What's Your Advice for Job Hunting? | Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport

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00:00:02.580 | - Job hunting, you know, organization,

00:00:09.060 | best way to practice answers, things like that,

00:00:14.320 | you know, in interviews.

00:00:19.040 | So I'm kind of doing both at the same time.

00:00:22.380 | Thank you so much.

00:00:24.400 | Okay, bye.

00:00:25.240 | - All right, well, first of all,

00:00:29.640 | tangentially, Jesse, was that the first call we've had

00:00:33.680 | where someone seems to actually be walking?

00:00:36.160 | - There seemed to be a lot of talk in the background.

00:00:38.280 | - I heard footsteps.

00:00:39.920 | Yeah, so I don't, can, the technology we use

00:00:43.600 | for people to call in, I guess that must work

00:00:45.560 | on your phone, right?

00:00:47.120 | - I think so.

00:00:48.040 | - Okay, so now we know.

00:00:49.520 | Now we know, we've never heard someone actually walking.

00:00:51.600 | I think it'd be funny if the reality was,

00:00:53.560 | Lindsey had a really large media cart,

00:00:57.040 | and like on the media cart, she had a desktop computer

00:00:59.720 | with a monitor and like a keyboard,

00:01:02.340 | and then there was another wagon that had a generator in it,

00:01:05.360 | and there was like someone pulling the cart

00:01:07.400 | and someone pushing the generator,

00:01:08.880 | and she had like a headset on connected to the computer

00:01:11.360 | as she walked, trying to answer the question.

00:01:14.640 | It's either that or SpeakPipe works on your phone.

00:01:18.520 | We'll see, but anyways, that's cool.

00:01:21.680 | So all right, everyone, now we know,

00:01:22.640 | you can answer these questions from the phone.

00:01:24.320 | And if you wanna know how to do this, by the way,

00:01:26.580 | calnewport.com/podcast, there's a link,

00:01:28.920 | but it's just a service called SpeakPipe,

00:01:31.040 | and you like record right from your web browser.

00:01:33.960 | Okay, so for job interviews,

00:01:35.320 | so for corporate job interviews,

00:01:37.300 | if you're gonna be doing corporate recruiting in particular,

00:01:39.920 | you gotta practice that too.

00:01:42.400 | And the way you practice that is it has to be practice

00:01:45.200 | specific to those types of interviews.

00:01:48.060 | Just to give you a little insider look,

00:01:50.040 | if you're at an elite college, for example,

00:01:54.000 | and watching people interviewing for banking jobs

00:01:58.180 | or consulting jobs, there's practice sessions

00:02:03.060 | that they do again and again

00:02:04.660 | with sample types of questions.

00:02:06.220 | How do you answer case questions?

00:02:07.780 | How do you answer brainstorming questions?

00:02:10.020 | Coders, so let's say you're trying to get a job

00:02:12.220 | as a computer programmer at Google,

00:02:14.180 | tell you just based on our grad students here at Georgetown,

00:02:16.740 | they practice a lot.

00:02:19.180 | And there's various tools like LeetCode,

00:02:21.100 | I think it's called, where you can practice

00:02:23.060 | the types of coding puzzles that they will give you

00:02:25.440 | to do on the whiteboards, but it's a very specific skill.

00:02:28.720 | You have to think about corporate recruiting

00:02:30.460 | like you're gonna juggle.

00:02:32.380 | I gotta practice how to do this.

00:02:34.820 | Quick personal story, when I was at Dartmouth,

00:02:37.660 | I signed up for one of these interviews

00:02:40.240 | for a consulting firm.

00:02:42.060 | And they were doing the first pass on campus.

00:02:44.060 | And I was like, I don't need to practice.

00:02:46.280 | I'm a smart guy, I have four Os.

00:02:48.020 | And just got destroyed because it was so specific.

00:02:51.660 | I was like, what the hell are you talking about?

00:02:53.820 | Because I did not practice.

00:02:54.860 | They're like, all right, well, I forgot the question was.

00:02:56.740 | It was something like, help us walk you through

00:02:59.260 | how you think through this question.

00:03:00.300 | Like how many windows, I think the question was like,

00:03:02.460 | how many windows are there in Manhattan?

00:03:05.140 | Now to me, I was like, what the hell are you talking about?

00:03:06.860 | I don't know.

00:03:07.700 | But it turns out, oh, that's a very specific type

00:03:09.540 | of question that corporate recruiters ask.

00:03:11.500 | And there's a method for how you practice it.

00:03:13.260 | And I hadn't practiced it, right?

00:03:15.260 | And so that interview went disastrously.

00:03:17.380 | So that's all I wanna say is that these type of jobs,

00:03:21.540 | especially for elite companies, people practice a lot,

00:03:23.540 | specifically a type of interview questions they're gonna do.

00:03:25.500 | So that is worth finding a course for.

00:03:28.900 | There's online training tools

00:03:30.260 | for different types of interviews.

00:03:31.620 | There's online courses

00:03:32.900 | for doing different types of interviews.

00:03:34.340 | It is highly specific, so you do wanna practice that.

00:03:38.100 | So get that practice in.

00:03:40.340 | And it's just like with the GMAT.

00:03:42.180 | Once you know, I've done 100 of these type of questions.

00:03:44.860 | I know how to do these questions.

00:03:46.060 | I know how to figure out the number of windows in Manhattan.

00:03:48.460 | I know how to come up with a binary search algorithm

00:03:51.540 | on the whiteboard that uses a single array pointer,

00:03:55.980 | whatever the challenge is.

00:03:57.620 | Like I've done it 100 times.

00:03:59.300 | Then you'll be confident for the interview.

00:04:01.940 | All right, Jesse, I think we made it.

00:04:05.740 | I think we made it through a whole episode live

00:04:08.700 | of questions and the text seems to be holding up.

00:04:13.700 | So I mean, I think the only thing we're missing now

00:04:15.420 | is we have to figure out,

00:04:17.340 | do you think actual live calls might be possible one day?

00:04:20.300 | - If people have generators and wheelbarrows

00:04:24.020 | that they can take a look.

00:04:24.860 | - They can move their cars, yeah.

00:04:26.540 | We will demand that.

00:04:27.780 | We will demand that you are in the wilderness

00:04:30.140 | on a generator with a media cart.

00:04:32.100 | That's the only thing that stands in our way.

00:04:35.140 | Actually, I see why not.

00:04:36.180 | I mean, they could zoom into your computer

00:04:39.340 | or something like that.

00:04:40.220 | And because your computer's hooked up

00:04:41.660 | to our mixing board now.

00:04:42.620 | So, all right, stay tuned everyone.

00:04:43.900 | But the technology is advancing.

00:04:46.300 | This was a big step.

00:04:47.700 | We'll put the full video of this online

00:04:49.940 | as soon as that YouTube stuff gets rolling.

00:04:53.140 | So you can actually see a full episode video

00:04:55.460 | if you're curious what it looks like in here.

00:04:57.780 | But until then, I believe that's a full episode, Jesse.

00:05:00.420 | So let's call this a wrap.

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What's Your Advice for Job Hunting? | Deep Questions Podcast with Cal Newport

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