How to Nail Any Behavioral Interview in Tech | Leveraging AI Tools for Job Seekers
Hey everyone and thanks for joining today. You're going to learn exactly how to ace your next behavior interview because we have special guest, Dom Capone joining us today.
He's a tech career and interview coach, and he's the co founder of mockinterview.tech and his company just released a new AI tool that's going to be a complete game changer for anyone who's prepping for the next tech interview.
Doug Howard: Thanks for joining us, Dom. Do you want to introduce yourself?
Dom Caponi: Yeah, thanks, Doug. Thanks for having me on. I'm Dom Caponi, as Doug points out. And yes, I am a career coach and co founder of mockinterview.tech. And mockinterview.tech is an AI based platform that helps people practice, specifically behavioral interviews. And the reason that we chose to focus on that Is that the behavioral interview is often seen as like the more soft skills. I can fake my way through it. If you're an engineer, and you've been through humanities courses, you might be thinking the similar thing about those humanities courses.
But as a person who's been a hiring manager and having friends that are hiring managers, 1, the 1 thing that will completely nerf, every preparation, every past technical interview you've ever done is showing up and not knowing how to collaborate, not knowing how to problem solve, not knowing how to be a team leader, especially as you get into those engineering leadership roles.
And that's exactly what we try to suss out and help people craft better stories.
Doug Howard: There's a lot of great points you made already, but I think you hit on a great point. It's, we focus so much on the tech part of the interview and we really overlook what might be equally important part of the interview, at least in my experience as a hiring manager. Before we dive into breaking down the interview and getting into your tool, I want to hear just a little bit more about your experience as a hiring manager.
Meet Tech Interview Guru, Dom Caponi
Dom Caponi: Sure thing. Yeah, I got my start in the tech world as a front end engineer. And that was at the time that, I was trying to break into mechanical engineering. My, my background is in aerospace. I passed the F. E. for mechanical engineering. But I found tech to be a little bit more appealing at the time. At least I was getting certainly a lot more traction there. So I fell into this career, and moved, I worked my way up through strong problem solving skills, being able to learn the trade quickly and collaboration and influence. I've made jumps in my career that have been helped immensely by knowing people and building relationships. We can touch on that later. It's why the soft skills interview is equally important as well.
And so I just worked my way up the ladder, found myself in in a managing position at a company called OneLogin, which is now OneIdentity. And we were building out a developer experience program. I was in this unique position where I didn't have a traditional software engineer background, but we were building a non-traditional team to go out into the developer communities of the world and try and help them understand how authentication systems work so that they can integrate them into our platform and be secure, which was something we'd never done before.
So I had to assemble a team of people that A, could code. But B, I was really interested in how they can build relationships and how they are able to influence without authority, because as it turns out, the stereotype of being a developer and locking yourself in a room without the lights on and just putting on some drum and bass and coding all day is not at all how it works in the world.
You have to build relationships with people. And if you need to, for example, deploy an application to a production or cloud server. And your platform team is stonewalling you on that. It helps to have that relationship to try and break that wall down. So that was what I was really interested in was not only can they code, but can they build relationships? Can they reach out to the tech community? Are they self starters?
And all these things that I get really into in my interview. And that's why when your interviewed with me as a manager. It was a little bit on the tech side, like I'd ask you like some softball tech questions, because if you can't code, like I can suss that out pretty quickly and very easily. But I wanted to know like all of these other soft skills, because that was what's going to make the team successful. And in fact, like once OneLogging got acquired and everybody split up, like we still keep in touch because the culture was that good. Like we're still able to, find each other on Discord and build things together in our free time.
Why Soft Skills Matter in Tech Interviews
Doug Howard: I think anything for the audience is really helpful here because, they want to know why does your perspective matter? And I think you're really sharing it as how you have a unique perspective as a former hiring manager.
