Why do I feel so nervous when I plan to go to a job interview?  The truth is that these kinds of emotions keep me alert, and make me do my task.

Seeking a job means to get prepared, so I found myself gathering information about interview techniques and the business where I am going to have the meeting.  But for a web developer, that also means that to get ready to modify a program or by using a specific programming language to print an asking figure.  My experience taught me that, to be ourselves is the best way to get a good evaluation.  I remembered when I went to my first interview, I spent several hours trying to figure out what kind of clothes to wear, and my mother told me “ A person who is overdressed is always more welcomed than a person who is not."  Of course, I did not go with fancy clothes. However, I gained some security.

Some businesses go through three steps to find the person that they want:

First, they check over the resume by asking some questions about some important points and invite the candidate to talk more about.  For example, what kind of system has the employee used in a specific program? How many persons were involved?

Second, finding the true experience means that a developer may have years of experience but might not know how to write some lines of any program, or has little experience but has done a lot of thing in a few years.  Besides, there are some candidates that have developed some work during personal time (like myself - having been a programmer since the age of fourteen), and keep doing it after work, meaning having more flying time than others that have only developed but a few years of experience in their job.

Third, checking the experience here the candidate needs to prove what they know, so some questions about some important part of a program will be asked here and will be needed to be explained precisely.

Dress for the job you want

Getting well dressed doesn’t mean that you must always wear a suit; you need to transmit through your clothes a professional and reliable image.  So, I am going to give you some advice about what to wear and what not to wear to a job interview:

It’s always better if you wear conservative colors such as blue, white or gray.  If you are going to wear black clothes, be sure to bring another color near your face to soften the image, because wearing black clothes could look too serious.

How to prepare for an interview

Every employer has their own way of conducting an interview; some of them hire an employee agency, others do it by themselves.  In any case, sometimes one takes more time during a different process, such as a psychological test, face-to-face interview, skills test, etc.

There are several techniques that can be used in an interview; I mention five:

1) Stress technique. Where the interviewer creates a hostile approach to evaluate the reaction of the candidate, like asking to program code in a specific amount of time.  I recommend keeping calm.

2) The relax interview. Here the environment is in a place that creates a kind of comfort, and, sometimes, the interviewer take advantage of that to explore the weaknesses of the potential employee.  The advice here is to not say too much about our personal life.

3) The professional interview. Our interviewer will look serious trying to determine how secure we are; I recommend making eye contact frequently both here and in all of these mentioned.

4) Intellectual interview. In this case the situation is to find how we respond to complicated examples, and how we find solutions or alternative ones.  The interviewer is keeping an eye on our logical way of thinking.

5) The friendly interview. This is a tricky one: the environment is friendly, and here we need to be careful not to say any secrets. We should keep distance but remain curteous.

The job interview is an experience that we should manage in a positive way, and, every time we face it, we should feel comfortable.  Being prepared is key for a successful interview.