Red Green Repeat Adventures of a Spec Driven Junkie

Blogging: External - Interview Reference

This is a series I am writing about blogging. It’s a reflection of the journey I have taken and highlights along the way.

I will go through the following topics related to my blogging journey in their own articles:

Unexpected Insight

Even thought one can prepare for an interview, there will always be something the interviewee will not know for the position they are interviewing for.

Why?

The interviewer is thinking about all the candidates they see for the position. They see resumes and interview them, through this process, gain knowledge. “Oh, maybe that is something I do value in a person in this role.”

I know I do this as an interviewer. It might happen I will ask the next candidate for this attribute I just discovered.

“How does a blog help??”

Well, a blog can help in this situation if and only if, the new attribute the interviewer is asking for is something you blogged about.

This is a conversation I had an interviewer:

  • Interviewer: “How much do you know about X?”
  • Me: “Oh, I haven’t touched X in awhile. I have worked with it in depth before and can get work done with it. I also wrote some articles about working with it. Would you like me to send those to you afterwards?”
  • Interviewer: “Yes, that would be great.”

Interviewing is so hard and there’s a long list of items to prepare for and never enough time, even with perfect information.

With a blog, it represents your knowledge and experience in written form. In the interview situation, I have the knowledge the interview asked for. I used the blog in place of in the moment interview preparation.

The blog article I sent was more in-depth than anything the interviewer was going to ask in an interview setting. If I was the interviewer, I would also send the article to a colleague to validate as well.

In this situation, the blog helped in interviewing by proving to the interviewer I had the knowledge on a topic he asked.