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Discussion on: Jack Of All Trades or Master of One?

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Katie Adams

I would love if your approach to hiring was commonplace. Unfortunately, too often hiring managers who can demonstrate their work under time constraints. I've even heard of interviews where programmers are asked to write their code to solve a problem on a whiteboard! The Google interview example is a very good one.

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Michael Lang

Yeah, I started writing about the Google Interview process and why it's so wrong for many companies (it may be right for Google, but it's not right for the majority of companies out there). But that got really, really long for a comment reply!

Here's the thing: Job candidates often fail to recognize this is their time to interview the company and just complacently move through the process dictated by the company. One should recognize that the interview process is very revealing of the company itself, so the interviewee gets a glimpse into the company culture based on how he/she is being interviewed. If you're interviewing, then leverage this time and observe carefully what's going on around you throughout the process. If you keep your focus outward instead of inward (i.e. the "is this company worthy of my time?" vs. "am I good enough?" mentality) and take notes and reflect on how you were treated during the interview -- which is admittedly hard to do when under pressure to land a new job -- then you can more readily recognize what the company culture is going to be like. Plus this primes you to question and probe and learn more about what the job at hand will entail and what the growth opportunities within the company are likely to be.

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Katie Adams

That's honestly such a great mentality: certainly one that I will be applying to my next interview. It might even help to relieve some of the stress by focusing it elsewhere instead.