I totally relate to that. I've interviewed more people than I can count. Early in my management career, I wasn't looking for those things. I was just thinking, okay, we, they need these tech skills and these, buzzwords to be on their resume. And they answer a few questions about the tech skills. Good. It should fit, and what I've realized, a long time ago is that, I would argue that the soft skills are more important in a sense. If they're not a good fit on the team, if they can't blend well with the culture, if they can't speak up, share their ideas in a way that resonate with the other people and pitch their ideas to me, the manager, in a way that's going to get me to be like, okay, this makes sense. Let's try this new guy. They're not producing, they're not valuable. And the biggest thing I saw is, people not being comfortable speaking up when they don't get it, when they're stuck, when they're lost. And that's a huge problem because then it's almost like a cancer, you don't notice it, you can't fix it, whether you're them or the manager.
Dom Caponi: I had a manager when I was starting out. He had a bit of a Southern accent. He used to say, bad news don't get better with time. And I totally agree with that.
If you're stuck on something I'm. Probably the only manager that I've run into in past jobs where I would say I will be stupid in Slack, like in the public Slack channels or the public forums where we discuss company issues, if you're not familiar with Slack, it's basically just chat.
I will be dumb in public because A, somebody will have the same question and be too afraid to speak up. B, it prompts discussion. And C, I get my question answered. So it's like there's three prongs to success. Rule of three of comedy.
And if you're stuck or if you're blocked by something, it doesn't help to sit and spin on it. It helps to go take a walk, come back. If you're still stumped, ask about it, right? Because the sooner I know about it, the sooner I can help you as a manager, as a coworker and so on.
What Role Does the Behavioral Interview Play in the Interviewing Process?
Doug Howard: Why don't we just level set, cause the whole idea here of this we want to give people insight on how to ace the behavioral interview.
So let's just take a step back and, I want to hear your thoughts on what role does the behavioral interview play in the interviewing process? Cause obviously they got to have the tech skills and if they don't, you could nail the behavioral interview, but if you can't code, so what is that balance? How does this work in your eyes?
Dom Caponi: So the behavioral interview is really important because as a manager, I'm trying to build a good team chemistry, right? Like you can't go off and be like the Yankees and pay everybody a bunch of big bucks because they're the best in the industry, but then pay no attention to whether or not they can actually perform together, which could be your downfall. And at the same time, you can't exactly hire all of your chums because, if it turns out that they all hate each other or they're just coasting on your goodwill and resting on their laurels, that's a problem too.
So you're trying to find out, who this person is really, how are they going to respond to things like criticism or a coworker who just isn't getting it or somebody has an idea that they don't like are they going to be good for the team, bad for the team. Because what you're trying to get ahead of when you're building a team is, is this person like toxic or is this person going to detract from the performance of the team overall.
For example, I can take somebody who's a junior engineer who's just struggling because they're taking a little bit longer than they would think to learn the ropes or something. I can handle that, but if they're doing that, and then doing the whole misery loves company thing and going around and complaining about how impossible all the deadlines are, how management is eliciting, now they're just dragging everybody else down. Those are kinds of things that we try to suss out in a behavioral interview.
And so what I look for is in a behavioral interview is can I give you a task? What do you do if you don't know what to do? I don't like that idea. What are you going to say about that? How do you defend your idea? What happens if it turns out that you lost that argument? How do you adapt to that? These are things that I'm trying to suss out. And the tricky thing with the technical interview and why so many people aren't really great at interviewing or being the interviewer is that there really is no right or wrong answer. It really just depends on how well do I gel with you, the manager? How well do I gel with the team?
And that's unfortunately with hiring, we try to be as objective as we can be with hiring. That's why you see so much emphasis on the technical interview, because you either pass it or you didn't. But with the soft skills, I'm building a team and I prefer that everybody got along and had positive, healthy working relationships. And not toxic or dragging each other down. Does that make sense?
How to Deliver Prepared Answers Without Sounding like a Robot
Doug Howard: Yeah, I think that's really interesting. You said something that resonated with me right away, and I just never thought of it this way.
You said there's really no right or wrong answer with soft skills. Obviously, there could be such thing as the wrong answer. You really put your foot in your mouth. But in general, it's like there's a million ways to answer it correctly, or there's a million ways to answer it incorrectly. Where with the technical skills, yeah, it's probably pretty black and white. You either can demonstrate you got this skill or not.
