7 Steps to Prepare for a .Net Job Interview

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Our department has gone through some changes lately; some changes have affected the process we follow when interviewing. Since I know I will be doing lots of interviewing this month, I have been thinking a lot about what we have done right in our process, and what can be improved. Here is the process that we go through in our department to prepare for interviews.

1. Define a Process

As an interviewer, one of my objectives throughout the interviewing process is to provide as much consistency as possible. Define a process that is consistent and repeatable. Then, when comparing one candidate to another, you will be comparing them win the same questions, with the same process. It will also mean that you are always prepared for the next interview cycle with little effort.

2. Write A Great Job Description

The Job Description that you write is what will let your recruiters, consulting companies, and candidates know exactly what you are looking for. It is important to list everything that you are looking for:

  • Technical skills (i.e. – Visual Studio .Net 2005, ASP.Net Ajax, SQL Server 2005, etc.)
  • Specific Education Requirements (i.e. – Bachelor’s Degree Preferred, etc.)
  • Certifications (i.e. MCSD, PMP, etc)
  • Methodologies (i.e. – SDLC, Agile, SCRUM, etc.)
  • Years of Experience (i.e. – Junior level with 2 years experience or less, etc.)
  • Project Management Skills (i.e. – 3 years managing projects with a budget of $1M or greater)
  • Communication Skills (i.e. – Written, Verbal, Able to work with clients to collect detailed requirements, etc.)
  • Other Intangibles – (i.e. – Energetic, “Do It Right” over “Get It Done”, able to work on multiple projects, etc.)

3. Offer A Competitive Rate

You need to know what the people you are looking to hire are worth. If you are not offering a competitive rate, then you will not be able to attract, obtain, and retain the talent you are looking for. If you can, research market rates for your open position, particularly with your competitors.

4. Follow A Proven Recruitment Process

Whether you have a business process for recruitment, have a third party company that manages it, work with recruitment and consulting companies, or post resumes on Dice and Monster, you need to get the work out about your open position and collect those resumes. These sources need to align with the types of candidates you are looking for. Some sources are for specific technologies or skills, so be sure what you are looking for and what your source can offer match.

5. Screen Your Candidates

Once your open position is posted, you will be flooded with resumes. With all the other things you are busy doing, it will be difficult to keep up with the influx. You will not be able to schedule face-to-face interviews with everyone. The best way to whittle down your pile of prospective candidates is to phone screen the candidates. Prioritize your candidates in the order in which you want to interview them. Then you phone screen them in groups of three to five at a time. The phone screens should be short, ask a wide variety of questions, and be sure the candidate meets the minimum qualifications. Be sure you stay consistent – ask the same questions, and stay with the same people screening the candidates. As you find candidates you want to see more of, schedule them for a face-to-face interview.

6. Script Your Face to Face Interview

You should have a planned script that outlines your face-to-face interviews. Knowing exactly what you want to cover in advance and following the script will keep the process consistent and make it easier to rate the candidates. The steps we follow to conduct an interview will be the topic of another post.

7. Plan your Questions in Advance

In the interview process, it is a good idea to have more than one person interview the candidate (it would be even better if you can interview your candidate all together). Write down your questions in advance and assigning certain sections of questions to each person. You can compile your questions from my .Net Hiring Managers Resource, or from your own resources. Make a worksheet of the questions, with space to jot down notes about their answers and your thoughts during the interview. It might help to come up with a rating scale of 1 to 10 to rate the answers you get. Again, this will make rating the candidate objective, consistent, and easy to gather and summarize the opinions of all the interviewers.

Have I missed anything? Do you disagree with anything here? What process do you follow? Do you have a best practice that you depend on that is not in these steps?

Gatineau Beta is Open for Applicants

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Ian Thomas is a Microsoft employee in their Digital Advertising Solutions group.  He is “responsible for bringing Gatineau to market,” as his blog states.  Gatineau is in essence a Microsoft Competitor to Google Analytics.  Microsoft already has adCenter, just as Google has AdSense and AdWords.  You can read all about his work and his perspectives on web analytics on his blog called Lies, Damn Lies.  I am a frequent reader, and his articles are insightful and informative. 

His recent post announces “Gatineau beta access request form online.”  Now you can go to his online form and request access to Gatineau Beta.  You will need to have an adCenter account.  If you do not, don’t worry – you will be able to register for one as part of the Gatineau Beta, but you will need to pay a $5 one-time fee. 

