First Interview with Students (Technical screening)

1. Before the Interview

1.1 Read Information About the Interview from the Student Curriculum

https://github.com/rolling-scopes-school/tasks/tree/master/stage2/modules/technical-screening

1.2. Choose Interview Format

  • 1-on-1 with a student or in a pair with a second mentor.
  • In case of offline interview, you can interview a group of students at once.

1.3. Choose Location

1.4. Agree on Time and Place

Students should contact you themselves; they have the contacts you provided in RS App. If you don't want to wait, you need to:

  1. View the list of students assigned to you for interview: RS APP > Interviews > Technical Screening
  2. Use student contact information from their profile in RSAPP or find the student in Discord by their GitHub account

1.5. Review Student Information

  • Information from the student's profile in RS APP.
  • Student's rating in RS APP > Score.
  • Read the CV that students created as part of one of the assignments. It's in the student's personal GitHub repository rsschool-cv. (Attention! There may be fake data)
  • Watch the student's self-introduction video. The link to the recording is in the student's private repository on the RS School account in the "self-introduction" branch.
  • Review the student's layout work. You can and should ask additional questions during the interview. Links to tasks are in score.
  • Review the student's algorithmic tasks. You can and should ask additional questions during the interview. Links to tasks are in score.

2. During the Interview

It's important to be polite during the interview and understand that students are usually very nervous.

2.1 EXAMPLE Interview Structure

  1. Mentor tells about themselves. About 5+ sentences is enough
  2. Ask the student to tell about themselves
  • Work experience in any field
  • Where they studied
  • Motivation to learn frontend
  • anything else you want:)
  1. Light theory and a simple task so the student can get used to the interview atmosphere.
  • example HTML questions
    • difference between block and inline elements
    • Display attribute values
    • Selector weights
    • Pseudo-classes
    • Box model
    • em vs rem, relative and absolute values
    • required attributes
    • data-attribute
  • Example tasks
    • palindrome
    • removing duplicates from an array
  1. Rest of theory and practice. Mentor fills out the feedback form - RS APP > Interviews > Technical Screening
  2. Check English level (by eye :))
  3. Mentor gives feedback to the student
    • What topics the student answered well
    • What needs to be worked on. Recommendations.
    • Your decision (if you already have one)

2.2 Possible Questions During the Interview

If you're interviewing several people at once, you can write questions on a board, and students write answers in any order:

  • Array vs List. Write the main differences. Draw a representation.
  • Draw a binary tree or hash table diagram on a board or sheet of paper.
  • Implement a Stack.
  • Convert decimal to binary. Give several numbers. Write (draw) the conversion algorithm.
  • Implement an array sorting function. Write what other algorithms exist. Specify Big O
  • You can ask to implement some task:
a.
	"aabbbcccc" - >  "2a3b4c"
	"aaaaaaa" -> "7a"
b. 
	"((a))" -> true
	"((vvv()" -> false
c. Calculate the number of ones in binary representation:
	31 -> 5
	1 -> 1
	15 -> 4
d. Any other (e.g., palindrome check, etc.)

3. After the Interview

Interview results must be entered into the form - RS APP > Interviews > Technical Screening.

  • Students will not see your interview feedback.
  • After conducting all interviews in your subgroup, you inform students of the result. You can postpone the final decision for a couple of weeks and see how the first assignments of the second stage are completed.
  • If you don't take the student further, you need to indicate what problems they had and what they need to work on.

Attention! Results must be submitted for all interviews, otherwise rejected students won't be added to the waitlist!

FAQ

Question: What to do if a student didn't contact you?

Expel the student in RS APP > Expel/Unassign Student, indicating "Did not contact".

Question: Where can I pick up more students?

Option #1. If you want to take another student for an interview:

  • Open RS APP > Interviews > Available students
  • Click "Want To Interview"

Option #2. Ask in your city's Telegram channel - which students are left without a mentor. List of channels. Then proceed as in option #1.

In both options, the mentor contacts the student themselves

Question: How to exchange students with another mentor?

After mutual agreement of mentors, open RS APP > Interviews > Technical Screening and click "Transfer".

Question: Do I need to interview friends/colleagues whom I mentor?

Yes, it's necessary. You can ask another mentor to help you. Leave feedback in RS APP > Interviews > Technical Screening

Question: How much time is usually allocated for an interview?

45-90 minutes

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