And as you're saying that, I'm thinking that's something that we as engineers struggle with, we are, most of us are very binary thinking, we're very, okay, there's a right way to do this. There's a wrong way to do this. And when things are open ended like that or agnostic it's a struggle a little bit to prepare for that and figure out what's the right way to do this. How do I make sure I'm prepared without looking like a robot.
Dom Caponi: No, I was gonna say like you say, prepare, and that's the thing is like there's tons of platforms out there that are, like you look at B code for software engineers. I don't know if the civil folks have an equivalent to that. Where you just practice problems all day. I guess the FE is a kind of a weak code, if you will, except you guys have the luxury of doing it one time. I have to do it every job I coach, but I'm all kidding aside.
There's plenty of platforms out there for practicing the technical stuff, but there's not a lot of platforms that you have to like book time with an interview coach and that's part of that's part of why we started mockinterview.tech because well, A, you can always book time with me or my co founder and we can coach you through the interview skills. That's not a problem. We find that, it takes a lot. You have to commit to a time, like an hour at some point, you have to pay somebody, two, three, $400 for this service. And a lot of these things, it's how do we structure soft skills interview and the soft skills answers so that you can practice it and so that there are objective criterias that you can try to bone up for before you go into the coaching session and get more out of it.
When you say preparation, I immediately think STAR stories, situation, task, action, result. And then what are the key things that we look for as hiring managers? Then I've been all around and I've talked to people that work at Amazon, but they're famous 14 leadership principles that you have to study for. They are not kidding when they say they look for answers that fit into these boxes based on these leadership principles, like being right a lot, like they look for that or customer obsession, they look for that.
If your story doesn't have that, and if you don't see that's a story, that's asking that type of question that can also, that can also hurt you. If I say, tell me about a time that you were dealing with an angry customer and it doesn't click for you that this is a customer satisfaction story and you go off and tell me a big old story about how you migrated the database over to use this new schema and all this other. But then you don't actually tell me how the customer felt after, like you just missed a mark. You told me a great story about a technical challenge you've overcome, but you didn't meet the bar for the actual question I asked you. And a lot of people are held to those rubrics and they have to grade you on that.
So you come to mockinterview.tech and then we have all that stuff prepared for you. You can select, I want to study this type of question. I want to make sure that my STAR stories check out. And I want to make sure that I'm hitting the high points of things like that customer obsession.
How Does the Behavioral Interview Impact Hiring Manager's Decision?
Doug Howard: Before we get into the tool at mockinterview.tech, in your experience, and your background is in software, mine's not. And so I think this is a bigger dynamic in software that I can't speak to, honestly, is, what role does the behavioral interview play in the decision making process?
If someone, I don't know, performs less then another candidate in the technical interview, will the behavior interview, help them leapfrog that candidate? How does that work?
Dom Caponi: Oh, I hate to be the, it depends on the team guy, but that really depends on the team. I've seen it where we have a guy go through the technical loops. He passed with flying colors, gets into behavioral and then like I've had my manager be like, no, this guy is a complete jerk. I prefer talking to the other guy like that we talked to last week, for example. Who like he was okay on the technical skills. He flubbed one of the lead code questions, but I know based on the stories that he's able to tell me that if I gave him an ambiguous task and there was no product manager assigned to it so that we were figuring this out as we went. He would get me a prototype and he would get something done. Whereas the other guy might sit and spin his wheel.
So it, I've have seen it where there was a candidate who was just more likable, a candidate who had more character or personality traits that we liked over the technical skills. With a lot of times, like it's, it's hard to do that because a lot of interview panels have four people that you have to impress. And it's usually only one that actually is really impressed by that kind of stuff. I've seen it save people and I've seen it hurt people and if they come in and they're not clicking with the team, but they have all these really high interview marks, 50, 50, whether or not they'll make it through the year. So I have seen it play a pivotal role in both cases.
What are the 7 Key Skills Your Need to Demonstrate During the Behavioral Interview?