I have signed up for a beta account, and want to try it out on my blog Pixelated Views.  It will give me lots of great insight as to how it works and what its impact will be on Internet Marketing and Web Analytics. 

The 3 Different Hats of a Search Engine Optimizer

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Optimizing your page for search engines is risky business – one wrong move, and all of a sudden your site is de-listed.  There are three lines you can walk while optimizing your site, each with an increasing level of risk – White Hat, Gray Hat, and Black Hat.

White Hat

SEO experts that follow the path of the White Hat are abiding by the recommendations laid out by the search engines, such as Google’s Webmaster Guidelines , Yahoo’s Directory Help, and MSN Live Search Site Owner Help.  By following these guidelines, your site will slowly climb through the ranks , and there will be no risk of being de-listed.  Most techniques for optimizing content, keywords, and meta tags fall into this category.  Typically White Hat optimizers focus on content and customer first, then optimization second. 

Black Hat

Black Hat SEO is on the other end of the spectrum.  These techniques, if discovered by search engines, will have your site removed from their index.  You will need to make changes to your site to bring you into compliance with their guidelines before they will accept your submissions again.  Black Hat Techniques may move you through the search engine indexes much quicker, but at a higher level of risk.  Techniques for Black Hat optimizers typically leverage techniques such as Google bombing, cloaking, and redirecting. 

Gray Hat

This is not quite what one would expect, i.e. the hat in between.  Gray Hat optimizers are a lighter shade of black more than a darker shade of white.  They are taking advantage of techniques that are not as well defined as Black Hat, or are too new to be well defined as Black Hat.  These SEOs are accepting more risk and using questionable or discouraged techniques, but are not banned by the search engines.  Techniques such as link farms, automated blogging, and gaming social media and web 2.0 sites. 

Your Hat

So the real difference between the different SEO hats is the amount of risk.  If you think about it, the hats are better explained as more of a continuum, with many Shades of SEO.  What are your thoughts about the risk vs. reward of SEO Hats?

7 Resources that .Net Hiring Managers Can’t Live Without

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Hiring quality developers is the key to any great application development organization. In our department we have experienced the joys of a great team that has jelled to produce high quality projects, and experienced the pains of bad coding practices, bad spaghetti code, and bad attitudes. Our team has very high standards, and our interviewing process is rigorous (and will be the subject of another blog post later). These resources are some of the tools we use to ensure that we get a candidate who can do the job and do it right, whether they be Junior, Mid, Senior, or Architect level developer.

1 and 2 – From Scott Hanselman

Scott Hanselman has two fantastic articles on .Net interview questions. One is called ASP.Net Interview Questions, and the other is called What Great .Net Developer Ought To Know, and the subsequently posted list of answers. This is basically version 1 and version 2 of the same idea. His second post breaks out his question ideas into increasing degrees of complexity and different job function specializations. The comments on these posts are almost as valuable (and some more so) than the articles themselves.

3 – From Marc Andreessen

If you are opposed to the idea of a list of technical (trivia) questions, here is a great article by Marc Andreessen called How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with. If the name sounds familiar, it should… in 1992 while at NCSA he co-authored Mosaic (the first widely used web browser), and in 1994 he co-founded Netscape Communications. Marc focuses on the less technical traits that make a good candidate great. He discusses the importance of drive, curiosity, and ethics. He then discusses the importance of a process for hiring, and outlines six steps to find great candidates. This is an article you should read, re-read, and re-read again.

4 – Worse Than Failure

Worse Than Failure is a web site that collects, “Curious Perversions in Information Technology.” It houses a collection of really bad code snippets, bizarre error messages, and best of all – accounts of really bad interviews. Reading these continues to remind me why we have such a complex interviewing process. So far, my most favorite is this account of a telephone tech screening. The shame of it all is that this has happened to us in our department. A lot.

5 and 6 – From Amazon.com

Here are two great books that cover the gamut of good, hard, uncomfortable interview questions, and the kind of answers you might expect to see. The first is 101 Great Answers to the Toughest Interview Questions. The second is Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions. I have chosen some great questions from these books when I was the interviewer, and have reviewed these books myself to prepare for an interview when I was the interviewee too.

