Interviewing Tips: Before You Apply, CV, Cover Letter & Screening Interview

Applying at and interviewing for a company is potentially one of the most valuable skills one can have – it’s not important for the job, but it’s important for you to get the job. It’s often a bit of a mystery how it all works while many pitfalls await you around the corner – but it doesn’t have to be that way! It’s not always easy to figure out what to do and I’ve even seen the most senior people make basic, but huge, mistakes. Let’s remedy that!

Over my career I’ve done a lot of interviewing: working at a startup, I owned the entire process from application screening to hiring decision. At Remote I did way more than 100 interviews from Junior all the way up to Staff Developers and Engineering Managers. For this article, I called in the help of my friend Pedro Homero, an experienced recruiter, to add his knowledge to this article as well – and add he did! My friend Eleni Lixourioti also gave it another read to make sure things are in shape. Thank you both! 💚

The post will be focused on engineering positions, but this first part is general enough that most of it should apply to all positions. This first part? Yes, there will be follow up parts about coding challenges and technical interviews.

Allegedly this post should have been split up as it is gargantuan in size, but as all of these parts flow into each other and require the same mindset it seemed too difficult to do so… and so I decided to stick with it as is. Take a break in between if you feel like it 🍵

This part of a blog post series I’m writing covering:

• CV, cover letter & screening interview ←you are here
• Technical challenges – Coding & More (Bonus: Reexamining FizzBuzz Step by Step – and allowing for more varied rules)
• Interviews

Mindset

Before we get to the actual tips and guidelines, the most important thing to understand when you’re preparing your resume and cover letter is this: What helps them make a hiring decision about me? How can I present myself in the best light? Why should they choose me?

Especially at big companies it’s not uncommon for people to have to comb through hundreds of applications. Sometimes the people doing the pre-screening have little subject matter knowledge. They’re often stressed and have more work ahead of them. Make it easy for them to understand how you can contribute to the company.

It’s also important to understand that interviewing is not a perfect science: mistakes are made constantly. How to design a good interview process asks for its own blog post. But it’s important to remember two things:

1. You can get rejected from a position although you did everything right and would be a good fit. Mistakes happen or someone else was also a great fit and was chosen.
2. It’s easy to look at some of the tips further down and say “It should not be like that, the process is broken!” and you may be right, but it’s still what we have to deal with. We have to do the best we can with an imperfect world.

Before you apply: Get to know the company

I’m an avid believer in quality over quantity for applications. Take some time to get to know the company and the position you’re applying for. It will pay off during the process. You might even end up not wanting to work at the company at all any more – in which case you save yourself the time of the entire process!

Here’s some things you should do before you apply:

• Read the job posting carefully, take note of the requirements (remember you don’t have to fulfill all of them) and think about which ones you fit well or exceed. Take note of what seems most important to them. For instance, they may be looking for engineers who have experience working in Finance or with big monoliths.
• Check out the company:
  • What is their business model? How does it work and how do they make money? You should be able to do a very basic explanation of their business model before your first interview as that will give you extra points in the interviewers mind.
  • Do they have a public handbook or company information? Check out things such as their company values, work culture and others.
  • Check out employee ratings (such as glassdoor). There will always be disgruntled employees, but a lot of negative ratings all at once speak for something negative going down. Also, if there’s a lot of them concentrated in the last couple of months, something big and bad – like a layoff – is likely to have happened. Check Layoffs.fyi to see if the company is listed there.
  • Search for news about the company, you never know what you might find
  • Look for a company blog. Any recent interesting articles? Do they have an engineering blog? What do they write about?

This may seem like overkill to you, but these are quick checks that shouldn’t take you more than about an hour. Why should you do them?

On the positive side, I’ve left a positive impression with hiring managers more than once due to my knowledge. Recently, I said no to a recruitment message of a startup based on the described culture and they were impressed with how well I read it, but also let me know that the information was outdated and we might fit after all.

