Recently, one of my fellow engineers took a job at Facebook. He successfully completed several rounds of interviews, he was called for an interview at the office, and already there, at the leadership and drive stage, something went wrong. As an acquaintance later admitted, he was not very ready to answer questions like “how did you work with a difficult colleague” or “how did you achieve your goals in a toxic environment”.
It is these questions that make it possible to assess the so-called soft skills of engineers. I was very interested in the history of interviews on Facebook, so I decided to study the topic of soft skills, check them and train in more detail. As a bonus, I attach a list of useful resources and articles that I came across in the process of preparing the material. Go!
What are soft skills
On the Russian-speaking Internet, and especially on Habré, many have at least heard of such a concept. Usually the following meaning is put into it: "This is all that is not directly related to the code - the ability to communicate in a team, etc." This is partly true, but this concept is too general.
Here's a good description of what soft skills really are: Soft skills require interpersonal adaptability to different people, problems, and situations. For example, leadership and communication are interpersonal skills that help engineers be more successful because they complement their hard skills, such as knowledge of a particular programming language.
According to research from LinkedIn, in 2020, employers value the following soft skills the most:
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- emotional intelligence is a new skill that was not included in last year's report. It implies the ability to perceive, evaluate and respond to one's own emotions and those of others.
Soft skills are tested in so-called behavioral interviews. There are more than a dozen aspects that recruiters can analyze during them, among them:
- Propensity to take action, ability to self-motivation.
- Ability to adapt to changing conditions.
- Communication skills.
- Ability to resolve conflicts.
- Creativity and the ability to generate ideas.
- Decision making process.
- Ability to set goals.
- Skills for communicating a position, convincing oneself in the rightness.
- Planning, prioritization, time management.
- Solution of problems.
- Teamwork.
- Work under pressure.
How it all works
Companies analyze soft skills in different ways. For example, Amazon, among other things, uses its famous Leadership Principles for this, and some of them “ try on ” a candidate already at a telephone interview.
Some people start checking already at the stage of applying for a vacancy. For example, we developed the @ g_jobbot bot , which allows candidates to receive vacancies relevant to their experience, directly in Telegram. Companies sometimes post a vacancy not only in the bot, but also on other sites, but in the end they give preference to those who came through g-mate - this is a fairly new way of finding a job, those candidates who use it show themselves as people who do not are afraid of experiments and open to new technologies.
For many projects - for example, startups - having these qualities is critical. According to companies' reviews, the sample of candidates who came through the bot significantly exceeds the quality that can be obtained through conventional job boards.
In large IT companies, especially in the United States, behavioral interviews usually become part of the so-called onsite loop - a series of conversations in the company's office for a candidate who has undergone phone screening.
In these interviews, soft skills are tested using questions like:
- Tell me about the situation in which you ..
- Share an example of how you ...
- Imagine that you are in a situation where you need ...
- Remember how you acted in a situation when ...
Such open-ended questions allow the recruiter to get a description of a specific situation, actions, tasks that the candidate faced. At the same time, it is considered good practice among recruiters to ask additional questions during the story.
For example, the ability to communicate can be tested by asking: “Tell us about a situation when you had to tell a person who is far from IT and does not speak slang about a complex technical problem? How did you make sure that the interlocutor understood you? "
And the answer to this question will tell a lot about the ability to work in a team: “Has it ever happened in your practice that one of the team members did not work effectively enough? What did you do in this situation: discussed it with a colleague, a manager, how the conversation went, and what were the results? "
It is clear that for many, if not most engineers, such questions do not always seem comfortable and even meaningful. But for the company, the answers to them are important, because they allow you to understand how comfortable the candidate himself will be and how quickly he will get used to the team. This ultimately affects how quickly a new employee emerges at maximum productivity, and if at all.
In some rather rare cases, soft skills testing can be extreme. For example in this threadon Quora, one of the respondents shared their experience of conducting behavioral interviews with engineers. Before this stage, he gave a difficult test task, and then during a conversation with those who successfully completed it, he said something like "everything is fine, only it does not compile" - and then looked at the reaction. If the candidate immediately began to be indignant and say that this could not be, this was considered a minus. Those who were embarrassed, but did not try to clarify what exactly went wrong, seemed to the interviewer insufficiently proactive, and most of all they liked those who tried to figure out the problem he invented.
How to prepare for a soft skills test in an interview
If you want to prepare for a behavioral interview, there are a few steps to follow:
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- STAR – , Amazon, . – (ST = Situation, Task), (A = Actions), (R = Results) – SCORE.
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Finally, a selection of useful links to help you better understand and prepare for behavioral interviews:
- 45 behavioral questions to use during non-technical interview with developers
- 100 questions to determine soft skills
- The STAR Method: The Secret to Acing Your Next Job Interview
- The SCORE framework: the best tool to answer behavioral interview questions
- What is the best way to evaluate soft skills during an interview for software engineers ? (interesting thread on Quora)
- [Video] Why do companies test soft skills and how to talk about them in an interview
- List of top skills (including Soft Skills) that are most in demand among engineers in 2020 according to LinkedIn
- Pramp - service for training before interviews