iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process, part 2: technical screening
This is the second article from my “iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process” series. You can read the first one about writing a good CV here:
iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process, part 1: CV
In this part, I’m going to cover the first stage of a recruitment process which is a technical screening. It’s usually a short (20–50 mins) call with a recruiter from a company that you applied to or a recruiter from some agency working for that company.
During that short call you are going to talk about the following topics:
- recruiter and company introduction,
- your introduction,
- your CV walkthrough,
- your motivation for applying to that company,
- your questions.
Recruiter and company introduction
At the very beginning a recruiter will introduce themselves and a company / position they are recruiting for. Remember to do your own research beforehand anyway. You will get to know how the recruitment process in that company looks like, how many stages there are etc.
Your introduction
You will be asked to quickly introduce yourself. Your answer shouldn’t be very long and detailed at this point. I recommend to say that you are an iOS developer, you’ve been programming for X years, using Swift and / or Objective-C programming languages, you can mention your experience with other platforms (backend or Android for example) as well and at the end I would say what company you work at currently and what your role is.
Your CV walkthrough
You will have an opportunity to go a bit more in depth in terms of your experience and career so far. Try to highlight the most interesting technical challenges that you have faced at each of the previous companies (and at the current one too of course) but also remember to choose the most relevant ones for the position you applied for.
Your motivation for applying to that company
This is a very important question. The first one from a “company culture fit” series. There will be another recruitment process stage dedicated to this topic later, where you will be asked more questions checking if your personality matches what they company is looking for. There is no one-fits-all answer to this question. Try to show that you share company’s values, that money is not the most important factor for you while looking for a job. There is always someone who will be willing to pay more than your current company. If that is your main focus, that means you will easily leave the company even in a few months which is a red flag for a recruiter :)
Your questions
This part is usually left for the end of a technical screening but it doesn’t mean it’s the least important one. It is actually important. Asking questions about a role and a company shows your interest, your excitement, that you are really interested in that position. I remember myself looking for the first job some years ago and answering that question “No, thank you, I think I have no questions at this point.”. I know how wrong that was now, after 8 years, and it was definitely a red flag for the companies back then.
That’s it for this part of my “iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process” series :) I hope you learnt something new while reading it. I will publish the next part about a technical interview, including a list of the iOS topics that you may be asked about (all iOS developer levels, from Junior to Senior) in more or less a week.
If you liked this article and the series in general and would like to be updated once I publish the new articles, feel free to follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/dammarpol and add my blog https://damianmarkowski.com/blog/ to your bookmarks. See you next time 👋