No matter what you think of company values – a lot of companies use them throughout the entire hiring process to see if a person fits well within the company. Being aware of the values helps you to make sure you highlight related qualities in your application and during interviews. “Which company value speaks most to you?” is also a relatively common interview question.

When you show that you’ve taken the time to check the company and get to know what their values are, you’re not only showing your interest but you’re also able to speak the same “language”. Doing that it’s much more likely that you’ll be deemed a “cultural fit” (while I’d much rather talk about “cultural add”, but that’s a different topic). 

I can’t stress this enough, I recently talked to an engineer more senior than me and they failed an interview because they didn’t go through this basic preparation, being left humbled by the experience. Think about it, if you had 2 candidates: one with no idea about your company and the other one knowledgeable and seemingly excited about working there – who would have higher chances of getting hired?

Surely the news section is an exaggeration though, right? I mean… maybe. However, I once ended up freelancing, via an agency, for a company with an open court case pertaining to crimes against humanity. I was horrified and got out of the contract as fast as I could and I wish not to repeat that experience.

Bonus Tip: Don’t apply at your “top company” first, unless you are really comfortable interviewing. A lot of people have some form of nervousness and “rust” around interviews. Apply to a less important, but still interesting, company first to shake off some rust, make some mistakes and then do it all better when you interview at your preferred company.

CV / Resume

Alright, you now know the company and what they do. It’s time to prepare your CV! Again, think about what’s most interesting to them. Keep in mind that sometimes, sadly, interviewers stumble into an interview without having read the CV beforehand. Make it easy for them to see what’s most relevant. My CV is by no means perfect but you can check it out here for some inspiration.

I’ll break down some tips and guidelines in the following sections.

General

Let’s kick it off with some general tips and guidelines regarding writing a CV:

• The language of the CV should usually be English, unless the job posting is in another language.
• Speaking about language, as a general guideline use past tense for past jobs and the  present tense for current jobs or in general current things (you are still a speaker at conferences, for instance).
• Make sure your CV length isn’t too long, I’ve seen 13 page CVs that had attached their entire university courses and grades. One to two pages is a good guideline unless you’re either very experienced or do a lot of relevant side activities. For comparison, I’ve now cracked 2 pages for the first time.
• Be mindful to adjust the level of detail as you maintain your CV over time, your job from 10 years ago probably isn’t interesting enough to take up half a page. Personally, I’ve been working for 9 years – I’ve removed a lot of detail from earlier positions and reduced my education section down to the bare minimum (degree, grade,  university, specialization) – it’s simply not super relevant any more.
• Sticking out with a more fancy design can help your chances, as long as it doesn’t impede readability. Don’t do a black background with red headlines – it’s terrible to read. Readability and ease of scanning comes first. Again, CVs should be judged purely on content but we’re all human and a special design can help you be remembered, show dedication or to make the cut at all. My CV doesn’t look too special: it has a clear division of sections to ensure readability, and it uses my favorite green as a highlight color.
• Give the file a meaningful name that isn’t just cv, people may be reviewing and looking through 100s of these, so something like firstname_lastname_cv.pdf is advisable.
• Unless specified otherwise in the job posting, submit your CV as a PDF. And I mean a “real” PDF here with searchable text, not a PDF that’s just a big image (I’ve gotten these…).
• You can use links both on the web and in PDFs, make use of them! Link to the company website of companies, to your open source projects etc. Make sure the links work though.
• With all those tips etc. it’s also important to remember that this is your application and your CV! You don’t need to follow all the tips here, be sure to speak in your own voice. I try to put the tips here into context, so you know why they may be a good idea. While many people I talk to could benefit from being a bit prouder of their achievements, also remember to not overdo it and to also be humble. Nobody wants to work with someone who doesn’t acknowledge the contributions of others.

