A junior interview: how it actually goes

The usual sequence

1. A short call with a recruiter — 20–30 minutes. Basic checks: are you genuinely looking, what are your expectations, do their terms work. Almost no technical questions.

2. The technical interview — 40–90 minutes. The main stage. Language questions, a problem, a discussion of your project.

3. A conversation with the team or manager — 30–60 minutes. Motivation, working with people, what you expect from the job.

4. Sometimes a take-home task — before or after the technical stage.

At small companies the stages collapse into a single hour-long conversation.

What's actually assessed

Not the volume of knowledge. Nobody expects a beginner to know everything. They expect you to think and to learn.

How you reason. The main thing. They watch how you tackle an unfamiliar problem: do you clarify, do you check your answer, do you admit a mistake.

Whether you're workable with. How you take a comment, whether you disagree constructively, whether you listen.

How true the CV is. Tested through your project: two or three questions reveal whether you built it or copied it.

On the project discussion

The most predictable part, and the most often failed. Prepare for:

• Why that storage choice?
• What was hardest?
• What would you change now?
• How would you scale it?
• Who did what, if it was a team project?

Each needs an answer. If the project came from a video tutorial, there are no answers — and that's clear within a minute.

How to prepare

Re-read your own code before the interview. It sounds absurd, but people genuinely forget what they wrote three months ago.

Say the project story out loud. Two minutes: what, why, how it's built, what was hard. Out loud, not in your head — the difference is enormous.

Work ten simple problems. Not to memorise solutions but to restore the habit of thinking while observed.

Prepare questions for them. About the process, mentoring, and what you'd actually do in the first months.

When you don't know the answer

Say you don't, and offer how you'd reason about it. That's a normal and respected answer.

Bad: silence, blind guessing, trying to steer away. All of it is visible and scores worse than honest ignorance.

Afterwards

Write down what was asked and where you floundered. After three or four interviews the repeating questions become obvious — and that's the best preparation programme you could compile.