What is screening interview?
At least at the time of writing, a software engineering role is a coveted position in the industry. Whenever a position opens up, it attracts multiple applications from various candidates. The automated resume screening process and the recruiters work diligently to identify candidates who should be interviewed. However, before conducting the main interview round which can span a full business day and can cost the company a whole lot more, another round of screening is done to ensure that the candidate is knowledgable in writing codes and will not have dismal performance at the main interview round. This is the screening interview round. Putting it simply, the screening interview round can be seen as a cost and time optimization step for the company, recruiters and interviewers.
What to expect at screening interview?
First things first.. After your recruiter mentions about the screening interview, you should ask them about what to expect in the screening interview, including, how long it will be, what kind of questions are asked (algorithmic, behavioral, anything else?), who will conduct the interview, can you ask them questions about the company or position to which you are applying, will the interviewers belong to the same team to which you are applying to, and, if there are any guidance on preparing for the interview. Give a higher priority to the information that you receive from the recruiter compared to the content below. Equally important, when taking the interview, follow any instructions given by your interviewer. If you have any questions / suggestions / doubts, then ask your interviewer about it, and do not just hold it back! Any and all technical discussions during the interview showcases your skills. The goal of interview is to showcase your skill, which is primarily achieved via coding; But, it does not preclude other technical discussions to be had with the interviewer.
Normally, the screening interview goes as follows.. it is about 1 hour long. You'll be given an algorithm based question. You are expected to talk aloud your thoughts and work with interviewer. Essentially, it will be like a less-hard, less-restrictive version of a whiteboard interview. There may be some, but not a lot of behavioral questions which are covered in details in a later section. Some companies can have alternate version of screening interview. For example, when interviewing for Capital One, I received a take-home assignment. Within 3 days, I had to pull code from a Git repository, add web services and push the code back. Side-note: This means that certain companies will require you to have a working knowledge of git commands even as part of the screening interview! So best to not delay leaning basic git. When interviewing for Indeed.com, the screening consisted of algorithm based question(s), but it was done by a third party and 2 attempts were provided to clear the screening (Thank God! ..and Indeed).
There are 2 main differences between a screening interview and a whiteboard interview: (1) screening interviews are judged more leniently than the whiteboard section in the man interview. It is understandable that a candidate may have higher anxiety levels because they are engaging with an interviewer for the first time, or after a long time. Also, the goal here is not to identify if a candidate should be hired, but to reject the ones who may not perform well in the main interview. If your current interview is somewhat below par, then then interviewer will warn you to focus more on the main interview. This being said, remember that just because it is a screening interview, it doesn't mean that you should only focus on getting the corect algorithm and should totally ignore other aspects of writing a clean code. You can still identify if some code is becoming complex, or variables aren't nicely named, or if edge cases are not being properly handled, etc. It's just that in main interview, you may be required to spend time to fix those issues, but in the screening interview, you can just mention it and not primarily focus on correcting it. (2) It is rare/never that a main interview will be conducted by interviewers who don't already work at the company. However, it may be possible for the screening interviews to be conducted by a third party who then compiles the result of interviews and sends it to the recruiter or hring company so that they can take a decision.
See a later section on questions that you can ask interviewers. Depending on whether your interviewer is from same company or same team as which you are applying to, you can ask them a few questions. If the screening interview was done by a third party, then they may not be able to answer any company / team related questions. Do thank your interviewers! After the interview, reach out to your recruiter asking them about the next steps in the application process.
Keep record of interview experience
Immediately after the interview experience, I strongly suggest writing down the interview experience in some diary/notes. Side-note: Also, send a letter to the recruiter thanking the interviewers, maybe share a few lines on what you feel about the interview, and ask the recruiter on what are the next steps after the interview. Coming back, the suggestion to record the interview experience is so that you can accumulate insight from each interview experience and can apply the cumulative insights to the next interview. Maybe something went right and you got invited for a main interview; In this case, you should look back on notes to identify what went right, so that you can reuse it. Or, if something went wrong, then you want to identify what might have gone wrong so that you can avoid doing it in future. For the question that was asked in the screening interview, you can check if the response you provided was the ideal algorithm, or if there are better solutions to the problem. You can also search for other questions that use a data structure similar to what was used to solve the screening interview question. In conclusion, keep a record of your interview experience because it will be really useful later on.