Contact & Introduction

First comes basic information such as your name and email, link to social profiles you want them to see such as github. Many CVs these days feature an introductory text highlighting your core competencies. This can often be a good choice, as it gives you a short form to highlight your most crucial and relevant skills. Put keywords in bold, so as to make those 20 seconds the recruiter uses to skim your CV more valuable. Here’s a simple example:

“I’m a senior backend engineer with a little over 5 years of experience. My main stack is Elixir, Ruby and NodeJS. I’ve worked both for big corporations and fast startups and I’m keen on helping develop interesting products with well-documented, clean and performant code.“

Here are some things that I’ve seen featured on CVs that usually don’t need to be on a CV, although cultural context may apply:

• Usually you don’t use a photo on CVs any more
• Age
• Full Address
• Marital status
• Gender

If anything, they aren’t providing much value (other than inviting biases) and are saving you some space, when you leave them out.

Experiences

This is the core of your CV – your work experiences and other most relevant experiences. You should generally feature them in reverse chronological order – so, most recent experiences first. This is because your most recent experiences are most likely to be the best indicator of what you can do in a work context. Similarly, usually more recent positions deserve more detail/space than older less relevant experiences.

• Work experiences are of course most relevant and should hence come first. If you contribute to Open Source or speak at conferences you can also mention this later in a separate section. Education usually comes last, unless you are fresh out of university, of course.
• For each position/entry make sure to list the following:
  • Position title
  • Company name
  • Start date/end date (month/year is enough)
  • An overall summary of what you did there
  • Preferably, mention the major technologies you worked with there
  • I like to start with a small summary of my role in the job, and then have bullet points for some highlights of major contributions you made at the company
• If a title doesn’t really reflect what you did at a company, highlight the actual work in the summary as best as you can and maybe also leave a note in the title itself. This is a painful experience I had where in an initial interview it was questioned whether I had the experience to manage ~7 people while I had managed 15 people before. Turns out my job title was “Tech Lead” which many people don’t associate with management.
• Embellishing your contributions is (sadly) a common practice, I won’t advocate for it and I know why it happens but make sure to keep it in check. If you say “Setup a deployment process from zero” I should better not find out that you were just the person clicking the “deploy” button every now and then.
• Last but not least, you should be able to talk about every experience on your CV for a couple of minutes. I’ve experienced way too many interviews where when asked about a highlight on their CV people could not tell me anything about it. Take those points out, everything on your CV is fair game to ask about.

To have a skills section or not

A big question is usually whether to include a “skills” section or not. I recommend it, due to these reasons:

• Yes people can see your skills by carefully reading your previous positions, but having the overview makes it easier for the recruiter to check the mental mark of “knows elixir”.
• Some companies employ automated systems to sort through CVs, having the skills spelled out there helps you pass these filters.
• Again, remember whoever reviews these is often not a subject matter expert – you might know that LISP is a functional programming language but they might not. So having basic skills written out like “Functional Programming (LISP, Elixir)” or “Version Control (git)” can be helpful.
• If you do create a skills section, either avoid rating your skills x/10 or be careful with the grades you give yourself. I don’t care who you are, but the chances of you knowing any technology 10/10 are very slim unless you invented it, and even then I’m skeptical.

Adjusting your CV per application

One of the best tips I’ve ever read about CVs is to adjust your CV based on the company you are applying for. First this may sound nuts, but it can make a lot of sense. This is where your prep work about the position and the company comes into play:

• If you worked as both a manager and an “individual contributor” extend and shrink relevant parts depending on what position you apply for. If you do this a lot, it’s advisable to create and maintain 2 “base” versions of your CV – one for management positions, one for IC positions.
• Does the job posting mention a minimum of years of experience with a specific technology? Make sure that this is easily verifiable from your CV.
• Does the company look for someone with some specific skills or experiences? Expand details about that in your CV and maybe cut less relevant details elsewhere. Here are some examples:
  • They’re looking for someone with experience around Finance, make sure to highlight that in every position you worked in that domain, and put keywords in bold
  • I’ve been seeing more companies working on workflow automation, and I actually wrote my Bachelor’s Thesis about this – normally I don’t feature this on my CV any more but for one of these companies I’d put it back on.
• An absolute pro tip from Pedro is to have a template that you can easily tweak and where you have black as the color of your text and another color for details, visual elements, maybe name of position or name of company. Now go to the website of the company that you’re applying to, check out what their main color is and use that one for this version of your CV. Some recruiters and other interviewers will notice it and appreciate the touch. 

