There are many articles about questions that are usually during an IT interview. If you google “[your-programing-language] interview questions”, you will find plenty of useful articles. If you answer them correctly, you will let your interviewer know, that you are worth a job. But how do you know that the company is a good fit for you?

I strongly believe that each recruitment is like a date. You need to get to know each other before you make a decision if you are interested or not. Do you imagine dating someone who knows everything about you, while you only know their name? Probably not. So, why would you like to do it when it comes to changing a job?

Typical recruitment process

In my opinion, a typical recruitment process looks like this:

1. 1. a recruiter finds a candidate,
   2. 2.a recruiter sends an offer,
   3. a candidate says whether he is interested in changing a job or not,
   4. if yes to the previous answer: an interview is being scheduled
   5. recruiter/interviewer tells about a company,
   6. a candidate is interviewed by tech guy(s),
   7. candidate asks about salary, contract type, benefits, etc.
   8. the decision is being made.

Later, it is possible that after 3 months in a new job, the new employee will find out that he doesn’t fit in the company. Great.

There is also another recruitment process in which a candidate sends his resumes to companies, but let’s not describe it now. In my opinion, this article is valid for both processes.

In this blog post, I will write how I try to minimise the risk of the above.

Prepare

Before each interview, I am going to have, I prepare myself.

I start with reading the job offer once again. Then I am doing a research about a company. I am trying to get more info about the people who will interview me. Does anyone have a blog? Is anyone a conference speaker? If yes, I’m reading their posts and listening to their’s prelections. While doing it, I am taking notes.

Later, I am writing down the questions I have. These are the questions I might want to ask. It may happen that they will bring them up during our conversation so I won’t have to ask them.

It looks like the process is short. I can tell you it is not. Nice research takes time. So why am I doing it? I am doing it as I want to be totally aware of what I am stepping into. I believe that the more I know about the potential company, the easier to decide if it is worth giving a shot or not.

While writing down questions, usually, I dive them into 3 groups: social, management and development (I will include all my questions at the end of this article).

The first group is getting to know a company. Their benefits, how are they organized, contract types etc. Basically, this is the part that can be answered by a recruiter. Nothing special but might tip the balance.

The second group is related to the project management. I am asking these because it really interests me & it is saying much about work organisation. Listen to answers and check reaction to questions. For example: if I know the company is working in SCRUM, I might ask:

Do you have all five SCRUM events? If not why did you decide to choose the one you have and skip others?

This question is kinda tricky. SCRUM is now trendy and many companies are saying “yes, we are working in SCRUM!”. The truth is: some of these companies don’t even work in ScrumBut. I am not saying that each company saying that they work in SCRUM is lying. Help God, I am not saying that. What I am saying is: it’s worth checking if they are not lying in their job offer. Scrum. CI. QA on board. TDD. Check if these are not only fancy buzzwords visible only on a paper.

Coming back to the question about the SCRUM. When asking this question you will also check how they work. Daily? Planning? Refinement? Retro? Demo? This is also a great opportunity to ask even more questions. For example when talking about planning: who is assigning tasks to people? Is client involved in planning? Will I have contact with him etc.

By the way, there is no good answer and a bad answer. You just want to know how they are working and why. Later you can decide on your own if you want to work with them or not.

Finally, in the last group, I am putting technical questions. Simple as that.

During an interview

Take fucking notes.

Thanks, that’s all.