Job Interview Tips: How To Best Showcase Your Skills!
💎 Prepare for your job interview with Logicworks! Learn how to best showcase your skills, build a stand-out resume, and more!
📼 Prepare for a job interview and learn how to showcase your skills with these tips from Jessica Cowle, Technical Recruiter at Logicworks, who will go over Logicworks’ application process and give you some insights into preparing for your interview.
📼 The best way to prepare before a job interview is to think about how to clearly and concisely showcase your background and skills. Logicworks' interviewers will ask probing questions that dive deeper into your experiences. Long-winded responses lead the interviewers to believe that you are trying to manufacture an answer. So if you don't know something, it's best to admit it! When asked about specific projects or experiences you've had, make sure you give examples of times when you demonstrated your earned skills in the workplace. Tell meaningful stories, focusing on context, action, and results.
📼 Apart from the job interview, your resume is another way to showcase your skills. There are many different ways to make your resume stand out from the pack. Typically, a resume with certifications like AWS Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect, or Azure Fundamentals will stand out more than a profile without any. These credentials prove you have the desire to go above and beyond to sharpen your skillset (even outside your role). And at Logicworks, recruiters like to see strong tenure. So if your profile is a bit hoppy, their team might scrutinize it a bit. They're also looking for candidates that have worked in customer-facing roles. When hiring for a non-technical position, like Accounting or Sales, recruiters like to see intellectually curious candidates!
Ace Your Job Interview At Logicworks - Showcase Your Skills And Shine!
There are a lot of things that Logicworks recruiters look for in candidates. One of them is professionals who embody their core values. Logicworks is a people-first business with a grow-or-die mentality. Suppose someone lacks specific technical skills but makes up for it with personality and attitude. In that case, recruiters will most likely be interested in hiring that person and invest the time to train them on technical skills. So, if you feel you could be a fit for Logicworks, even if you don't check 100% of the boxes, don't feel discouraged to apply!
🧑💼 Are you interested in joining Logicworks? They have open positions! To learn more, click here.
Get To Know Jessica
Jessica is a Technical Recruiter, Content Creator, Licensed Mechanical Bull Operator, and former Musical Theatre major with a Master of Science (M.S.) focused in Marketing Communication Management from Manhattanville College School of Professional Studies. And she’s a proud AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner. Ask her about coffee☕️, skiing 🎿 , musical theatre 🎭 , or punk rock music 🤘🏼🎸! If you are interested in a career at Logicworks, you can connect with her on LinkedIn!
More About Logicworks
Logicworks helps customers migrate, run, and operate mission-critical workloads on AWS and Azure with baked-in security, scalability, and efficiency. Their Cloud Reliability Platform combines world-class engineering talent, policy-as-code, and integrated tooling to enable customers to confidently meet compliance regulations, security requirements, cost control, and high availability. The team of dedicated certified engineers with decades of IT management experience at Logicworks ensures their customers’ success across every stage of the Cloud Adoption Framework.
From Intern to Engineer: 3 Tips From Splunk’s Auna Walton on Building An Engineering Career
Auna Walton designed her first website in high school.
She later built on that skill set while studying computer science in college.
But it wasn’t until her first Silicon Valley internship where she learned what it really meant to be a software engineer, which is her current job title at data platform company Splunk, Inc. It was less of neat assignments and more of pushing out features, and Auna rose to the occasion.
“In the classroom, all the parameters are set up nicely for you. In the real world, things aren’t set up perfectly. You may not have this, or that, and projects are undefined. You have to figure out both the problem and the solution,” she says.
But Auna is comfortable tackling problems and speaking up about how she solves them, which has been a boon to her work. We sat down with Auna to hear more about how she’s built a satisfying career, and why she’s excited to keep growing at Splunk.
Tip 1: Ask for what you need
Auna was sitting through a presentation in college about an alum’s startup when she realized that she had a lot to learn from him.
She went up to the founder, Michael, after the presentation, showed him the website she’d built for a local nonprofit during her senior year of high school and asked if she could work with him on his company’s site.
Michael said yes, and Auna credits that early professional experience with setting her up for success with future internships.
“It’s hard to go to someone and say, ‘Give me this,’ if you don’t have anything to offer,” says Auna. “So put in the time first. I know it’s not easy—you have schoolwork and you’re a human being and you need to rest—but spend time working on side projects, because it shows people what you can do.”
Having that experience on her resume prepared Auna well to do her school’s semester in Silicon Valley program, structured like a co-op model, where she worked at a startup and took classes in the area.
