What I learned from Bar Raiser Interview

Julio Anthony Leonard
3 min readOct 23, 2018

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Hi, It is me again, trying to write anything I experience the last time I go for a bar raiser interview. First of all, what is a bar raiser interview?

What is a Bar Raiser Interview?

Basically, it is a technique adopted by Amazon and Netflix, but nowadays it is being used in most tech companies. It helps companies to secure the best talent and ensure that the talent that they are going to recruit is at least better than the current employee they had. So the talent inside the company always becoming better and better, thus improve the company value significantly every time new hire is joining.

Bar raiser is a way for company to always hire better talent than existing one to ensure talent growths and the culture in the company is growing

The interviewer will try to find out what will be the interviewee brings to the table and how would these values grow the company even better than before.

How is it Conducted?

Most of the time, it is senior people or even someone who held the managerial position inside the company to interview the prospective employee. It is believed that the senior people already know how the company running and what the culture is needed inside the company to make sure that the new joiners always fulfill the empty roles. The senior management sometimes has a veto to accept or not to accept the prospective employee based on his experience interviewing. The question can span from technical question, culture question, behavioural, or even asking on our experience.

Make sure to prepare the “right thing” before any bar interviews. That right thing is yourself, make sure you know yourself the best

What I learned

Most of the time, the challenge that we should conquer is ourselves. Sometimes we are worrying about a lot of things in the interview especially when we know that it is your life deciding factor. Just make sure to calm yourself first before any interviews.

As a human, it is a bad thing to always percieve what are going to happen without realizing what is happening now

How to Prepare

The best way to prepare for a bar raiser interview is always to reflect on yourself and your experience. Looking at what is the good, the bad, and the ugly, and what lesson have we learned so far. It is always about perspective on looking back, do we really understand the path we carve, looking back what impact do we make for others and the company. This way also, we can grow ourselves to be even better.

After my experience, I think I now get a gist of how to prepare on similar things basically to give good impressions on your bar raiser interview. If most of the time you are always prepared for a coding interviews but unprepared for a bar raiser interviews, this video might help you.

Keynote

So basically, the interviewer only asks one sentence or two-sentence questions. It is the job of the prospective employee to answer and steer the direction of the topics. Make sure you study something really well and steer the direction of the topics to the things that you master and are ready to be tested. The rule is: Avoid Bullshitting

Think thrice before answering the question, we need to be clear on what we got to say and deliver it clearly

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