How do you do this? Well, just make a copy and adjust it! Keep both versions in separate folders so that you can still easily keep the canonical naming (first_last_cv.pdf). Be sure to keep every version of  a CV you sent around, so that if you get to the interview stage you know what version of your CV they have.

Personally, my CV is generated by a static site page generator and so is stored in git so I can easily create a branch for adjusted versions. I can also easily create 2 different base versions of the CV as all the information is stored in JSON, so I can easily feed 2 different sets of data into the same base CV.

Cover letter

Should you write a cover letter? Yes! I know many see it as an unwelcome chore, but I see it as an opportunity for you to show why you want to work for a company and how you can contribute. And it shouldn’t be a standard cover letter you send to everyone, but one adjusted to the position you’re applying for.

Yes, depending on the company only the recruiter might read your cover letter (if that) but it can also be more: this is somewhat of a me thing, but I’ve read every cover letter of every person I interviewed – ever. It gives you the chance to set up a conversation you want to have, and I wish more people would do it like this. Especially if you’re a career switcher this is your place to highlight what else you can bring to the table. If you don’t fulfill the minimum requirements exactly but have other relevant experience, you can highlight that here. For instance, maybe you haven’t worked with Elixir yet but if you have 6+ years of experience in Erlang then that’s worthwhile highlighting.

Not convinced? Ok then, I’ve worked at multiple companies where the lack of a cover letter or a very lackluster cover letter resulted in automatic rejections. Do I have your attention now?
Again, you can say that’s not fair but the reality is many companies are overwhelmed with applications – seeing if you’re interested enough in the job to write a basic specific cover letter can be an effective filtering mechanism.

Also, if a cover letter is marked as mandatory and you just upload your CV another time or put in two sentences and call it a day, think about how that reflects on you in the eyes of the company hiring. They don’t know you and one of the first things you show them is that you’re unwilling to comply with some basic requirements – what may that say about your attitude when you work there? Yes, it may be completely different but you have to understand that at this point companies don’t have much more to go on – try seeing the process through their eyes.

So, how do you write a cover letter then? To me, it has mostly these parts:

• Introduction/how did you find the job
• Why you want to work at the company, use your research on them and maybe also company values
• Highlight, again from your research, how you might contribute to the company
• Say thanks and that you’re looking forward to hearing from them

As an example, when applying to Remote, I highlighted how I liked the business model, as I frequently had problems getting remote jobs while working from Germany. I believe I also highlighted my desire to work with Elixir full time and that I liked the company value of “kindness”.
I then proceeded to highlight the experience I had gathered working remotely, my Elixir open source projects, talks and community involvement dating back to 2015 (as technically, I did not fulfill the 2 years of working experience with Elixir minimum requirement) along with my public profile and experience interviewing (as I figured the company wanted to grow).

The result of that? The next morning I got an invite for an interview later that same week. I’m not saying it was “just” my cover letter, but I’m certain it played a role.
(Note from Pedro: I read Tobi’s cover letter and was immediately impressed!)

The Screening interview

Usually your first interview is a screening interview without technical questions with a non technical person. The preparation for this interview is basically what is mentioned in “Before you apply” above: Be sure you know what the company does and what the position is. As long as you’re nice, engaged and your language skills are passable you should usually pass this interview. It’s more checking for red flags and some basic parameters.

