Effective talk: Soft skills for interviews
Year of Talk: 2023
Soft skills can be a hard set of skills to learn. Especially given they are skills you use on a daily in any job.
According to the presenter, you shouldn't list them as skills. It can be seen as cheesy and just using them as filler skills when you might lack other important skills. Use different ways of showing those skills from projects.
If you are stressed or unable to do much before the interview, try to use that energy to prepare for more questions or do more research on the company.
Also, be able to realize that by having the interview scheduled it means that you've already been shortlisted. It is no guarantee of a job but it does prove that your skills are good enough for them to consider you.
If you try to move away from focusing only on your skills in a vacuum. Try to talk about how you enjoy what the company does or how you can help the team and the company.
Interview Strategies: Many of the achievements from your resume should be the main things you can talk about.
Make a Master/Main Document where you have anecdotes from previous work or projects that are related to your resume. It is also important to only have bullet points and not full sentences as you may just repeat them and sound very monotone.
Trying to tell them stories may help with explaining them.
Why do interviewers ask questions?
It helps them get a better picture of how you respond to different situations. Maybe you say talk about something in a specific tone that might give away how much you may have enjoyed something or not.
They also might want to see if you're a good fit for the current team or if you could help build the culture of the company.
The questions can help you shine the best qualities that might be best fits for the company.
Strengths and Weaknesses:
Skills are not the only strengths. You can also try to find other times you were strong while not using a skill.
Dont try to hide strengths in weaknesses, “I'm such a perfectionist.” Give real-life examples of weaknesses and show you are able to be self-aware and are trying to be better.
Watch out for deal breakers. “I'm always late,” “I get angry easily.”
Goals:
Helps to understand if your goals fit into the company's goals. If you want to be able to be the best at inter-team communication or learn how to do a specific thing extremely well in the team might make them more willing to hire you so that you can fill said role.
Try to do some research on how different people might be in the industry. Determine what type of job titles did they take and how they progressed over the years.
If you split it into buckets it can help make more realistic goals overall.
Situational questions:
Being asked about a specific job or time.
This can even stress professionals. If you keep the master/main document with that information as well as different points like strengths, weaknesses, team experiences, etc then you are better prepared with multiple examples to the question.
If you have multiple alternatives you can give an appropriate response depending on the specific position or how the conversation has been going.
Individual accomplishments:
Depending on how accomplishments are presented it can shine a light on how you think and what you prioritize in life and work. Maybe you are proud of the amount of work you put in for a specific part or that you were able to learn something new and interesting.
Make sure to keep it somewhat specific and related to your accomplishments instead of a whole team's accomplishments.
Dont try to judge or be over critical of your work. It isn't your job to do that, it is the interviewer's job to be critical and they were willing to give you a chance.
Team experiences:
Make sure to take responsibility where needed. But also give appropriate credit to other teammates if they worked on other areas of the project.
Dont deflect all the blame/problems of the project to the other team members/leaders. This shows that you might be willing to do the same with their team if you ever leave in the future. Show that you won't just throw someone under the bus.
Failure and conflict questions:
Try to talk about it as a growth story instead of just a weakness.
Start by talking about what happened. What bad thing happened during the project that caused this problem/conflict?
Then talk about how you and/or the team dealt with it at the time. And if there were any processes the team put in place to not happen again.
Finally, talk about what are some things you learned from that experience and how would you try to do things differently to make sure it doesn't happen again or at least doesn't become a bigger problem.
Redemption arc:
When talking about problems and weaknesses try to reach farther back into your projects. This is because you can make it seem like you've been able to grow and become a better person. If it's something more recent then the interviewers might think that you haven't improved and might not want to risk you doing that again.
This also helps show how you have been able to make better projects after that.
Problem-solving questions:
At times you might be asked about how you went solving a specific problem or how you might go solving a given problem.
Instead of going straightforward to the answer, it would be best to start by making sure you fully understand the situation. So it's wise to ask some follow-up questions about the situation to have a better understanding of what you're dealing with.
At this point, given the extra information if you have previous experience that helps you come to the best solution then you can present the solution with an explanation along the lines of “My team and I recently faced a similar situation x time ago and this things happened and we used solution y and found it worked great for what we wanted”. If you're able to give a deeper explanation or have it fit to the initial question even better.
This helps show not only that you've experienced something similar before but that you can analyze past experiences or current problems and find common solutions or similarities to arrive at a better final solution.
Why do you want to work for us?
Make sure you do appropriate research on the company. Try to learn what games they released. Are there any new releases coming out?
Do they try to push certain values on their page? Ask them to expand on it. See if you can fit into them better.
It helps a lot if you already play their games or are a fan. It can be used as a starting point for conversation. Maybe you want to learn/ask about the process of making the game. Make it so you're not just a fan but someone invested in making the game better while being willing to work with the team.
Possible “power” question:
“Do you have any concerns about my suitability for this position?”
Might be able to allow you to highlight another part of your resume or project you couldn't go as deep in detail. It also helps you make sure there weren't any misunderstandings about what you talked about during the interview.
The question also allows you to know what companies consider your weakest area. Maybe you can make sure to highlight it for future resume applications.
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