tackling interviews w/ vitor oliveira, talent success manager at gun.io

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Victor, let's get to people what they want, man. Who are you? What do you do? Yeah, so I am Victor and I'm a talent success manager at Gonzario. I work to manage track and monitor software developer satisfaction, performance productivity in the Gonzio network. And today we're going to be talking about interview preparation. And we're going to be discussing some techniques, a few questions, and how you guys could show up. It's a pleasure to be in the show again. Absolutely. Well, so Vittor is a humble man. Vittor, I want to ask you two questions. First off, talk about your background real quick. I mean, you've been a founder, CTO.

I mean, can you kind of dive into a little bit about your background? Oh yeah, I'm 30 time founder. I joined the startup ecosystem in 2012. So being involved with startups for 11 years, worked as a founder, also as a team member and consultant for multiple startups, had experience working for startups in Brazil. I'm originally from the state of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. And did my second startup in Cala, Div, in Israel. I lived there for a couple of years and then moved to Canada five years ago that had been living here for five years. And I did a tech school last year. We were able to train 524 developers last year.

It was great to be able to be delivering courses here in North America. And this year I decided to join GUN to provide mentorship for them during that work. Yep, absolutely. And the reason why I wanted Vittor to share his background is because what we're doing at GANIO is very different, right? We hire technical architect CTO's founders to help tech out our community and Victor is one of them. And so I just want to set that stage. Victor, I want to ask you, man, because I asked the audience this. I want to ask you this. What's one thing that you want to celebrate that you've done recently that you're proud of at Gun IO?

I'm putting you on the spot. Yeah, I would say like part of my work It's basically to work to set up talent for success. And with being this year, I wouldn't say this week, but this year we've been able to overcome main challenge. And internally, with clients, we've been able to achieve many milestones with our talent pool. And then very happy to be able to support them in this journey and provide mentorship when things are good or when things are bad. So I would say that was, so now that we completely easier when I look back I can remember these stories and they make it really good.

I love that. I love that. Alright man let's dive into it interviewing. Let's talk about it right I mean obviously you have been a founder you've done your fair share of interviews you're still I mean you're very much do a ton of interviews on our platform with engineers. Where do we start man like where do you want to start I know it's a lot I know you create a presentation not necessarily for this but I don't know if you want to start there like tell me where you want to start. I think we can start by defining what a phone screen really is and how you can prepare for this first interview and that's what we are going to be talking today.

I'm not going to be bringing like ton of concepts it's just going to be questions that we are going to be answering and I'm going to be bringing my perspective and the way how I I would like to hear from developers when I'm interviewing. And you can also let us know how you would answer these questions. Yes. Let's see. Let me present my screen. Yeah, let's do it. Go ahead and throw it up. And then there you go. Amazing. All righty. Drum roll please. Here we go. Yeah, first thing that I want to talk about is that interviewing is a learning journey. So you are not going to apply for a job, just one job, interview and get the job because you probably have weaknesses.

You need to work on your gaps and during the journey you're going to have failures during the interviews and you need to work on your self-awareness so that you can, after the interview, buy books or look for mentorship, ask for other people to help you practice with your mirror in your home. And so it's not gonna be a linear journey. So it's gonna take you some time to be able to get a new job. Maybe you're a senior developer in a specific company and you wanna go to a tech company and you may need to prepare for that. So it's gonna take some time. So and if you fail in an interview, maybe in the first phase or maybe in the last phase, it's not only you.

The company has many different expectations. You should just think like, what is introvert who is trying to teach me? What do I still need to improve? Is it because I didn't prepare, or is it because of the company? So that's first thing that I would say. And second thing that I... And real quick, Victor, with that graph back there, what exactly am I looking at? Is that just like, is it expected versus actual? I mean, can you break this down just real quick and kind of what I'm looking at, and really just to explain to the folks who you watching. Yeah, I expected this. As I said, you are not gonna apply for one job and get the role, it's not gonna be like that.

That's what we expect. We wanna get the job as soon as possible. But in reality, you are gonna apply for 10 jobs. Nine companies are gonna go through the company and that is gonna interview you, he's gonna reject you. And then we are gonna initiate a new round of applications and then you are gonna work kind of in cohorts or input. And yeah, like every, when I was applying for interviews, I would apply for five interviews in a week. And then I would see what would happen. And then I would apply for five, another five applications in the other week. And that's how I would do it.

So according to my expectations, I would get the job in a week or maybe in a month. But in reality, it took me three to six months. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Second aspect that I think it's really important is that whenever you apply for jobs, you are choosing specific positions. And in the job descriptions, companies always express responsibilities. And as we can see here, we are talking about the ideal candidate, we are talking about the things that are important to the candidate to have. And you as a candidate, you need to do a homework that is going to be composed by, you're going to analyze three to five job, eight, uh, applicable job description that you have.