“It was stressful in that it was a lot of work with only six engineers. They actually used their interns. The training wheels were off, and Michael was no longer there for mentorship. But it helped me move at a faster pace and figure things out on my own,” says Auna.
Tip 2: Work to understand, even if it’s uncomfortable
Auna’s first exposure to Splunk was at the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC), a global women in tech conference, where her school sponsored her to attend. Splunk had reached out to meet with Auna before the conference began, and upon arrival, Auna says she was immediately impressed with the company's witty t-shirt taglines and warm energy.
She got an offer to become an intern, and was placed on the company’s engineering productivity team. She helped build a tool that measured productivity, identified roadblocks and bottlenecks, and showed which stage each feature was at so that teams could make improvements based on real data insights.
When she was first assigned the project, though, Auna didn’t quite see the value in it—and she decided to tell her manager that.
“I remember thinking, ‘Okay, there’s a lot of ways this can go wrong, because I’m an intern, I’m a Black woman, and I don’t want to come off aggressive; I don’t want to step on any toes,’” says Auna. “But the culture at Splunk is truly collaborative. I knew my manager was an open-minded person and a really nice guy. I felt like I could go and give him my perspective.”
The conversation with her manager went well; he appreciated her questions and shared some of his own doubts about the project. “It was interesting to hear that managers don’t always know everything, either, and that they’re looking for their team members to contribute ideas,” says Auna.
She shifted her mindset into how she could improve the project, and ended up working with other engineers to make a tool that was more useful to them.
Tip 3: Do your best on all your work, even what seems small
After finishing her internship, Auna accepted a full-time offer at Splunk and moved to the Bay Area to start work. While she’s been mostly remote because of the pandemic, she’s happy to have made the move and to have stuck with Splunk. (Though she is now on an external-facing team—a move that her management fully supported.)
Auna says she feels taken care of by Splunk, citing benefits like extra time off called “pandemic days” that employees can take to deal with health concerns or family responsibilities and a “power hour” each day in which employees are encouraged to spend 60 minutes of each workday focused on their mental or physical wellbeing.
“Sometimes I tell my parents about these benefits and they’re like, ‘Are you guys working over there?’” says Auna, laughing. “It truly feels like we’re all a team. If we have the mentality that we can take breaks, we can keep working towards our goals. And it’s about all of us. If I’m successful on my project, we’re all successful as a company.”
With her renewed energy, Auna is able to dedicate herself fully to her work, and encourages budding engineers to find ways to do the same. As an example, she cites a collaborative side project she built with two engineering productivity interns during a Splunk hackathon—and put her all into—that has grown into something that the company uses every day.
“Try to do things that you may not think will bring value, but very well might,” she says. “Even if it looks small, it could really blossom into something huge.”
If Splunk sounds like the place for you, too, check out their open roles!
Top Tips: How To Improve Your Tech Skills
💎 When looking ahead in your career, you probably want to acquire new technical knowledge. But what’s the best way to train for it and learn new skills? Don’t miss these tips on how to improve your tech skills!
📼 Play this video to get three top tips on how to improve your tech skills. You'll hear from Mina Zhou, Lead Application Security Engineer, and Matt Battles, Engineering Lead in the ACS division of Autodesk.
📼 Tip #1: Master the Skill (Don’t Rush Through It!). The first tip on how to improve your tech skills goes like this: when you’re learning a new skill or technology, it’s best to take the time to thoroughly master it. Make sure you truly understand a new term or concept before moving on. Avoid rushing through it. Sometimes people will focus more on the topic they are familiar with and skim through those they aren’t. Instead, keep researching and exploring the same issue until you feel like you get it. If you’ve read through the docs and are still stuck, schedule some time with a colleague or friend to discuss the problem. This will help you improve your communication skills as well, since clearly articulating an issue can be the best way to find a solution quickly and efficiently. And remember: Learning is a marathon, not a sprint.
📼 Tip #2: Learn by Doing. The second tip on how to improve your tech skills centers around this: If there’s an area of your code you are unfamiliar with, try picking up a bug in that domain. This will help you to immerse yourself in the code and give you a place to start digging, rather than trying to understand an entire domain at once. Diving in and getting to the core of an issue can be very meaningful, and solving the problem will help cement the knowledge into your mind. When you feel stuck on a project and look for solutions online, try not to copy and paste other people's work line by line without reviewing it. Make sure you understand their approaches and what they did differently to make things work. Then, implement the same idea with different methods and figure out what works best for you. With this, you are not only building one thought process per problem but actually figuring out the best solution and owning it.