Doug Howard: What I'm hearing you say is it definitely plays a factor in any company interview. It's just how much varies from team to team and company to company. But when I heard something that I want to point out to make sure our listeners have caught this, you said in the example, your boss was like, I don't really like this guy. It ain't going to work out. And I think that's a real important point to realize is, it sounds unfair, but the reality is you need to be likable. People don't hire people that they don't like spending time with. If they're feeling uncomfortable around you in the interview, they're most likely not gonna want to work with you every day and, grind it out with you during, busy periods and all that, they're thinking about this stuff.
Humans are flawed, so the decisions aren't made logically. They're made based on emotions and how we feel. And that's why it's important to really not punt on this side of the interview.
We're reverse engineering the behavioral interview here for our engineering audience. What are the key skills you need to demonstrate on the behavioral interview?
Dom Caponi: We try to get it down to seven, which is a nice round number, because my co founder is an Amazon person. So we started with, okay, what are these 14 leadership principles? Then when she moved over to Meta, I said, okay, so what are Meta's leadership principles? And what are, what is Microsoft's leadership principles from back when I was at Microsoft? And we're trying to figure out basically swiss cheese model this whole thing and like where the holes overlap.
And we came up with these seven principles here. And those are like adaptability, collaboration, customer focus which seems to come up a lot, especially in engineering roles, which we can talk about a little bit if you like. I was surprised to see customer obsession being such a thing in engineering. But then, of course, continue, there's decision making. Obviously, as engineers, you make a lot of decisions. Influence and authority seems to come up a lot, whether you are a manager or a leader or not. Influence and authority comes up a ton. And finally, innovation. Of course, we're in an innovative space in problem solving, which, that's more on the technical interview side, but you're going to see a lot of behavioral interviews where they want you to walk through a recent challenging technical project.
And they're going to want to see things like, How did you manage the stakeholder expectations? How did you set goals for yourself? What happened when you were falling behind on those goals? And how did you communicate up? Cause you know, bad news doesn't get better with time. So are you going to tell me the bad news when I can help you? Are you going to wait until the day before launch day and tell me that you're not even halfway through the project?
So those are the key things that we look for. When we do our coaching, we'll let, somebody pick a question because a lot of times, when you go through a behavioral interview, kinds of the questions that you're going to be really good at really bad at. Like for me, I'm really good with the innovation questions, but I'm not really great at the customer focus questions because I, I may or may not deal with a customer a ton. So we let you zero in on that.
And then we'll ask you those questions and we'll probe into, if you're not talking about the customer enough and you're not telling me anything about that, then we're going to say and how did the customer respond? How did your stakeholders respond?
Because, if you're working on an internal tool, you might have internal customers versus other teams. And so we'll probe you on that and then we'll give you a readout of if I was hiring for customer focus, I didn't really get a lot of customer focus out of you or, oh man, you knocked out of the park. Like you only told me about the customer. Now I have to ask you another question about the innovation side of it.
Those are the seven key points that we've come up with. But of course, that may be a subject to change depending on what the hiring trends happen to be.
How to Demonstrate Adaptability During the Interview
Doug Howard: I think what's interesting and I think it's really cool is that you've looked at how the key characteristics that a bunch of different of the major players in tech have, and you looked for the Venn diagram of all of them. Which I think is brilliant because that means that's, it's your safest bet is to make sure you focus on those areas. I'm a big probabilities person and don't swing at a bad pitch type mindset. And so I think that's pretty cool that you've you've had that access to that information and people with those that have had intel at those companies.
I want to unpack a few of these a little bit deeper. You said adaptability. This is such a buzzword right now and I love attacking buzzwords just because I want to get clear on what they mean. I see LinkedIn posts all the day, be more adaptable. So what does that mean?
Dom Caponi: So for adaptability, it can depend on the company that you're at. For example, like the bigger companies tend to be have to be more adaptable to like major global events, right?
If you look at the news right now. Like all the things that Meta is going through, they're getting hauled in front of Congress again for, how we're adapting. We, the royal, we people are adapting. And we're adapting to how people experience the world through the internet. And they have to adapt a lot of their systems to, be, to protect children more often. That wasn't really a thing back in 2005 when the internet was like, up and coming and we could put whatever we wanted on myspace and give each other viruses so so there's a big pivot adaptation for the large companies.
