Be human

Here's a stat that should terrify you more than any system design question: the recruiter you're talking to today has already done three interviews before yours. Yesterday they did five. Next week, another twenty. You are, statistically, forgettable.

So don't be forgettable.

Every guide out there tells you to nail the STAR method, quantify your impact, structure your answers. Fine. Do all that. But that's the stuff that gets you considered. It's not the stuff that gets you remembered. And in a hiring process where three candidates all clear the bar, "remembered" is what tips the scale.

The Spreadsheet Problem

Picture the recruiter's day: name, years of experience, tech stack, salary expectation, notice period. Row after row. By interview four, you blur into the last three people they talked to. Same words. Same structure. Same "I'm a results-driven backend engineer with a passion for scalable systems."

Nobody remembers a spreadsheet row. People remember people.

Your Cat Walking Across the Keyboard Is a Feature, Not a Bug

Your cat jumps on the desk mid-call? Don't apologize and shove it off-camera like you committed a crime. Laugh. Say something like "Sorry, she's unionized, refuses to respect my work hours."

Why does this work? Because it's a real, unscripted moment in an interview format built entirely out of scripted ones. The recruiter has heard "tell me about a challenging project" 400 times this month. They have not heard your cat's opinion on your Java career. Guess which one sticks.

💡 You're not trying to turn the interview into a comedy show. You're trying to be a three-dimensional human for 15 seconds instead of a resume that talks

Small Talk Is Not a Waste of Time

Devs especially love to treat small talk like overhead — inefficient, no ROI, skip straight to the technical stuff. Wrong instinct. Small talk is where the actual relationship gets built, and hiring is, underneath all the process, a relationship decision.

You don't need a script for this. You need three things ready in your back pocket:

• A hobby you can talk about for 15 seconds without sounding rehearsed
• A recent trip, book, or show that meant something to you
• A genuine reaction to something on their end — their background, the weather where they are, a detail from their LinkedIn intro

"Professional" Doesn't Mean "Personality-Free"

Somewhere along the way, a lot of engineers absorbed the idea that showing personality is unprofessional — that the interview is purely a technical audit and anything human is a distraction from it. That's backwards. Nobody hires a compiler. They hire a person they'll sit next to in stand-up for the next two years.

Opening up a little — a laugh, an opinion, a "honestly that question stumped me for a second, nice one" — doesn't undercut your competence. It's the context that makes your competence land. The recruiter isn't choosing between "professional you" and "human you." They're choosing whether they can picture working with you at all. Give them something to picture.