That said, interview processes are different everywhere and especially at smaller companies it can happen that you’ll discuss some more in depth topics such as collaboration or even technical details in the screening call. When I was doing screening interviews, I often asked some technical questions to get a first feel for the technical expertise of the candidate. 

Back to the “common” screening interviews, the basics they usually check are:

• Salary expectation
• Possible start date
• Work eligibility
• Are you in a big hurry (due to other interview processes?)

The salary question is of course a note-worthy one. I usually try to reverse the question and ask them what their salary range is for the position, as I’d hope that every company has these by now, although they might not share them. If that does not work, remember that the real salary negotiation comes later (and is its whole separate topic). Don’t say something completely outlandish (at best do some research before) and give a realistic number of what you’d like to make. Also beware of the “What did you make at your last role?”-question. You do not need to answer this question, and more importantly, you also don’t need to tell the truth. The question is used to anchor your salary close to what you made before, reducing the space for negotiation and movement.
In general, the salary question is often asked here to make sure that both sides don’t invest an undue amount of time in an interviewing process that can never work out as you’re looking for way more money than they’re willing to offer. Be ready to either give a value that is high in your range and say “but I’m flexible on this topic” or give a range “from X to Y”.

Other common questions you can expect here are:

• “Why do you want to work here?”
• “Have you checked our company values, what do you think of them?”
• “Why do you want to leave your current job?”
• “Have you got any experience with $thing-they-do?” (For instance remote work, or micro-services)
• “How did you find this job posting?”
• “What would make you decide not to take this job?”
• “Tell us about yourself”

That last one, “tell us about yourself”, appears in many different variations throughout various interviewing stages. The real question is “please give us a one or two minute elevator pitch on why we should hire you”. Come with this pitch already prepared, at least the main ideas. You can take these from your cover letter, where you should go through a similar exercise. The interviewer wants to know what you could bring to the company, how well you would fit in with the team and ultimately be excited about the prospect of you joining. Hiring managers are humans, after all, and a recruiter that is excited with your application and your interview will positively affect the hiring manager and the rest of the interviewers. Highlight what you know, how well you would fit the team and that you’re a person that is easy to get along with. At the same time, also remember to be genuine.

A good recruiter will also have time for your questions at the end of the interview, if not before. Be ready to ask a couple of interesting questions that show that you’ve done your homework about the company and are interested in joining. Questions are often more important than the answers, as they reveal more about what you, as the candidate, are interested in. I often ask about topics pertaining to collaboration, the tech stack and aspects of the business model I don’t understand yet. Don’t ask questions just for the sake of it, but ask about what would really interest you about a potential future employer.
End with a question like “I see on the job description that the next step is a test/an interview with X/other. Assuming you think I should move forward, when will I know if it’s going to happen?”. A great recruiter will tell you right away if you’re moving forward or not and will give you instructions (either on the call or with an email a few minutes after it).

It’s common advice to send a message thanking the interviewer after every interview. Personally, I don’t do this unless I have a question I want to ask or something to clarify/highlight. However, it’s still good advice, that Pedro also added in, so here it goes:
After the recruiter interview, send the recruiter an email thanking them for their time (“this candidate is a nice person”), highlight something they said that was important to you (“this candidate paid attention to what I said”) and show yourself ready for the next steps (“this candidate is serious about this recruitment process”). Rinse and repeat after each of the next interviews, unless you don’t have access to their email addresses. 

Going forward

This is the first part of what will likely be a 3-part blog post series, and all together a small eBook I wager 😂 Thanks again to my diligent reviewers Pedro & Eleni for helping round it out and fix some of my horrible comma skills. 💚

The other 2 parts I have in mind right now are about coding challenges and technical interviews. I might end up merging the 2 but seeing how much I’ve written about what I consider to be a lot more simple I think splitting them up will be just fine.

Remember, interviewing isn’t perfect and especially at the early stage you may get rejected for all kinds of reasons not even related to your own application – they might already have a candidate in the final stages whom they really like and close down the position. Keep going, you got this!