On interviews and probabilities.

I don't know if it's fact that many of my friends are Greek and Greece is in crisis, computer science is such a hot field and there's quite a bit of mobility or all those little changes that late-20's/early 30's usually bring but recently many of my friends find themselves having interviews in London. I came to notice a few interesting things:

a) Qualifications don't matter that much. They are important to get you through screening but as soon as you get an interview, they don't really matter. You might get a comment like "wow - impressive studies" but that far for appreciation. You also get conscious or unconscious negative side effects like "ah – you Oxford guys - you think you rock right? We - Cambridge guys are the best" as well as "hmm... who knows what salary he's looking for with all those degrees that I actually would prefer not to have to pay for". I would say though - that at the screening level you have huge control over what's happening. If you come from a great Greek university your odds might be 20%. If you come from a mediocre UK university your odds are 70% - solely due to familiarity. But still you have control... just get more degrees or do more (carefully thought and well prepared) applications!

b) Interview(s). Here it's as much knowledge as personality, coolness, personal charisma and stress management. My main point being; it's not just knowledge. So many friends of mine flew to the UK with great brains and great experience to have an interview that filled them with shame. They felt they performed horribly and indeed they did. Stress can paralyse the most remarkable brains. The more you anticipate the interview, the more important it feels for you and the more likely it's to cause your inner chimpanzee try to "fly" to a cave crying "this is too good for me", "I shouldn't be here" or something similar. Here you also have control. Exposing yourself in lots of competition at university teaches you early how to "sell yourself", have "poker face", "fake it till you make it" and manage stress. This is good but the best thing you can do is to become a "professional interviewee". Just do lots of them. Schedule the least important interviews first if possible... go and fail! After a while you just don't sweat the small stuff, you appreciate the degree of randomness in the process and you build a broad knowledge base of frequent interview questions. You prepare better, you stay cool, learn how to use humour and "play" with the interviewer. When you end up wondering how often they ask you something they aren't really experts on just to impress you with a good question, you are in a good position. Many questions are asked to sell the company or the position instead of being of any interest to the interviewer. That's ok... answer anything good enough and move on. I would say that the probability for a clever, well prepared engineer making it through 3-6 rounds of interviews on his first attempt is probably less than 10%. After a few failed attempts one's probably gets to - I guess - something like 40%. Contractors are amazing on this. I've heard stories about some who are more skilled in the art of selling themselves than e.g. writing software.

c) Finally, Luck! If the maths doesn’t look fine in my previous calculations it's because... Let me explain. Yes, being experienced with interviews etc. is great. It 4x's your likelihood of getting an offer (from 10% to 40%). This doesn't mean that there isn't still 60% probability that you won't get an offer. The interviewing process must be even more random than speed dating. The guy who interviews you might have thousands of unconscious biases. She might be having a very bad day. He might even press the wrong button in a form accidentally and then being ashamed to admit it. But even the interviewee might screw up. I don't really want to know how many times people accepted an offer and informed other potential employers they weren't available anymore just few minutes before they were about to get a dream offer by them.. Just bad timing! Of course those examples are imaginary (seriously) but the point is that absolutely no recruiting process can guarantee that you hire the perfect fit nor that you don't not-hire a perfect fit. The latter is actually the weakest guarantee of any recruitment process and probably interviewees' worst nightmare. You see - there's so much risk aversion while recruiting. This is due to policies - most notably that it's so hard and costly to fire people. Wrong people don't leave as well... they just stick to a company for ever. Companies and individuals under no circumstances want to be blamed for hiring the wrong people. Avoiding false positives is the #1 priority for most - I guess. Depending on the recruiting process - if quite a few people aren't certain that you know your stuff and that they will have fun working with you, you might not get an offer despite the knowledge and the relatively good fit.

What can you do about it? Just admit it's a game of chance, don't take it personally and make a large enough pool of companies that you would be happy to work for. For example, identify 3 companies for which you are perfect fit and you would love to work for and while you might still have let's say 40% probability of getting hired on each one, you have nearly 80% probability of getting an offer from one of them. Don't over-focus, don't dream your life there before you get an offer! Counter-intuitive but simple... and not just simple, but the only way. It's a game of chance; the company plays and so should you.