“Cultural Ambassadors” will interview candidates to make sure they are a fit for the new AOL culture
Besides interviewing with these ambassadors, candidates will now be required to go through several more interviews cover topics from cultural fit, to project management skills, to job-specific skills.
Scores from these interviews will be be aggregated into an overall candidate scorecard, to be reviewed by the hiring manager and then an exec above that.
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong will sit on a committee that rubber-stamps each batch of hires.
All hires must go through human resources recruiters, now.
In addition to the changing culture, it appears AOL wants to increase their hiring standards by implementing more approvals and rigor to the process.
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Most interview candidates can’t help but ask, “Am I boring the job interviewer?” I wouldn’t obsess over it. However, if you’re curious, you might want to read Gretchen Rubin’s blog post, Eight Tips to Know If You’re Being Boring.
Of her eight tips, here are the four that resonated with me:
1. Repeated, perfunctory responses. A person who repeats, “Oh really? Wow. Oh really? Interesting.” isn’t particularly engaged.
2. Simple questions. People who are bored ask simple questions. “When did you move?” “Where did you go?” People who are interested ask more complicated questions that show curiosity, not mere politeness.
3. Interruption. Although it sounds rude, interruption is actually a good sign, I think. It means a person is bursting to say something, and that shows interest. Similarly…
4. Request for clarification. A person who is sincerely interested in what you’re saying will ask you to elaborate or to explain. “What does that term mean?” “When exactly did that happen?” “Then what did he say?” are the kinds of questions that show that someone is trying closely to follow what you’re saying.
Why do companies prefer internal candidates? Hiring managers like candidates who can make an immediate impact. Internal candidates are more likely to do so because they:
Understand the processes
Know the people
Fit with the culture
Most importantly, they’ve already proven themselves on-the-job. Typically, external candidates only have a resume, the interview, and a few references to demonstrate who they are and what they can do. To summarize, there’s more risk hiring an external vs. internal candidate.
As an external candidate, you must close the gap between you and the internal candidate. Invest the time to review the company website and talk to employees. Create your own “on-the-job” opportunities. For example, if you’re applying for a marketing or sales job, try the following:
Create a business plan for a new product idea
Develop a new sales deck for an existing product
Make your own opportunities and convince the employer that you’re just as strong as (if not stronger than) the internal candidate.
During the event, Karen will introduce her book and talk about career success secrets. Karen is one of the most talented, courageous, and knowledgeable authors I know. I’ve included the time, date, and location info below as well as Karen’s reasons on why you should go.
P.S. If you’re looking for more career advice from Karen, check out her U.S. News column & her blog.
Date
Thursday, February 25th
Time
5:30-6:30 p.m.
Location
Elliott Bay Book Company
101 S Main St
Seattle, WA 98104-2581
(206) 624-6600
Karen’s Ten Reasons on Why You Should Go
I’ll be joined by Shari Storm, author of “Motherhood is the New MBA.” That’s two authors for the price of one.
Actually there is no price. The event is free.
Ours will be one of the very last author events ever to be held at the original historic location of Elliott Bay Books. This is Seattle’s most famous bookstore (Bill Clinton had an event here) and if you have never been to a reading at Elliott Bay, this is a perfect opportunity.
Elliott Bay Book Co. is having a BIG BOOK SALE (to get ready for their move to Capitol Hill). Who knows what you might find.
There will be wine. And, yup, that’s free, too.
Also a drawing. Win prizes!
You could make an evening of it and have dinner afterwards at the adjacent and recently refurbished Elliott Bay Café. The chef there is Tamara Murphy, formerly of Brasa, and it is supposed to be quite the thing.
Shari is a wonderful speaker. And most charming.
Many cool people will be there. Great networking opportunity!
Did I mention it will be my last book promotion event for “The Amazing Adventures of Working Girl”? I would LOVE to see you there.
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At Harvard’s commencement, J.K. Rowling spoke about the benefits of failure. Job seekers who are struggling with the “What’s your biggest failure?” question may find inspiration from her speech.
Refer to my earlier blog post, How to Answer the Biggest Failure question, for more tips and a detailed analysis on how Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama approach the question.