But then for small startups that are innovating in whatever their space is we often say that the customer doesn't even know what they want until we give them something and then they tell us how wrong it is and so you have to be like adaptable and nimble in that respect, too.
So it really depends on where you are and what adaptability means but it's like we say that all code is forever code, but also all code is throwaway code. Sometimes you write code and then you find out, oh, that wasn't at all what we were trying to do. Now we learned something and then you pivot. So anyway, yeah, I asked a startup guy what adaptability is, I'm like, that's like a job, man. That's what you mean. This is normal.
Doug Howard: I guess the obvious elephant in the room is the one constant has changed right now. And your companies could be overhauling a new system tomorrow. They're changing out their new ERP or structural modeling software or whatever. So you can't get too stuck in your ways on a certain angle. How do you show that you're adaptable? How do you demonstrate that besides just saying I'm adaptable?
Dom Caponi: You have to tell a story where you have a process or do you have like a way of doing a certain thing? Let's say so when I was working at OneLogin, it was a Ruby shop. Ruby's a programming language. Very easy to learn. I like Ruby. I'm a big fan of it. So OneLogin was a Ruby shop.
And when we were coming up into trying to grow and make the organization a little bit more mature and implement better DevOps practices, there was a big push to go to move off of this kind of older model of how we would deploy software where you would have like your big Ruby on Rails monolith and you would deploy it through a service like Heroku. Or there'd be a command line script that you would run that would put it in an EC2 in Amazon, and something like that, which I have that down, right? Because like you just have to learn it once, then you automate it away and then you forget about it.
Then there was a big push. Everybody should get onto Node. js, which is, JavaScript for the back end, and using Docker and Kubernetes. And I've never heard of Kubernetes before. I had no idea what a Kubernetes was or why it was so cool. And we let the platform team lead the charge on that because they have the better information than we did. Why don't you tell us how this should work? How we should deploy things to Kubernetes? And why this is so much better because we have a very simplified workflow, something breaks and they gave us the pitch on Kubernetes.
They told us how it works and how like you can have five instances of your app running. So if one of them gets sick, that one just goes away and then a new one comes in to replace it. I'm trying to remember how the story went. So I had to adapt my workflow and adapt my understanding and worldview to this new containerized Kubernetes way of doing things. And, that required going off and learning a new piece of technology that required being wrong a lot and asking a ton of questions in Slack until I, I overcame that and was able to work effectively. And then I went into management because that was how I was able to be most effective.
Using the STAR Method to Deliver Impactful Interview Answers
Doug Howard: I heard you mention a few times throughout you going through these core skills, you said the STAR model, which I'm familiar with but maybe if you want to just shed some light on what is the star model for storytelling?
Dom Caponi: Oh, sure. Star model is an acronym. Situation, task, action and result. But what we teach our, clients is when you tell a story, You want to start with the situation like that's your backdrop and your setup. So like in this story, I was a Ruby guy and I worked at one login and one login was moving to containers and Kubernetes and Docker and all that. So that was situation.
And the task that I had was I had to adapt to this new way of looking at the world, this new way of deploying things. Using containers and Kubernetes and Docker. And my task was, I had to go figure all that out. I had to ask a ton of questions. I had to be wrong a lot. Until I was able to, hit my stride and understand how to compartmentalize all these things in my brain. So the action was doing just that.
And then the result was that I was able to function within the group and teach new people that came into the company, how it worked, and automate some testing of some different things here and there.
So that's basically the four things that I break down for each story. How'd I do Doug?
Doug Howard: You did good. Actually, honestly, I was just thinking that's really succinct. And that's a great framework because I know a lot of us engineers either tend to not say enough or we say too much. So it's a good way to keep your answers succinct, focus to the point. And it's really all about that impact. What's the impact? Is really what the STAR kind of adds up to is like what did it matter? Why does it matter? What was the point? And that's a good way to make sure that the story you're telling does converge on a point that will matter to the hiring manager, the decision maker.