And you want to find similarities between these, uh, job responsibilities and you want to make sure that that language is in your resume. Because whenever a recruiter is looking at your resume, you want to make this recruiter spend five seconds and they are going to, The impression that you want them to have is these looks very similar to what we are looking for. It doesn't mean that you are going to copy the job description responsibilities to a resume, but you're going to do that. You're going to use a similar language and you're going to put your results with that responsibility as well as with the responsibility.

So that's the first thing. So if you were applying right now, I would encourage you to put the job description of the company that apply here at the resume here and try to see it like do I really look similar to this job description my resume if I was a recruiter would I choose this candidate to apply for the company so you want to have this similarity because the recruiters are going to spend five seconds and you need to impress them in a very short time so do you agree my love? Yes agree I want to I want to present something real quick so Vittor's got me on like the presentation bug right now.

So I have a series with Alicia Novin. Alicia Novin is actually this is the screen. Alicia is at Microsoft and he and I have a series where we review resumes every month. And so what I would do, so again, Victor was talking about looking at the job description and upload your resume. For me, what I would do is, oh, I'm sorry, I'm trying to do this real time. It's kind of hard. What I would do is then post it up here, right? So this template is on unghosted.live. You feel free to check it out. But for me, what I would do is I would post the skills that you see in the job description up at the very top.

Because as a recruiter like myself and I was a hiring manager like Vittor, your your natural gonna read top to bottom. So you need as much of that information in the top. Viter, do you agree? Yes. There you go. I love it. I love it. Awesome. All right, I wanna remove it. All right, Viter, back to you. Back to you here. I'm gonna pull up this. Here we go. All right. Yep. So make sure that they are aligned and always ask for people. Like ask for other engineers, ask for your mom or your dad. like, hey, do these two pieces of papers look similar? Or even ask for a recorders.

And I think it's important also to, yep. I have a quick question. Can you go back to the job description? So I think this job description, and listen, this live interview, we're not gonna dive into terrible job descriptions, I just think there's a lot here for an associate person, right? Like there's a lot, or ideal candidate, The ideal candidate, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13 bullet points for an associate developer. So my question to you is if I'm, if I'm an associate or junior developer looking at this, what should I focus on, right? And I'm asking you this as a hiring manager, what, what would you want someone to focus on putting their job description or putting in their resume?

I think it really depends on the company that you're going to apply. So you have to, yeah, so the resume that you're sending Google and the resume that you're sending, I started that has 10 people in RGT and it's probably going to have, they're going to have different expectations. So I think this answer may have multiple questions, multiple answers. But yeah, so it really depends. And I would tell you, I agree with you that some job descriptions are not well done. And totally, totally. But each company has a specific problem. And sometimes, you know, they can be more demanding than others just because of the nature of the problem that they are trying to solve.

But I would agree with you that asking for a junior professional to have three, five years of experience and a ton of experience with different skills is too much. And I agree that we have a lot of items in this job description. 100%. Alright, so what's next? We'll dive into a little bit more of the interview side of things. Next thing is I really believe that preparation is super important in interviews and you have to build your storybook. You have to create your own presentation. And this is my presentation that I viewed in 2017. 2017 was the year that I was applying for companies outside Brazil, and then I got a job in Canada.

And the reason why I got a job in Canada and also in the Netherlands was that I did a lot of preparation. And I was analyzing the company's behavior when I was interviewing, I would answer a question and I would see the interviewer's reaction. And then I would see if my answer would be good or bad and if it was good, I would keep that answer and if it was bad, I would change the answer. So I would pivot as I would see the reaction and the feedback of the company. And in this quick guide that I created, I first described the company. So I put the logo and then I say what the company does and I try to bring features so that they can concentrate information about the companies that have been done in interviews.

If you jump on a call with a company and they ask you, what do we do? And you are not able to answer. It's a rejection. So this is the first step and it's difficult because we apply for so many companies. So how can I prepare for a hundred companies having in mind that I applied for a hundred positions. But But you somehow need to do this preparation and you need to choose your top companies that you're going to be interviewing and always be prepared to show up and say, explain what the company is doing. It's going to make you look much better in the interview and it is also going to enhance your business knowledge.

Because as a software developer, you also need to understand all the areas of the company. But take advantage of this moment to do it. And then after describing the companies, I would also say that you need to have the basic questions that people usually ask you. And I bring these 11 questions that are very popular. And we are going to be talking a little bit about these questions and the way how we would answer these questions. Well, let's start with this one. So tell me about yourself. I've been big on this one. I've been big on this one on social media lately. Go ahead, Tyler.

