Preparation for FAANG Interviews – How do I prepare for them?

I know I’ve written and discussed this with my coaching clients before – truthfully I didn’t do *any* preparation for my Google or Amazon interviews.

For Amazon it was before my “aha!” moment so I simply walked in and told my stories with no preparation. I had been in many interviews before that – Microsoft, Intel and others (and landed jobs) so I believed I could walk in and wing it. That was even after the recruiter sent me a lot of instructional material explicitly about “how to interview with Amazon”.

Knowing what I know now, I could have saved myself days and even weeks of stress waiting for the response from each of my interview loops everywhere.

Not only that, it’s very possible I might have scored better jobs with better seniority and salary had I prepared.

I may have gotten better job offers & compensation had I prepared like I do today

It is *very important* to do your preparation for FAANG interviews. It’s very important to prepare for any interview with any company worth the time.

My first strong suggestion is to do research into the company, and actually in the team or division you specifically want to go work for. What products have they released and what does it appear that they’re working on now? No matter how secretive companies are, they still telegraph hidden messages about the cool tech they’re working on that will result in some cool user or customer experience. Its how they attract the best and the brightest.

The best & brightest do their homework and know exactly what they are looking for as the next step in their careers.

Second is to do some retrospective and honest analysis of your career and experience. I’ll be very straightforward here and tell you the if you are a CTO or VP of a small startup that you founded – that likely wont translate into a very senior role with Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple. Having senior individual contributor experience across a range of medium and large tech companies is far more qualifying for a principal or senior level role. Company culture is everything – and being the big fish in a small pond doesn’t give you that experience of collaboration and compromise that is needed in the larger organizations.

So set your targets realistically and revise your LinkedIn and CV to reflect accurately what your role and responsibilities were.

Third – write down the top 6–10 projects / programs that you were a key contributor to. If you’re a more junior IC then the top 10 where you did something special and impactful. Solving a problem that was vexing the team, or writing an object library / set of extensions for a feature that is brand new. You want to present yourself well in the interview, and simply stating the projects you were involved in doesn’t achieve that level. Note the specifics as bullet points because interviewers will want you to tell your *stories* from your experiences in a very specific STAR format that is guaranteed to present in the best way possible.

A job interview for any company isn’t a life or death event – even if it is

Finally – remember this isn’t life and death. You have as much of a risk professionally in accepting a job with a FAANG company as they have in hiring you. Be critical but positive throughout the process, make sure this is the right place and the right role for you. Nothing can make your life more miserable than to take a job that you have zero interest in simply because of the prestige and potential you believe the opportunity will afford you. For sure, working at a FAANG company looks amazing on your resume if you’re there for any good length of time – but it will actually be a detriment if you leave in some fashion within a year or two. Most recruiters see that as a warning sign of a difficult colleague or poor performance, or often simply flagging job hopping to achieve rapid career escalation.

Be sure that this is the role and place for you, and you will be highly successful in a flourishing career

I end this with promotion of my services – we work on all of these items in our sessions to ensure that you’re prepared with your stories, mentally and emotionally for your interview loops. These loops can be very stressful if you don’t go in with the right mindset, and I’ve coached many Director/VP/C-suite people who failed their first go rounds with Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc… It turned out that they needed to learn how to relax and present themselves as the senior level highly intelligent people that we knew they were. After our sessions, they did far better in their interviews and many received immediate offers from their companies. I didn’t teach them how to cheat and present themselves as better than they were – I just got them to relax and project to the interviewers how competent and how great a teammate and leader they would be.

Do your Preparation for FAANG Interviews with Prodigy Interview Coaching

Check out Prodigy Career Coaching for more about my services. My website is brand new and I’m continuing to fill in thoughts like this in the Community pages. To date I’ve helped some 450 people over the last 27 months subcontract coaching through IGotAnOffer and Carrus. Many have achieved levels of success doing interviews they didn’t think they were capable of. If you’re asking, Three or Four sessions is enough to get you to a higher degree of confidence to do the full set of interviews with improved chances of getting that dream job offer.