Leverage AI to Prepare for Your Behavioral Interview
Doug Howard: So we covered the core skills you need to demonstrate in the behavioral interview. Now I want to segue to talking about your tool and how does that incorporate into the AI that you've developed?
Dom Caponi: Sure. So like a lot of companies taking advantage of the AI revolution our tool leverages open AI's LLM model or large language model to basically have a conversation with you. As much as I get a lot of flack for saying it, it's basically chat GPT but with a focus on doing an interview. And so this tool that we've built is basically taking one of those large language models and then we coach it.
We say you're interviewing at, you, the user can choose like what company that you're interviewing for and what the role is. And so we give that information to the LLM and we say you're interviewing Dom and he's trying to be a mechanical engineer at Boeing. Knowing what you know about Boeing because of this model was trained on all the information up to 2022 now is the new one. It knows all this stuff and it was been and it's been trained on, what kinds of buzzwords that Boeing tends to look for? What kinds of hiring characteristics does Boeing have? And it's able to just know and get a good sense of, what's important to them.
And then it also knows a bunch of things about, okay this is a STAR story. This is how situation, task, action, result works. These are the key traits that we look for those seven things, adaptability, customer focus, those kinds of things, and why they're important and what things to look for there. So we give it a bunch, what we call context, which is you can think of it as like motivation. If you're a movie director, like you give an actor a motivation.
And from there, we just let it go. We host this up in the cloud. You would come in as a user and you would say hi, I would like to interview today. And then it would say, Hey, great. Where would you like to interview? Software engineer at Boeing. All right, cool.
And then it'll say and which of these seven skill areas do you want to practice today? And I say adaptability and it goes great. So you're going to talk about adaptability today as a software engineer at Boeing. Good to go. Here's your first question. Tell me about a time that you had a significant change at work that you had to deal with. And how did you adapt to that?
And then you have a little button. That's a microphone. You can press it. And then talk into it as if you're having a real conversation. Like I said, we tried doing the text to speech model where it would talk back to you. Some people found that a little uncanny, which I'm surprised that I'm not surprised. It's getting a little weird.
Doug Howard: Probably depends on how human the voice sounded. If it sounded like Hal 9000, then it might've been off putting as the interviewer.
Dom Caponi: Indeed. But yeah, you have a conversation with it, but then at the end, we run that through yet another LLM model. And that one has a little bit more context and that's the, okay. You're a behavioral interview coach. You're just getting this transcript, and you need to grade the student, like, how well did they describe the situation? The task? The action? And then this was the characteristic that they were looking for, the adaptability. So how well did this story speak to adaptability in terms of what you are looking for in an engineer that wants to work at Boeing? Pretend that you work at Boeing, but you also have to be an interview coach and go.
Then we give you a report card and you say situation presentation, A, task presentation, C. You probably could have told us a little bit more about what you had, what you were assigned to do. And that blended a little bit in with the with the action. Like my story did that, like I'm reading my story as I speak it. So like we give you like A, B, C, like letter grade scores. And then your focus area, which is the adaptability piece. We can tell you like, okay you need to give more specific information. Was there any statistics that you could give?
And what I found is like most people that go through it, like that's the advice that they give is they're either giving too many details or they're not giving enough details. And then the other thing is when they give statistics, it, you have to be very careful about choosing your statistics that you give, because if you say that I drove down bug reports by 10%, but you have a hundred thousand bug reports a day, like that's significant. You need to tell me that you have a hundred thousand bug reports a day and it's 10%. But if you tell me that, Oh I saved the company a million dollars on our cloud bill. Yeah, great. But if your company spends 3 billion on cloud bill that's peanuts, man. So you have to really figure out like how to tell that story and what's significant to that person.
If you're interviewing at Boeing or like Microsoft, they're going to be thinking in percentages. Because these numbers that they deal with are very large. If you're coming from a no name startup and you're saying things like I've saved a million dollars yeah big deal. But if you say if I cut costs by 50%, that's a pretty big deal. Because if you can do that for Microsoft, that's billions of dollars. But if you can do that for a no name startup, that's 50% of their costs. It's pretty good. So anyway, a little bit of a tangent there.