So how would you answer this question? Tell me about this. This is my two cents, right? And I'm interested in your thoughts because you and I haven't chat about this. So first off, I've never had anybody go short. Everybody runs long on this question, right? So like, I think people feel like they need to fill a three to five minute window. I think this is a 60 to 90 second answer, right? It is quick to the point. I think another thing too, I think you need to research the people who you're interviewing with and answer the question with similarities with that person. So for example, Vittor, Vittor lives in Canada, right?

I would mention I play hockey. Now, I know you're from Brazil, but you're in Canada. So I always bring up hockey for individuals in Canada, right? And you're in Vancouver, right? So like Vancouver's got one of the best ice hockey teams right now. So I would maybe bring that up somehow, right? like try to find similarities to switch the interview to a conversation. Then after you go, hey, my name's Taylor Destin. I play ice hockey. I know Vittor, you're in Vancouver. You guys have like one of the best ice hockey teams right now in NHL. Then I would go into about me as it relates to the role you are interviewing for.

So many people talk about yourselves, and it's just very vague in general. For me, it needs to be specifically about the role, right? So if you're interviewing for a tech lead role, that requires 70% management experience, 30% hands-on experience, I would be like, you know, my name's Taylor, yada, yada, yada. I've actually been managing team for five years. The last two roles I've held have been 80% leadership, 20% coding. And then what that does is it allows Vittor to know exactly who you are and what you've done as it relates to the role. So, Vittor, I'm curious to hear your thoughts when it comes to my answer on how they answer that question.

I love your answer because I think we really need to do research with the company. When I was, for example, when I was applying for it, Dan.io, I had my final interview with the CEO. And what I did was I listened to his podcast and I brought some topics that I knew that he was super excited about. And that was a perfect connection because I was able to talk about those topics and he was super exciting in the call. So if you do your homework, it could be in the phone stream, it could be in the middle of the interview or at the end, you need to find these opportunities to create connections with the people that you are interviewing.

And the only way to do that is by reading what they're writing on LinkedIn, reading their blog posts and listening to their podcast and watching their live sessions on YouTube. Yep, absolutely. Regarding this question, I think it depends. So if you are a software engineer and you're applying for, let's say, a Python and the React JS role and it's an intermediate or made in a senior position. I want you to be short and I want you to introduce yourself. Tell me a little bit about your background. I wanna listen to the skills that you are bringing to the table. I wanna understand your expectations of your career.

So if I would answer this question and I'm applying for a position, I would just say that my name is Vittor Oliveira. I've been working as a software developer since 2004. I specialize in Python, React, JS. I'm also an iOS and Android engineer with five years of experience. I've been building applications for startups, meet size startups and also early-stage startups in Brazil, in Canada, and in the United States. And I'm currently looking for a position in the healthcare industry because I really believe in the cause. And I can state the points why I'm interested in the healthcare industry. I'm considering that I'm applying for a startup that is in the healthcare industry and that's why I'm talking about my expectations at the end.

So I quickly talked about my experience, the number of years that I had, the excuse that I worked with, the types of companies that I worked on and what my expectations are. So when people are short and they are able to gather the necessary information, I find it much better than just talking and running inside circles. Yep, absolutely, absolutely. So, all right, what's next, man? Question, why would you work for a new company? So when you, and I think this question, you can, so when you are applying for a gun that I owe, gun that I would ask you, why do you wanna work for us?

any company that you not on the door they are gonna ask you this question. And I think as an exercise, you can try to bring a generic answer. So why would you work for a new company? And we are not talking about specific company. So what, when you look at companies websites, what is something that redirects you? So is it the industry? Do you like small teams? What are the reasons? So try to do self-reflection and bring these topics. When you're applying for a specific company, you wanna do what Tyler said. You wanna do a research and you wanna bring a few topics. So maybe you're gonna go to the about us page and you're gonna read the values, the culture of the company.

Maybe they have collaboration as the course skill and that really resonates with you. So you could talk about that here. Like I love collaboration and because in my previous role, we used to do pair-prove game sessions with other engineers. we would have collaborative activities with the rest of the company, where we would brainstorm ideas, and et cetera. I love that. Also another thing too, Vittor, what are your thoughts on creating almost a proof of concept, maybe with the company's product, right? Like I think it could be cool to come into an interview and I don't know, let's say you're interviewing for Stripe and you do some sort of Stripe, I don't know, plug into an existing thing you've already written.

