These are typically done about a week or two before graduation. The purpose of the interviews is to give the students a chance to practice giving answers to technical questions and presenting themselves in a professional manner.
First thing you will need to do is find a company that the interview will be for. This gives the students the opportunity to research the company before the interview and hopefully come up with questions to ask about the company during the interview. This also means the mentors doing the mock interviews will also need to read up on the company to at least give believable answers.
You will also need to create some sort of sign up sheet with all the available times to meet. Each interview usually lasts about 30 minutes but to be safe probably allot 45 minutes of time per interview just to make sure you don't have to rush interviews. At the same time give out the name of the company that you will be impersonating along with the interview guide.
The interview itself will be broken up into 3 parts, the HR questions, Technical questions, and giving the student time to ask questions. After the official interview make sure you have a debriefing on what they did well, and what they could do better on. We found it works best to have 2 mentors in the interview one taking the role of HR and the other being the Technical lead.
HR
Typically we have the HR mentor take the lead on the discussion and start by asking the student a few questions from this list, this should not take up a majority of the time so typically limit it to 3 questions.
- Tell us a little bit about yourself.
- Tell me about your experience working with your peers and mentors at DevMountain.
- How did you hear about our company, and why did you apply for this company.
- What do you think sets you apart from the other candidates applying for this job?
- If you could have one superpower, what would it be and why?
- What do you expect from our company?
- How are you hoping to grow during your time with our company?
- Can you tell us about a time you had to solve a problem under pressure.
This should take up a majority of the time with the interview. With these questions we typically based the questions off how well the student had been doing in the course. Give them a few questions they can answer and at least one they can't. This gives them at least a little bit of confidence and it is also good to see how they handle a situation where they don't know the answer. Pick a few from each section then pick one from the toy problem section. The toy problem should be hard enough for them where they will have to think about it and can't just jump strait into code. The purpose of the white board problem is to see how they think, not if they can solve it.
Also this list is not the definitive list, feel free to use what ever.
One of the questions we found that works super well is giving the student a layout from a website and ask them how they would approach making that layout and where they would draw boxes and why. and what tags they would use to position things.
HTML/CSS
- What is a selector?
- Describe the box model?
- Describe how you would make a paper card effect in CSS ( Like the products on Jane.com )?
- What are the different properties for position and how do they work.
- What is the difference between caret ( < ) comma ( , ) and space ( ) in a css selector?
- How could you make a circle in CSS.
- Describe Pseudo selectors in CSS.
- How could you make a star using CSS shapes only?
- What is the transform property and how does it work?
JavaScript
- Describe closures and why they are important.
- Describe context.
- What is hoisting.
- What’s the difference between a for loop and a for in loop
- Explain let vs var.
- Describe square bracket notation and when you would use it (hint arrays and objects).
- Describe 3 es2015 features and how they differ from ES5 ?
- Describe how scoping works in JavaScript?
- What does the statement ‘use strict’ do?
- Explain how to handle errors in JS?
- How does inheritance work in JavaScript?
- What is a prototype in JavaScript?
- What’s the difference between == and === in JavaScript?
- What is event bubbling in the DOM?
React
- What is a component?
- What’s the difference between an element and a Component?
- What is setState and what does it do?
- What are the differences between a class component and a functional component?
- What are refs in react?
- What are keys in react and why should we use them with lists?
- What are React lifecycle events?
- Where should you make AJAX requests?
- How is React different from vanilla JS, jQuery, and Angular?
- What is unidirectional data flow in React?
- How can you as a developer force a react component to require certain props to exist on this.props?
White Board
- Write an algorithm that can find prime numbers.
- Write an algorithm that writes the Fibonacci sequence.
- Write an algorithm that converts a cabob case string to a camel case.
- Give the student time at the end for them to ask questions