You get you get a report card at the end of this. And, you can practice that same question again, try to improve your score. Or you can try to practice all seven and make sure that you have the story that you are ready to tell for, your next interview. That way you don't have to try to riff on the spot.
Doug Howard: So it not only just gives you a role playing cause that's half of what it's doing is just, it's giving you that environment of asking you the questions and, you answering on the fly, but then it's also just summarizing your biggest opportunities for improvement critiquing.
Does it give suggestions on I would say it like this? Or can you give some more examples of the type of feedback it gives you?
Dom Caponi: We're actually working on that. The model is not very great at giving specific types of examples or feedback. So that, that is a limitation of it, but for example, with the customer success stories, you might get feedback provide detailed examples of the customer feedback before and after the problem that you solve or the thing that you built. Or with the influence section, it would say give more examples of the specific actions that you took to persuade the platform team to give you access to the production cluster or something to that effect.
What we've seen with our actual in person coaching is that seems to be feedback that we give a lot ourselves in real life too. It's like we're looking for, okay, what did you do? And a lot of people that do these behavioral interviews, they, especially with engineers, right, like we tend to be a little bit more reserved. And so we'll talk about what we did, what the team did, not what I did specifically like what action did I take to get this job done?
So those are the two primary things, whether or not you do use mockinterview.tech, because we're going to tell you on mockinterview.tech, we're going to tell you that in person coaching, you need to focus on what you did, what specific actions that you took, and all the details that you can give us without breaking your NDA. And especially with statistics and that kind of part, right? Like you want to be able to use the percentage or the number depending on what's going to be important for the company that you're interviewing at.
Can AI Eliminate Resumes from the Hiring Process?
Doug Howard: What's been the biggest, surprise that you found from this tool? Cause I would imagine, when you develop something like this, you have an intention of how it's going to work, but then it does something different, in a good way, like it, it has an unexpected positive impact or it's doing things and capabilities that you weren't expecting would be possible. Is there anything like that's come up from developing this?
Dom Caponi: What I have noticed like in discussing with a couple of friends of mine is that there's an opportunity here perhaps to get the resume out of the hiring process entirely. If you come to my platform and you practice enough, we have now this whole body of stories that you've told me, that we could potentially make searchable to, to somebody who would be interested in hiring.
Obviously it would be an opt in and it wouldn't be like just willy nilly. Let's go sell some data, like we're not that kind of company. But if you opted in and put your stories into a pool of potential candidates for something. Now a hiring manager can come in and have a discussion with the other side, perhaps another LLM or something so the other side of that, and they can have a discussion about what kind of thing they're trying to build. Team chemistry they're looking for. Characteristics of people that they want to hire. And then we can basically connect the dots on that and figure out okay, this person has dealt with a difficult coworker. This person has a lot of experience dealing with angry customers. We can put those stories on the top and then great out of the thousands of candidates and thousands of resumes that I really didn't want to read in the first place. I know what I want. I told you what I want. Give me three people that I should call. And that would be it. So that's a potential thing that we're looking into now.
Doug Howard: I'll tell you the former hiring manager in me hears that and just thinks, wow, that could be huge because a lot of engineering now is so niche. Yeah, there's some top level broad skills or overlapping industries but everything is becoming so much more specialized. It's hard to find skills that cross over from company to company, at least this is what I'm seeing. And I think what a great tool for hiring managers to be able to search into a database like that and find, Oh, here's someone who's encountered these unique problems or situations or solutions, or they worked in an environment like this. I think that is huge. And what a great low stress, pressure free way for the candidates to get that information captured. Because a lot of times, prep or no prep, it's hard to react in the interview to seize that opportunity, pull that, that, that thing you didn't prepare for on the fly, to know, to say the right thing to the right person. So that sounds honestly, that sounds amazing.
I think it would help create win wins, for both sides here. And like you said I got out of the hiring manager game before it just became such a mess that it is today, but it's a mess for the hiring managers too, you're getting a thousand resumes cause everyone can just mass apply and I'm not saying a right or wrong opinion on this side of it. There's negatives on both ends of it. You can't get the interview either, but it's just it's like combing through a maze to, to look at what you got. I think this is something that could really fix a problem that both sides are seeing, which I think is awesome.
