Interviewing Tips - Video Calls

COVID has changed a lot, making remote work much more common among businesses today. Due to this change, many interviews are also being held remotely via video call. Here are a few things to keep in mind when interviewing this way:

1. Install or update the video platform you will be interviewing over. The last thing you want to do is wait until the last minute to open the platform and it takes 5 minutes to update, making you late.

2. Declutter your background and make sure there is nothing distracting behind you. An ideal background is a plain wall with nothing behind you. If that isn’t possible, find an area that is neat, clean, and professional-looking.

3. Check the time zone. Always make sure you know the correct time for the interview. With many remote jobs taking place all over the country, this is vital to make sure you aren’t too early or too late for the interview.

4. Have a cheat sheet out of sight. Sometimes interviews make our minds go blank, so having a cheat sheet with notes, questions or anything else can be helpful and even make you feel more confident going into the interview.

5. Eliminate any outside noises. The hard part about video interviews is that they take place in your home, rather than a neutral office space. If you have kids, dogs, or any other noises, make sure to eliminate as many of those noises as you can. Microphones will pick up those noises, it’s best to have your voice as the only thing heard.

Have you had a video call interview? Have any tips for us?

Check out these other resources for more tips and advice.

How to Ace an Online Job Interview

Tips for a Successful Video Job Interview

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Photo by Beci Harmony on Unsplash

General Tech and Hiring Trends in Colorado

Thanks for checking out this blog post! To give a bit of background, I (Kevin Doran) am one of the co-founders of Code Talent, and we started in early 2012 and have helped companies find the technical talent they need to grow, and on the other flip side of the coin find awesome jobs for software engineers, designers, and all kinds of roles at (mainly Denver area) tech companies from CTO’s to sales.

The Denver Devs slack channel expressed some interest in hearing about what I’m seeing in the great Denver area market, so I thought I’d throw it in a blog and see if it’s interesting. If it is I’ll try and make it a monthly feature. Please let me know your feedback on what type of stuff you’d like to hear about or if it’s worthless junk my skin is thick enough to enjoy that feedback as well J

None of this is particularly scientific, and has a tilt toward startups, although some of our startup clients from six years ago are now publicly traded or very large companies. This isn't meant to be anything more than what I'm seeing.

·      Where did PHP go?? We’ve traditionally loved working with PHP shops, and the first major meetup group we got involved was the Front Range PHP User Group (shoutout Dave, Xander, and about 50 other folks who we’ve built relationships with through the years!). These days it seems like PHP has all but disappeared from companies building large scale applications. We have a few clients left, but for the most part it seems a lot of companies have moved to Node or other newer languages. PHP is still pretty common in digital agency type companies, either raw or using Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc

·      Python is back! A lot of companies are using Python for data work, but a recent trend we’ve seen is a few awesome new clients using Python for actual application development.

·      Developers love Vue.js – I’ve talked to a ton of front end focused developers in the last few months who love Vue.js. It sounds like a great framework to use for certain types of applications and a fun one to code on a daily basis. It seems companies haven’t started using en masse yet, but I’m sure it will happen sooner than later as a lot of folks want to work with it.

·      React is the most used JavaScript framework for new UI Development – Again, this isn’t scientific at all, but I think React has passed Angular as far as companies using it. They are very close

·      Speaking of Angular, 2+ is a lot more popular among developers – We have a few clients using AngularJS and there is a lot of people who only want to work with Angular 2+ and Angular 4/5. A lot of upgrades are happening from AngularJS to the newer ones.

·      Big Data is getting bigger – Almost every industry can use data to improve their business, so there is a race to build out software to work with the big data. Both Data Scientists and Data Engineers to build out data pipelines. Python seems to be a popular language to build tools to leverage the data and R and SQL are the big ones to sort and analyze it.

·      Salaries are going up! – Compensation has gone up even over the last few years for mid to senior level engineers. It seems to even be keeping pace with the crazy housing market.

·      California companies are opening Colorado Engineering offices – As crazy at the demand for mid to senior level software engineers is here in Colorado, it’s even worse in California. A huge number of Bay Area and Los Angeles based companies are opening engineering offices in Boulder and Denver to take advantage of the awesome engineers living out here. There are the big names like Amazon, Twitter and Facebook but a lot of less widely known yet still fairly large and prominent companies. It’s happening enough to definitely be considered a trend!

·      Awesome community – Per capita, Colorado probably has the most engaged community in tech in the country. From Denver Startup Week (https://www.denverstartupweek.org/) to a monthly meetup focused on just about any topic you could want to the awesome Denver Devs slack channel  (https://denverdevs.org/#/) there a ton of awesome people looking to help each other.

I hope this is helpful somewhat and I’d love any feedback you have. The best way to reach me is email, kevin@code-talent.com. Thanks!