s kind of how I want you all ideally you’re doing this for every single interview that you get so you can convert as many interviews as possible awesome and yeah if you can’t say that that’s okay so random tips that I didn’t want to forget to mention to you all and you will get that worksheet going out to you if you’re doing a phone interview it’s really important to practice listening on the phone I talk to people on the phone as little as possible like I refuse to talk on the phone basically I basically only talk when I like have to refill a prescription or something so when I get phone interviews I’m like really really bad I don’t know if anyone else feels this way I’m really bad at listening for when the other person is done talking and when it’s my turn to talk and it makes me feel like really really awkward and I will make sure that I have headphones in my ears and then I’m able to like my ideal phone interview situation so I have headphones in my ears they’re connected to my phone so I know they’re gonna like work and not disconnect and stuff like that and then I’m able to walk around and then I have something to write with that is near me in case airpod is the best okay for phone also recording yourself I hate recording myself I’m doing it right now I hate watching myself I hate being on camera but you all will be on camera right so as much as you can practice being on camera practice seeing yourself practice watching your facial expressions making eye contact with the camera as much as possible possible you’ll do you can always practice with me in mock interviews and I think it’s really really important for zoom interview to really control your background and it’s not always important to have like fifth like for example what would I say for zoom interviews I would practice having like good lighting having your face in the center of the screen I’m having a minimal like background and then just being before and after the interview so that you can be in the best mindset that’s really important as well I’m going to send you all this form so that you can offer feedback for the presentation that is really important and really helpful so please save that and put it in a tab to the side so that if you have any feedback or follow-up questions you can always dm me on slack email is not the best way to contact me because every time someone rsvp’s to a session I get an email and so my inbox gets really crowded but slack is a really good way to read you’re interested in it will be in this presentation LinkedIn does interview prep where you can record yourself and ai will basically tell you if your answer matches the best answers pram pram dot com all the way at this time so again right now it’s like night time where I am but I’m moving on sunday so next time it will be 4 p.m my time I’ll be with all of you east coasters in the same time zone that will be really fun and we’ll be talking about imposter syndrome which is one of sounds like a sad topic but it’s honestly one of my favorite topics because everyone in tech has to deal with it I also want to remind you about the career center here at CodePath so we have lots of events that we’re constantly promoting through our career center center channel and slack we also send out an email newsletter two times a month thursday workshops every thursday I’m here you’re here this is how we kick off our fridays career coaching currently I’m the only career coach at CodePath but I will help you as much as possible if there’s something I can’t help you with I will make sure that I get the help that you need and our mentor program so you will get all of these links in the follow-up email in this presentation yes I am east I am an east coaster virginia from virginia yeah I’m originally excited for her I’m gonna have a choice near me and I’m really excited for that I will stick around to see if anyone has any questions but that is everything that I had to share today and let me see if there are any questions I am able to assist with resumes just dm me and I’ll give you the link well actually I will give you all the link right now because I normally do that when you come to these presentations just try to make the links really easy for you to see to schedule time with me you may use that link and again my schedule a little weird over the next week because I am moving I’m trying to keep as much availability open as possible just know that if you’re meeting with me early next week I will probably be we talked about cover letters with resumes I’m happy to talk about cover letters one-on-one it’s more of a a one-on-one thing oh the mock tech interviews I would ask in the career center channel about that so someone can give you I think that we I’m not sure so I would ask in the career center channel can book a mock with me through a normal appointment it will be mock behavioral I am not going to take you through peer programming or anything like that queer channel is in slack and it is a separate channel hashtag career center but there are also lots of other fun channels like opportunities and internships oops I sent that as a dm sorry hashtag career center yeah okay perfect powerpoint slides will be going out and I do think here’s the thing I think the thing I’m I’m most excited about the reason I think behavioral interviewing is so important is because there might be a ceiling at which like you can improve your time technical interview skills over the semester right but I feel like some of the time everyone is focused on likely code leap code and you actually have a lot more room where you could improve your good every day and I’m not going to get that much better like maybe five percent better but maybe if you devoted that same amount of energy to behavioral interviewing you could get like 50 better at behavioral interviewing so that’s why I think this is really important okay talk about a project that you’re most proud of I will talk about that again so first of all pick a project that you’re proud of out in the situation so we were in we had I participated in a hackathon this past semester where we were tasked with building a simple app that had a social impact a real social impact we partnered with a local nonprofit and this local nonprofit that had a problem where they were looking for ways of streamlining their donor communications so we ended up creating a simple website where like they we could advertise information and because of so the actions we specifically took were insert technical things that we solved here and what and the job happening is the nonprofit was able to actually utilize the platform that we built for them they’re still using it today I think if we had more time we would have been able to incorporate like an events function as well for the nonprofit but right now that was a huge help to them and it’s been able to help them communicate with their donor base during a time of a lot of uncertainty and blah blah blah so I hope this was helpful I’m happy to meet with you all more one-on-one and sometimes that’s helpful in a different way but it’s always so great