Interview Kickstart Review: Steven Isaac’s Journey to Becoming a CTO
Cracking technical interviews at FAANG+ companies requires diligent effort and a solid preparation strategy. Due to the intense competition and difficulty of these interviews, a large percentage of engineers who apply to these companies do not make the cut. The average acceptance rate at most FAANG and Tier-1 companies is less than 5%.
FAANG+ interviews fundamentally evaluate your coding and systems design capabilities. In this review of Steven Isaac, who landed the CTO’s role at BoomPop, we’ll talk about his experience with Interview Kickstart, his learnings, and the aspects that helped him ace technical interviews.
Below are some key areas of IK’s course that Steven Isaac reviews:
Resume and LinkedIn Profile Building
Cracking FAANG+ interviews isn’t possible without actually getting an opportunity to interview. FAANG+ recruiters get thousands of applications throughout the year and don’t spend too much time looking at minute details in resumes or LinkedIn profiles before shortlisting candidates for interviews.
Interview Kickstart’s excellent resume formatting strategies and professional branding WORK. The resume structure auto-scans perfectly, and the templates allow recruiters to scan the essential information effortlessly. Moreso, the LinkedIn profile-building aspect of the course plays well with LinkedIn’s bullion algorithms, enabling your profile to get shortlisted for interviews.
I had an astounding uptick in the number of recruiters reaching out to me. From just 1–2 recruiters reaching me over a whole month, I had 1–3 reach-outs every week after going through IK’s professional branding exercise.
I personally feel that regularly applying to jobs on LinkedIn is important, as you gain extremely valuable experience from interviewing often. The more you interview, the more likely you are to crack the more difficult interviews at FAANG and tier-1 companies.
Interview Kickstart Experience- Live Classes, Mock Interviews, and More
Technical interviews these days have become significantly challenging. The focus is on three main areas — coding/programming, scalable/distributed systems, and behavioral/leadership. Interview Kickstart’s program is built to achieve one thing — to help you excel in all these three areas.
Interview Kickstart’s live classes are intense and interactive. The lessons in coding and systems design are taught by FAANG+ hiring managers, making it extremely beneficial for students. The depth of learning at IK is directly tied to your effort.
The coding exercises and in-house coding platform were very helpful. The platform, Uplevel, has a brilliant system to run code and a wide range of test cases. A drawback I found was that, as a JavaScript programmer, the documented input parameters were sometimes not quite right. I had to manually do a console.log() on the input parameters to see what they meant before writing code on the platform. But all in all, the coding platform is excellent for practicing writing code and running multiple test cases for your code.
The best approach is to focus on what is being taught in the current week, even if you are a bit behind on the previous week’s lessons or assignments. If not, you can fall behind wholly, making it difficult to catch up. The real trick is that if you’re falling a little behind, cover about 80% of the areas. The pre-class, along with self-paced study materials and video lectures from multiple instructors, can help you get a stronghold of core programming and design concepts.
Mock Interviews
For me, mock interviews are perhaps the best part of the course. You can study all you want, but the mocks are where the real value is. You get the opportunity to practice a ton of mock interviews with real FAANG+ hiring managers and recruiters, giving you a concrete edge over the rest of the competition.
The highlight of IK’s mock interviews is the depth and extent of feedback you’ll receive. You actually need to put in the work to implement the feedback correctly and ready yourself for the next mock. There’s no free lunch at Interview Kickstart.
Behavioral Interview Training
Behavioral interviews have never been more important than it is today. Even if you meet the expectations in the coding and design interviews, not doing so in behavioral interviews can cost you the offer.
Most candidates tend to ramble at behavioral interviews, not framing answers crisply and correctly. Interview Kickstart’s behavioral interview training is extremely good at helping you keep your answers brief and to the point.
I personally bombed a lot of interviews at the beginning because I lacked the necessary direction to excel in this area. IK’s training helped me understand these interviews better, boosting my confidence and performance in the process.
Advice to IK’s Students and Those Who Wish to Take Their Careers to the Next Level
At Interview Kickstart, I had the unique experience of working with FAANG+ hiring managers and accomplished career coaches.
I went through interview processes at 8 different companies. I feel that regularly applying to jobs on LinkedIn is important, as you gain valuable experience from interviewing often.
Interview processes at top companies take about 5–7 weeks. I advise that even if you are in the middle of the interview process, keep applying to companies. Nothing teaches you more than actually interviewing. The more you interview, the more likely you are to crack the more difficult interviews at FAANG and tier-1 companies.
As for mock interviews, I advise students to practice even behavioral interview mocks apart from the technical ones. One of the main reasons I took up Interview Kickstart’s course is that I bombed several interviews because I lacked in this area (behavioral/leadership interviews). I knew my approach to these interviews was right, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to do them better.
Ready to Prepare for Your FAANG+ interview? Join us today.
Interview Kickstart has trained over 13,500 engineers to crack the most challenging tech interviews at Tier-1 companies. We can help you too! You’ll learn how to nail these interviews from tech leads and hiring managers of top-tier companies. Sign up for our free webinar today to learn more about our programs.
Or visit www.interviewkickstart.com.
