(upbeat music) - Job hunting, you know, organization, best way to practice answers, things like that, you know, in interviews. So I'm kind of doing both at the same time. Thank you so much. Okay, bye. - All right, well, first of all, tangentially, Jesse, was that the first call we've had where someone seems to actually be walking?

- There seemed to be a lot of talk in the background. - I heard footsteps. Yeah, so I don't, can, the technology we use for people to call in, I guess that must work on your phone, right? - I think so. - Okay, so now we know. Now we know, we've never heard someone actually walking.

I think it'd be funny if the reality was, Lindsey had a really large media cart, and like on the media cart, she had a desktop computer with a monitor and like a keyboard, and then there was another wagon that had a generator in it, and there was like someone pulling the cart and someone pushing the generator, and she had like a headset on connected to the computer as she walked, trying to answer the question.

It's either that or SpeakPipe works on your phone. We'll see, but anyways, that's cool. So all right, everyone, now we know, you can answer these questions from the phone. And if you wanna know how to do this, by the way, calnewport.com/podcast, there's a link, but it's just a service called SpeakPipe, and you like record right from your web browser.

Okay, so for job interviews, so for corporate job interviews, if you're gonna be doing corporate recruiting in particular, you gotta practice that too. And the way you practice that is it has to be practice specific to those types of interviews. Just to give you a little insider look, if you're at an elite college, for example, and watching people interviewing for banking jobs or consulting jobs, there's practice sessions that they do again and again with sample types of questions.

How do you answer case questions? How do you answer brainstorming questions? Coders, so let's say you're trying to get a job as a computer programmer at Google, tell you just based on our grad students here at Georgetown, they practice a lot. And there's various tools like LeetCode, I think it's called, where you can practice the types of coding puzzles that they will give you to do on the whiteboards, but it's a very specific skill.

You have to think about corporate recruiting like you're gonna juggle. I gotta practice how to do this. Quick personal story, when I was at Dartmouth, I signed up for one of these interviews for a consulting firm. And they were doing the first pass on campus. And I was like, I don't need to practice.

I'm a smart guy, I have four Os. And just got destroyed because it was so specific. I was like, what the hell are you talking about? Because I did not practice. They're like, all right, well, I forgot the question was. It was something like, help us walk you through how you think through this question.

Like how many windows, I think the question was like, how many windows are there in Manhattan? Now to me, I was like, what the hell are you talking about? I don't know. But it turns out, oh, that's a very specific type of question that corporate recruiters ask. And there's a method for how you practice it.

And I hadn't practiced it, right? And so that interview went disastrously. So that's all I wanna say is that these type of jobs, especially for elite companies, people practice a lot, specifically a type of interview questions they're gonna do. So that is worth finding a course for. There's online training tools for different types of interviews.

There's online courses for doing different types of interviews. It is highly specific, so you do wanna practice that. So get that practice in. And it's just like with the GMAT. Once you know, I've done 100 of these type of questions. I know how to do these questions. I know how to figure out the number of windows in Manhattan.

I know how to come up with a binary search algorithm on the whiteboard that uses a single array pointer, whatever the challenge is. Like I've done it 100 times. Then you'll be confident for the interview. All right, Jesse, I think we made it. I think we made it through a whole episode live of questions and the text seems to be holding up.

So I mean, I think the only thing we're missing now is we have to figure out, do you think actual live calls might be possible one day? - If people have generators and wheelbarrows that they can take a look. - They can move their cars, yeah. We will demand that.

We will demand that you are in the wilderness on a generator with a media cart. That's the only thing that stands in our way. Actually, I see why not. I mean, they could zoom into your computer or something like that. And because your computer's hooked up to our mixing board now.

So, all right, stay tuned everyone. But the technology is advancing. This was a big step. We'll put the full video of this online as soon as that YouTube stuff gets rolling. So you can actually see a full episode video if you're curious what it looks like in here. But until then, I believe that's a full episode, Jesse.

So let's call this a wrap. (upbeat music)