Machine Learning Interviews

Chapter 7. Behavioral Interviews

The goal of an interview is to gauge whether a candidate is suitable for a specific role, and that includes whether they can fit well with the team. No matter how amazing a candidate is at technical skills, they cannot deliver projects if they don’t collaborate well with colleagues to deliver said projects. The interview identifies a good candidate by several measures, with their ML/coding ability being important but not the entire picture that the interviewers are looking for. This chapter focuses on the interview questions designed to assess your fit on a team.

To put it another way: there is a minimum requirement for technical skills, and candidates at least need to know enough to clear the technical interviews. The bar is set here so that the hiring company is confident that the candidate can do a reasonably good job from a technical perspective. There is still variance among candidates who clear this bar; for example, some candidates might be expected to take slightly longer to onboard, but if the employer is expecting them to stay for a year or longer, slight differences in their programming skills aren’t expected to make a large difference in the long run.

What then, separates all of the candidates who performed well in the technical interviews? Interviewers depend on additional measures, such as how well the candidates can communicate, how well they can collaborate with colleagues, whether they respond well to feedback, whether they have ...