Top Tips on How to Improve Your Tech Skills: Last-Minute Tip!
📼 Tip #3: Set Measurable and Useful Goals. When defining goals, focus on things you can measure and start small! Break down your long-term goal into short-term tasks with reasonable deadlines. You would not want to go too fast and burn out or set a date too far away to make you feel motivated. Really focus on the why. Think about what you want to get out of being an engineer and how you'd like your career to progress over the next two or even five years. This will help you set goals that align with your ambitions and derive lots of meaning from them. If you fail to meet a deadline, instead of blaming yourself, adjust your plan and think about what you can do better next time. And do the same thing when you meet a deadline earlier as well! Ask yourself, were you not being ambitious enough? Is it easier than you thought? Or did you find a new technique that works better for you than usual? And most importantly, when you achieve something: Celebrate!
📨 Are you interested in joining Autodesk? They have open positions! To learn more, click here.
More About Autodesk
From the greenest buildings to the cleanest cars, the smartest factories to the biggest stories, amazing things are created every day with Autodesk. Over four decades, they've worked together with customers to transform how things are made and what can be made. A car's performance now inspires the method of its manufacture, a city's infrastructure helps predict the unpredictable, and the creation of ever-bigger universes shapes ever-bigger stories. Today, Autodesk solutions span countless industries empowering innovators everywhere. But they're restless to do more. They don't believe in waiting for progress; they believe in making it. By combining and recombining technologies. By blurring boundaries, reinventing rules, and merging fields. By unleashing talent and unlocking insights across industries. By helping their customers converge on solutions to the challenges we all face today. At Autodesk, they believe that when you have the right tools to work and think flexibly, you have the power to transform what needs making. The ability to design and create a better world for all.
Chainalysis Interview Tips From a Recruiter
💎 Don't miss these tips for your interview with Chainalysis! Learn more about this company's amazing mission within the crypto industry.
📼 Watch this video from Chainalysis to learn how to prepare for your interview. Molly Gancsos, Recruiter at Chainalysis, shares some insights on what it's like to work at the company.
📼 At Chainalysis, they feel it's critical to build diverse teams. Their studies literally prove that a diverse workforce results in improved processes and faster and better business solutions. But more than that, the scope of the work done at Chainalysis itself is highly diverse. And so, they're building internal teams to reflect the diversity of the external solutions that they deliver.
📼 Since she joined Chainalysis, one thing that has been incredibly surprising and refreshing for Molly is the level of respect and pride that everyone has in working there and in their roles. As she says, "It's a very low ego environment. People genuinely want your feedback and genuinely want to collaborate."
Prepare For Your Interview With Chainalysis With This Tip From A Recruiter
As Molly notes, soft skills are incredibly valuable, with their importance equal to technical skills. And one of the soft skills that Chainalysis truly values is intellectual curiosity. At Chainalysis, you'll find a level of intellectual curiosity threaded throughout individuals. It's an essential quality since the team operates in the brand-new cryptocurrency and blockchain analytics space. (Talk about uncharted territory!) So, their people must have the desire to learn more about it and seek out information.
🧑💼 Are you interested in joining Chainalysis? They have open positions! To learn more, click here.
Get to know Molly
As the youngest of four girls (Go ahead say it, "Your poor father!"), one might say Molly's been a people person since the day she was born. As a kid, she looked up to her siblings and observed everything they said and did. To their dismay, this led to near-constant questioning of their behaviors. "Why" was her favorite word. Today, she still asks people "why," although now respondents give her permission to ask questions and pry into their lives. Her passion is delivering new, more meaningful, and powerful ways to listen creatively to people and then turn those emerging insights into ideas that generate results. Molly's worn many hats in her career thus far—manager, recruiter, fundraiser, salesperson, researcher, writer, marketer, and event planner. As a result, she has a unique ability to manage multiple projects and navigate complex challenges.
More About Chainalysis
By now, you may be familiar with cryptocurrencies and their mainstream growth potential. Unfortunately, a rapidly growing ecosystem can mean an increasing number of bad actors trying to take advantage of it. At Chainalysis, they believe in building trust between the key players in this space—law enforcement, regulators, cryptocurrency businesses, and financial institutions—so the industry can continue to grow. Chainalysis powers compliance, regulatory, and investigative software that detects and prevents activities on the blockchain like money laundering, terrorist financing, child exploitation, ransomware, and more. You may have heard about their role in solving the Twitter hack, assisting in counter-terrorism financing, or taking down the largest child exploitive material website in the world.
