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I made it the final round "panel" interviews with Amazon for a hardware engineering role. Anyone got any tips or experiences with Amazon interviews for a HW-oriented role?
It's 5 hours total, first two rounds are with managers. What I've done in the past is give as many examples as I could for HW solutions that I worked on highlighting the tech skills. Wondering if I can do more?
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McKinsey & Company Hi everyone. Hope all is well.
Recently took the McKinsey & Company game (not sure if I have an interview yet but preparing nonetheless). It’s an entry level business analyst position and an entry level digital position and was wondering if anyone wanted to case prep with me. I’m willing to work on anyones time zone. (I’m located in Sydney, Australia).
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Is it worth it to get azure certificates ?
I made it the final round "panel" interviews with Amazon for a hardware engineering role. Anyone got any tips or experiences with Amazon interviews for a HW-oriented role?
It's 5 hours total, first two rounds are with managers. What I've done in the past is give as many examples as I could for HW solutions that I worked on highlighting the tech skills. Wondering if I can do more?
Bowl Leader
I don't think it will impact you negatively. Even if the self-employed work isn't related to the job you applied for, it still proves a lot of soft skills I think.
yeah definitely, I've seen self-employed people get great offers at FAANG because they have so many imp soft skills around collaboration, management etc - I think it puts you at an advantage personally!
In my experience (I’ve been doing a lot of interviewing and talking to recruiters) companies see consulting work as the best kind of experience because it shows leadership & initiative. I was interviewing at Amazon and I talked to quite a few people who owned their own business before being hired there.
If I were you I would approach your interviews with confidence in your unique background.
For me it would depend on two things:
1. How much do you know about the industry ie was your business in my industry or did you have prior experience in my industry (doesn’t matter as much as the next one).
2. How you explain wanting to no longer work for yourself. I know a lot of people think about going out on their own and working for themselves. Having never done it personally I would imagine that there’s a lot of freedom that goes along with it versus a company where there’s rules and bureaucracy. It’s a lot like if a senior manager to company interviews at a bigger company for an individual contributor role basically a lot of the same concerns.
All that aside in my career so far I have hired about ~20 people and 1 person out of that 20 fits your situation. They were one of the best hires I made easily.
You do not have a 2-year gap on your Resume since you can list all those consulting projects & their favorable metrics (ex. Raised Client Company’s PPC Conversion Rate by X % in 30 days) under your small company’s name.
Also politely give friendly past colleagues and clients to be your honestly favorable References of how professional, personable, & adaptive you hare even throughout your self-employment years, so they can vouch for you as you get screened for positions.
The only so-called drawback you might encounter is if you end up being screened/interviewed by HR persons, recruiters, or executives who - due to their own inexperience (never been gainfully self-employed themselves/never hired former freelancers before), lousy training (some have stupidly been brainwashed to think that all self-employed people are egotistical types who are never going to be loyal, reliable W2 employees) or possible negative experiences w/ bad apple past formerly self-employed folks as “incompatible cultural fits” (their code for someone who is less likely to be an unconditional yes person or might clash personality-wise with existing autocrat executives).
Unfortunately there could be some people out there who willfully block great talent, self-employed or not, from joining their teams because they are afraid of having their own incompetence & inflexibility to get finally exposed & fixed.
If a company rejects you for being self-employed, then consider it a good riddance that you won’t have to work w/ such outdated mindset/narrow-minded folks who likely throw talented, ethical people under the bus all the time, just to give job security to ineffective yes people & delusional leaders who blindly follow lousy business practices until they will go under.
FYI there may be employers might just want to make sure you respect non-disclosure/non-compete agreements to protect intellectual property and not finding their own clients getting pirated by your own freelance practice.
Also, there is nothing wrong w/ holding down multiple income streams and different types of professional networks because naturally no sensible person wants to put all their eggs into one basket alone.
Being a W2 means you get benefits to help w/ your taxes, retirement, health insurance, possible help w/ student loan repayment &/or advanced education opportunities, etc. while also making one be less isolated away from people & ideas who can give fresh outlooks on our competitive world.
This is why wise interviewers/employers worth working for respect & understand why talented freelancers do explore well-suited work cultures w/ W2 work.
Just strategically widen your job search to include even opportunities that may not be widely advertised but are posted in a professional networking group, school alumni group, known by friends/contacts, etc.
That way, you hopefully won’t waste time just filling some recruiters’ interview quota and do end up talking to worthwhile employers who sincerely need proven problem-solving self-starters to join their team of cooperation-driven self-starters too.
This is excellent perspective/advice!
I was a self employed consultant for a number of years and this has never hurt my job prospects in a corpirate environment. Do be completely honest though when they ask you why you sre no linger self employed.
What kind of consulting did you do? Trying to get into that myself.
I used to take do tech support and website design focusing on small businesses. They would call me to do onsite troubleshooting and upgrades. On more than one occasion I was asked to implement accounting software. This was before "geek squad" was popular. While lucrative, I decided that I really liked the accounting software and focused on becoming more profient so then, my career pivoted to being a bookkeeper and then a payroll specialist.
You can put your company as the company you’ve been working for the past 2 years and list your work as experience. You can also make a company page on LinkedIn to add it there as well. If you don’t wanna do that you can explain the work you’ve been doing during the gap.
I have been seeing lately more acceptance around employment gaps. I’ve seen job descriptions targeting people with employment gaps and Returnships, jobs that help you get back into the workforce. So even though not everyone will favor it, it’s slowly becoming normalized.
Also we are in the great resignation, companies are hiring left and right so it shouldn’t be too bad. I heard January there going to be an even more bigger ‘great resignation’.