New Graduates and Interns

Using early-career experience

Early-career candidates are not expected to have led large initiatives. Interviewers look for learning speed, curiosity, collaboration, taking initiative within a project and handling feedback. Good sources: internships, team course projects, final-year projects, open-source contributions, hackathons, part-time jobs, clubs, volunteering and teaching assistant roles. Non-technical experiences are valid when they show the competency (resolving a disagreement in a student society shows conflict handling). Be precise about your role in group projects, and talk about what you learned from feedback, code review or a project that went badly.

Scope grows with seniority

The same question has different strong answers for an intern, a senior engineer and a manager.

A student-project answer

Fictional, showing initiative in a team project.

Q: Tell me about a time you took initiative.

S  Four-person course project: a timetable app; two weeks before the
   deadline nothing integrated.
T  I was responsible for the backend API.
A  - suggested a 15-minute daily check-in, which the group agreed to
   - wrote a shared API contract so frontend and backend could test
     independently
   - set up a simple CI job that ran our tests on every push
R  We integrated a week early and used the spare time for user
   testing with classmates; the marker highlighted our testing.
L  Agreeing interfaces early saves painful integration later.

Do not apologise for your experience

Avoid starting with 'It was only a university project'. Describe it seriously; the competency is what matters.

त्वरित जाँच: Which is a valid source of stories for a new graduate?

• Stories borrowed from a senior friend
• Only paid full-time roles
• A team course project where they resolved an integration problem
• Hypothetical answers only