I’ve been immersing myself in books on negotiations and sales recently, and I’ve also been watching shows like “The Recruit” on Netflix. Inspired by what I’ve learned and the patterns I’ve noticed, I decided to test some of the theories I’ve developed.
Step 1
Applied on linkedin, wrote up lengthy answers company asked on it even though its not required. For example, They asked excepted salary and I wrote I’m looking for a competitive offer that reflects my experience and the market rate for this role.
Step 2:
Got a call from recruiter, had some discussion things that were on my resume. Had a good impression and he Scheduled the first round.
Things I did before connecting with recruiter:
- He called me as asked me if its a right time to talk. Generally I say YES!. But this time, I say no and gave told him to call me tomorrow @9:43. (Apparently, I say giving an odd number triggers something who is on the other side. My take is its stupid, but hey if it works then its not stupid)
- This time, I actually went and researched on the company. (What tech do they have, Tech blog posts, how frequent do they post, what linkedin page looks like, What event did they host, how much did they raise in fundraiser rounds, if they have any videos on youtube, who are theirs customers, what theirs customers do, how did they get started and what was the purpose…etc etc). I went full detective mode. It was fun. The idea for this step was to have leverage and build a rapport during conversation.
- We connected @9:44, He asked me about the wether and I told him its bad and actually played along with the charade.
- I generally don’t do the foreplay. What’s the point of kissing when I know I’m here to fuck.
- This time I did do a foreplay.
- He explained me what they do and and they recently raised some Million Dollars etc etc. Then I praised the company of having a good and diverse tech stack. I told him they talk they gave on youtube. I told them they don’t frequently publish the tech blogs.
- Apparently this kinda woked and he setup my first interview with Head of Engineering of the company. (I applied for SDE 2).
- He told me after discussion with the internal team, they are not considering me for SDE 3. \
Step 3:
Receiving the interview link, two guys were there one was HOE and other was the Tech Lead.
Full disclosure, this was a bad round I did not read up anything to prepare on this. I just read how to ask questions and negotiate in an interview.
- Q: why you used neo4j ? Same problem can be resolved by elastic search. (it was related to synonym filter (if the text field is “Bank Of America”, searching for BOfA or BOA, BofA etc should match this record )
- I asked him why do you think why do you think this will solve the issue. Neo4j has much better capabilities.defelection
- He told me how do we manage elastic search cache, I said we don’t need to. We don’t have a single cluster.AnotherDefelection. Many things happened like this and eventually he got bored and asked me if there are any question I wanted to ask him.
In my research 7 years ago we used to work on maps data but now they don’t. And a specific tech talk where they had 3 like on the video.
I asked question around these data points and the whole conversation extended to 20 more minutes. I knew interview was not good nor I was expecting anything.
2 Weeks later…
I got an email from the HR they liked my energy and would like to proceed for second round.
I denied to go further but I realised some things.
- Other side don’t know anything about you, you can be a goofy kid or a straight shooter it all depends what kind of rapport you are building.
- Information is leverage, use that leverage to surprise the other person. At the end of the day they are humans. A shocking factor creates a bias in their decision making.
- Even if things don’t go well, make sure you make the person happy when you exit. Sometimes, last impression sometime makes a difference.