Have an upcoming software engineering, developer, or QA testing job interview?
Seattle Interview Coach now offers interview coaching for technical interviews. Read on for more details on Jon, the newest member of our interview coaching team. Jon focuses on technical job interviews. For a list of tough programming interview questions, refer to our list of 140 Google interview questions.
I’d like to introduce myself as the newest member of the Seattle Interview Coach team. I’ve been brought on to provide some expert advice to those of you facing the prospect of going through a technical interview. I’ve been in the software field for the last 7 years and am currently an engineering manager at Amazon.com. More importantly, however, throughout my career I’ve been continuously interested in technical interviews and have had a wide variety of experience sitting on both sides of the table. I currently conduct about 100 technical interviews a year and know what interviewers are really looking for when conducting a screening.
The majority of candidates I interview end up not receiving job offers because they mess up some technical portion of the interview. In the majority of these cases, however, it has nothing to do with the intelligence or ability of the candidates, but rather their lack of appropriate preparation for a technical interview. Invariably, people forget details about basic data structures or forget how to tackle problem solving questions – this leads to a downward spiral during the interview.
For example, image how you’d deal with this question: Given an input stream of integers of an unknown length (the stream, not the length of the integers), derive an algorithm that can return one of the numbers already seen in the stream at random and with a normal distribution when a client asks for it – you only have 1MB of memory to work with. So, for example, if your algorithm was running along and has processed 100 numbers already and a client asks for a random number, your algorithm should return one of the 100 numbers that you’ve already processed with equal 1/100 probability.
This question usually proves to be a stumper, but if proper problem solving techniques are used it becomes a lot more manageable – certainly not easy, but manageable. First off, you need to recognize that the 1MB requirement is simply a made up number. For problems like this that have large data sets, it’s tempting to start by looking at the big picture, but that’s not really the way you want to solve them. I suggest looking at the problem from the absolute simplest case and building from there. If you’ve processed one integer and then are asked to return a number at random, what do you need to do? Well, that’s simple, you need to return the one number that you’ve seen with 100% probability. What if you’ve seen two numbers? Then you’ll return the first number with 50% probability or the second with 50% probability. At 3? 33.3…% for each of the numbers you’ve seen. Now a pattern is emerging. For each number you process, you need to be ready to return one of them with a probability of 1/n. Great, now we’re getting somewhere, but how do we implement this? You’re dealing with a, possibly, infinite stream of numbers so it doesn’t matter if you have 1MB of space or 1TB or space, you can’t “remember” all of the numbers you’ve seen. So, since you have limited space let’s see if we can solve the problem by only remembering one number at a time, the one that you’d return if you were asked to at any given moment. For each number that you read from the stream you’ll need to roll an N sided die to decide whether that becomes your new return number or not, if it is then you can forget whatever the old return number was and store the new one in its place. For the first number you see you’ll have a 1/1 probability of making that your return number. When you see the second you have a ½ chance of replacing the first number with the second number as your return number, with the third it’s a 1/3 chance that you’ll replace the return number. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to write out the inductive proof to show that this actually works, but that’s the answer. Note that this isn’t a particularly good interview question as it requires some specific probability knowledge to solve. But I’ve seen it asked before, and it helps illustrate that having a good approach to problem solving can mean the difference between floundering on a question and at least making reasonable progress.
If you have a technical interview coming up and want to be better prepared, contact us. You’ll benefit from a mock technical interview with honest and frank feedback. You’ll also get a study plan and give pointers on how to solve common types of technical interview questions.
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52 people showed up at the Ace the Job Interview workshop last night. Our hosts, Mike and Peter, tells us that we had twice as many attendees as a typical Job Seeker Network meeting.
Thanks for having us; we enjoyed meeting all of you.
I’ve included some pictures and links below. We wish the best for all 52 attendees. We hope that you get a job that you’ll love.
Do you want to improve your interview your skills? If so, come join our free workshop this Thursday.
During this evening session, I’ll host a two hour workshop on how to ace the job interview. You’ll learn and practice many of the same techniques Seattle Interview Coach uses with our clients during one-on-one coaching sessions.