I mean, is that, is that looked highly upon as a CTO and a hiring manager like yourself? Yeah, yeah, you can say that you were a user of Stripe and that led you to apply for deposition. At gun.io, for example, I was talent before. So I applied for the community. I did the approval calls, got to know people internally. And then I applied for a position internally. So that really connected me with the network. And I was able to bring my own experience with them. So if you can create this connection, it's gonna definitely help you. I love it, I love it. All right, we got 10 minutes left, so let's try to fly through this as fast as we can.

So most important question that probably all the companies are gonna ask you, what is the most important challenge in your career? Or what is the most challenging project that you have ever worked on? So when you think about this question, you could think about the structure that I brought in the right bottom, which is first you're gonna introduce the situation. And you're gonna talk a little bit about the tasks associated with that situation. And then you can describe what was the most important part of that project, what was the most complex technical aspect in the project, were there any conflicts? How was the communication with the internal and external stakeholders.

And then you always wanna bring the outcome. So what were the actions that allowed you to achieve that outcome? And what was the result? Was it positive or negative? What I see is that people usually describe the project but they don't bring results. And you wanna be able to bring metrics. So this was a very challenging, let's say that I was building a search engine for a company. And before this project, we would search on the website, and it would take 10 seconds. So let's say that you worked on this project. You did many actions. And as a result, you were able to improve the response times by 100 times.

Before it was 10 seconds, and now it's loading in one second. And you can bring this metric to the table. That's going to make a huge impact. That's huge. If you don't talk about that, you may not sound like a results-rated person. I love that. I love that. What else we got? Well, what is the reason for weakness? Nah. The dreaded question where everybody turns their biggest weakness into a positive. Yeah, so this question is very common. Probably most of you are already comfortable with this question. The only thing that I would highlight is always, if we're talking about things that we're improving, always say what we're doing to improve.

Because if you just say that English is my weakness because it's my second language and if I end up like that, it's weird, right? So you want to say that even though English is still difficult for me, I do this, I initiate this action to be able to gain more vocabulary. I find groups on meetup to meet them once a week and then we get together to practice and we talk about different topics. You always want to say what you're doing in order to improve everybody is in its own time zone and even the CEO is in his or her learning journey. They have weaknesses and they are trying to improve.

So it's okay to be a little bit vulnerable, vulnerable, but always talk about the action items. Well, and I think to real quick, I think this is a good, just advice in general for interviewing, right? It's, you almost don't just answer the question being asked. You have to try to think of a way to like, I call it the and then statement, right? So like, so, so, so, so, say, well, what's your biggest weakness? Well, my biggest weakness is, you know, for me is like, I'm super emotional, but or and then I'm working on it. Yada, yada, yada, right? It's the same thing. Like, Sometimes a lot of people just answer the question at hand, but when we're hanging out with our friends and our friends ask us a question, we typically just don't answer the question.

We typically develop a back and forth. Right, and I think that's the biggest key when it comes to interviewing, is trying to develop that back and forth. Amazing. So I will talk a little bit about this quickly. And I want to ask you a question, which is do you know what is the star method as a developer? I do not. So please educate me, Victor. Yeah, so start methods basically when you bring your structure for your answer in an interview. And I would say this is, I consider this a storytelling concept because you're trying to view the story about a situation that you had in your career.

And when you talk about that situation, you want to express the context. And then you want to talk about the task and then the actions that allow you to achieve results. And there are specific questions that these structure fits really well and other questions that it doesn't. And I'm gonna bring one question that is gonna be really good to see this framework in action. So tell me a situation that you demonstrated to be a great team player. So this is a question that is gonna help the interviewer to understand about your soft skills, about your communication, about your collaboration skills. So you can clearly use the star method here.

And whenever you're doing preparation, I would encourage you to do this structure, like to write situation, task, action, and answer and write one or two paragraphs for each one of the items. So B, you don't need to be alone. You wanna be precise and you wanna be able to bring the results at them. So, a situation that I demonstrated to be a great kid player, so I answered this question. Let's say that I was working on a FinTech company five years ago, and I was a tech lead team lead senior developer for this team, and I had a team of junior developers, intermediate developers. One of the intermediate developers got sick.

He had COVID, and he was responsible to complete a lot of tickets. So I had a call with him. He told me that he was really sick. And I decided to talk to my manager and I took ownership of his tasks. And I told my manager that I would support him and we would do program sessions. And as my actions were to reorganize my tasks and reorganize my schedule and show my manager, I worked on the other developer tasks and I was able to complete. And as a result, we were able to deliver on time. At the end, the developer was back. I was able to do knowledge transfer about the tasks, and the team was able to deliver that project on time, and the client was successful.