Dom Caponi: Oh, thanks. Yeah, absolutely no, no pressure to go off and build that. That actually is going to be a more complicated piece. But yeah, like we're pre flighting a bunch of different, like kinds of ideas in that direction. And then, yeah, the mock interview pieces it's still pretty new. So we're still trying to get some customers in and using it and telling us what they think.
At the end of the day though it's a dead simple app. Like you come in, we're going to ask you a question that you really want to get some practice with and you're going to get an evaluation on that.
And at the end of the day, we talk about how hard soft skills interviews are, and it's not that, they're not necessarily hard, cause there really is no right answer. But they are something that is worth practicing and having good stories for. And not even just interviewing, like even just doing podcasts like this.
Doug Howard: And this tool is a great tool for that practice. Cause you're right, practice makes perfect. You gotta get those reps in on these things. And the thing I find the most interesting about this dynamic with interviewing is you have to become an expert interviewer every time you need a job, but then you don't need to practice those skills at all until the next time you're looking for a job.
So it's almost like a Catch 22. Unless you're just always job hunting, you're not going to stay sharp at these skills. But this is a great way to quickly get those reps in a way that's going to be effective in the interview. And not just sitting by yourself and not really knowing if you're working on the right things. You basically got the AI mind of an engineering manager giving you this feedback, this round trip feedback, which I think is super powerful. I think it's awesome that you're working on this.
Dom Caponi: Thank you. I was going to ask you how long is the average tenure for an engineer on your side of the house in the civil engineering world?
Doug Howard: I'd say there's two different types. There's people that rotate every two to three years, and then there's people that stay forever. That's the relationship I've seen. Not that's only two, but those are the two most common.
Dom Caponi: I was curious because I was actually expecting it to be more like the longer tenured folks on that side of the house to attack. It's a lot shorter obviously depending on the company, but like it's about two to four years for a lot of people. And so like when we designed this tool from the inception was, people have to be prepared for interviews, like pretty much every two years is a whole thing.
So you could use mock interview as like a brag sheet of sorts. Like every time you have a major accomplishment, do a quick interview with us, talk up your accomplishment, and then boom, now you have a library. 'Cause we actually do give you like a repository of all the stories you tell us, of how good that story was, like what could be punched up a little bit. And you can go back and easily, see what's a good story to tell. That way you don't have to go fishing every two to four years. Or every gosh, if it's been like forever since you've had an interview, that's, that'd be a tough one to wrack your brain around, but you have a repository now that you can go through and say cool, like I'm going to tell the adaptability story and I'm going to tell the customer focus story. So I'm going for a job at Amazon. That those are two of their big leadership principles right there.
Doug Howard: What a great way to keep your own brag sheet, logged and database versus, having to, I don't know, draw on our flawed memories to find these things from time to time. This is awesome. This is awesome. This has been a great discussion, Dom. And for those of you out there that are seeking a job, go check out this tool at mockinterview.tech.
Dom, what are some other ways that people can get in touch with you or follow you?
Dom Caponi: Oh, sure. LinkedIn is always a great way for that. Goes right to my phone. If you need me there, you can hit me up. You can also email the mock interview concierge. There's a contact thing down at the bottom on the site. Yeah, those are probably the primary ways.
If you want to schedule a time to get with me and talk about technical interviews, or maybe you're doing a career transition, like I did from mechanical or an electrical engineer into software, you're interested in checking that out, happy to talk about that. And then of course, soft skill interview coaching, career coaching.
Doug Howard: I'm going to include a link to all those resources that you just provided in the description of this episode. So I encourage you guys to go check this tool out and to reach out to Dom. He's a wealth of knowledge on this stuff and we didn't even scratch the surface of all of his insights and intel that he could tell you about landing and acing your next interview in tech. So Dom, I want to thank you for joining us here today.
Dom Caponi: Thanks for having me, Doug. I really appreciate it.
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