Your essential EM Interview crash course. Learn strategies from FAANG hiring managers to demonstrate your leadership skills & experience to interviewers.

Engineering leaders serve as a backbone of an organization and play a significant role in how a company operates. Companies invest significantly in hiring good managers through an interview process designed to measure a broad spectrum of candidates’ technical and leadership competencies. 
In this course, you’ll examine the interview process, understand the engineering management hierarchy and learn about the leadership phone screen. You’ll explore various engineering management aspects, including people management, project management, organization building, managing collaborations, and personal strengths. Next, you’ll explore good interview questions and possible good answers. 
By the end of this course, you’ll have a deeper understanding of the engineering leadership interview process, leadership skills, and the ability to articulate situational stories from past experiences. You’ll also learn the importance of building a story bank to recall relevant experiences during the interviews effectively.

Grokking the Engineering Management and Leadership Interviews

Most companies conduct interviews for hiring in specific teams. In case the company is conducting interviews for a generic EM role, the team match is done at a later stage. If the candidate is being interviewed for a specific team, the recruiter may dig deeper into a candidate’s experience to find a potential match.


## Background questions


Background questions are normally lightweight and act as great icebreakers for follow-up conversations about people and project management.

The interviewer would like to know more about the current role of the candidate in the organization they are working in. 
 

The primary objective of these questions is to understand if the candidate's background matches the job requirements. Background questions generally cover the following areas:

 

* **Team size:** The answer depends on the company size. The main purpose of asking this question is to determine the candidate’s level in the leadership hierarchy. It can vary from company to company.


   * **EM1** is expected to have supported a team of 8–15 people.

   * **EM2** is expected to have supported a team of 20–45 people.

   * **Director++** level is is expected to have dealt with a team of 45+ people.

  The size of the team is not the only indicator of an individual’s level. It is complemented by team structure and project profile as key indicators of the candidate’s level.


* **Team structure**: This includes team hierarchy, i.e., how many tech leads, team leads, engineering managers (EMs), individual contributors (ICs), senior individual contributors are in the team. The company conducting the phone screen will be interested in knowing about how the candidate has managed people working in different roles in their team. Normally, senior managers have experience managing more diverse teams.


Learn about the leadership phone screen and the possible questions that can be asked.

Before We Begin

Introduction

People Management

Project Management

Organization Building

Managing Collaborations

Behavioural Interviews

Conclusion

Leadership/Management Phone Screen

Interview structure