So I demonstrated in my answer that I was a great employer. I collaborated with a team member that was sick, and I allowed my team to achieve the results that we were looking for. Love it, love it. There you go. Sweet, hope you all enjoyed that. That was good. That was again, we're going to be doing more of this stuff. Victor, Victor and I are super passionate about giving back. So Victor, I do want to ask you so so I asked, I asked four questions to every person at the end of the show. Obviously you've been on the show before, but I added another one.

So I want to ask you this first question again for everybody who has tuned in. Thank you so much. Hopefully you got something out of this. Go connect with Victor on LinkedIn. Again, we're going to be doing more of this stuff. Go follow us on gun. I owe. We're going to post a lot of this stuff to our LinkedIn page. So, Vittor, first question. Outside of, so if finances were the same, what would you do? What would be your dream job outside of what you do? Today? Say what? You mean today if I had to leave again, why would you? Like if you could go do whatever you wanted to do and money not be a problem, what would you wanna do?

I think I would do a thing that I'm super passionate about. One of them is helping others. And I do a lot of mentorship and coaching with software developers in different levels. And it's not really about the money. It's about supporting others. It's about creating a stream of impact in people's lives. So I would definitely do that as a self-employed person. I would work for startups for sure. And I would support entrepreneurs, I think. Like I love feedback, I love recruitment, developer tools. So I would definitely jump in one of these sectors. Well, Vittor, it also sounds like working at gun IOs the perfect fit for you.

So next question. What do you do outside of work? So you can't answer this as a work question, Vittor. Outside of work, what do you like to do for fun? Many things. So I'm here in Canada and we have different seasons, sometimes we have no, sometimes we have summer. So I'm someone who loves to be outdoors. So I try to be active and I enrolled in the gym go two times a week or a few times a week sometimes. So what I do is, my work is technology, my work is people development, you can see that. And one of my passions is also technology. So I can end up spending my time doing technology in my spare time.

And I tried to connect with people with different backgrounds and I tried to join them in activities that are totally outside of my bubble. And that's my strategy. So as an example, my girlfriend, she is a personal trainer and I don't understand anything about technology. She is a designer, but she is a fitness professional and she helps me to overcome you know this fitness laziness and to always be active. I love that I love that that's awesome. Alright last are two more questions. What tools technologies trends are you kind of reading on your own right now that you're really interested in that you want to share?

So technology that I'm interested in I'm very interested in Python and JavaScript because of its popularity. So I'm trying to follow the trends. Very excited with those technologies. I'm very excited with no code technology and AI technology as well and how the display and things are going to evolve in the next, I would say decade and I would say, I was going to say century but I would say decade. So I'm someone that tries to keep in touch with their latest trends, even though it's difficult. I love that. I love that. All right. Last question, Vittor. And then we can, we can wrap this thing up.

What would be your biggest career advice to your younger self, right? This show is called Guidance Council 2.0 because we had Guidance Councils of Middle School High School and College. But now as adults, we don't really have anybody. So what would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Vittor? Okay. So I said that I started working as a software developer in 2004, so almost many years ago. And during my career in the first years, I wasn't a very collaborative person. So I wouldn't connect with other developers. I wouldn't ask silly questions. I would be afraid of making mistakes. And if you can be aware that this is very important, like you need to ask questions and you need to work with others, and you need to get together in communities.

So if you can join a community today where you're going to find a lot of senior developers or more experienced engineering leaders, join this community, even if you have to pay a subscription and connect with others, listen to their careers, ask for help like code read deals and always listen to feedback. And once you're feeling more comfortable about helping others, start doing that because that's going to reinforce what you already know, the knowledge that you already have, and you're going to learn so much with mentorship. So that's what that would be my advice. Just like try to work with other people, joint communities and mentor, junior developers or mentor, led experience developers.

I love that. That's awesome. Well, y'all, thank you again for hanging out with us. Vitz, we'll stay on. Uh, it's like to say about you backstage, but y'all have a great one. We appreciate it. Thank you so much. Tomorrow unicorn finders. I'm hanging out with a startup founder who, uh, if you have a pet, if you own a pet, I would tune in tomorrow, nine 30 M central unicorn finders. And then Friday, I just booked them yesterday. We had a quick catch up call my dear friend Justin Jackson. He's an engineering manager at a DC We're gonna be catching up Friday. He's an awesome awesome person.

So can't wait for that. So again, y'all have a great rest of your Humpday, we'll see y'all tomorrow. Peace Peace Hey, you did it you listen to an entire episode and I am very grateful because you know why there's a lot of podcasts out there There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finish an entire episode So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the app store. I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please, like right now.

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