7 – Brain Benders

Sometimes, depending on the type of candidate we are looking for, we like to ask the candidate to solve a number of puzzles or riddles. This is (or was) a common practice at Microsoft and Google. If done right, it can shed some light on the thought process of your candidate, even if they do not get the puzzle solved correctly. One source of these types of questions is a really great book called How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft’s Cult of the Puzzle – How the World’s Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers. There are lots of other sources for this kind of material, both online and in print.

Which ones did I miss?

These are not the only good resources for interviewing by any means. These just happen to be the ones that our team and I can’t live without. What resources do you rely on to find a matching candidate for your needs?

7 SEO Tip Articles That You Need to Read

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While I have surfed the web, trolled the forums, and read the blogs, I have compiled this list of SEO Tip Articles that have guided me in the right direction.

1. The SEOMoz article Beginner’s Guide – What is SEO outlines the following topics: why a company would need SEO, how search engines operate, some basic design and organization mistakes to avoid, a discussion on relevance and popularity, some top content tips, the anatomy of a hyperlink, paid placement, Overture, keyword terms and targeting, usability, design, content authoring, community building, metrics to watch, pro vs. do-it-yourself SEO, and an enormous list of resources.

2. Big Oak Inc’s series called 52 SEO Tips releases a tip a week for all of 2007. Topics range from tech tips, tools, reviews, content guidance, SEO community terminology, techniques to avoid, and new perspectives.

3. SearchEngineLand wrote 21 Essential SEO Tips & Techniques on June 28. The article is targeted at small companies, and covers lots of simple yet effective do-it-yourself SEO tips that will help shoot your pages through the SERPs. Some tips include how to leverage site map pages, building SEO-friendly URLs, opening a pay-per-click account, and copywriting tips.

4. SEO And Your Website by Digital Web has 10 basic, solid tips on how to make your HTML content better suited for SEO. This article covers spiders, spidering, robots.txt, title tag, meta tags, JavaScript, page body content, page titles, mouse-overs, tables, bold tags, and strong tags.

5. ifergan’s 7 Advanced SEO Tactics include syndication, translation, ROR Sitemaps, keyword phrases, GoogSpy, internal content links, and how to leverage your server log files.

6. Entrepreneur’s Journey – The Top 16 Yahoo SEO Tips From A Yahoo Insider, written specifically to target the Yahoo search engine. This article covers whois and domain registration, dashes in your domain, inbound links, content update frequency, Yahoo Site Explorer, press releases, run of site links, SEO blog resources, tool usage, and long term planning.

7. Hobo – SEO / Internet Marketing Tips Round-Up has 10 additional tips articles and great articles on the Hobo web site to read and hold on to. These articles cover things not to do, valid HTML concerns, Google’s Supplemental Index, ethical marketing, and multiple browser testing.

The Truth About Organic Search (SEO) and Paid Search (PPC)

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In a recent New York Post article, Google claimed that, “its own research shows surfers look toward natural search over paid search by a ration of 4-to-1.”  A recent newsletter by respected SEO company iProspect claims that their research shows, “[60.5 percent] of Internet users found natural search results more relevant than paid search advertisements.”  Either way, surfers, consumers, SEO experts, analysts, and the search engines themselves have demonstrated that Organic Search is more effective than Paid Search. 

All of this research would seem to indicate the downfall of Google, as this is their primary source of revenue.  Google is not in trouble.  A balanced approach to Search Engine Marketing is necessary for a healthy site, and I will show you why.

The Differences

To understand the difference between organic and paid search, read this great article by Adido Solutions, and this article by eWhisper.  They show you how to tell the difference on Google’s Search Engine Results Page, define what each of them are, and outline their advantages and disadvantages.  This article by iMedia Connection outlines the financial implications based on results. 

The long and the short of it is that SEO costs less, takes lots longer to work, and is less predictable.  PPC costs lots more, can start working for you in a very short amount of time, and has much more predictable results.

The Similarities

These articles do a great job of outlining the difference between SEO and PPC.  What they fail to do is show you the similarities between the two. 

Both advertising methods do just that – they advertise for you.  Whatever you want to advertise, whether it be web site or storefront, SEO and PPC advertise for you on the Internet.  They complement each other – where one drops off, the other picks up.  The big problem is that they both appear on the same page.  Why should I pay for both when they could appear together?

The Blended Approach

The key is to allow SEO and PPC to live together in harmony, as this article describes.  At the outset, your site has no search engine rankings.  The easiest way to drive traffic to your site is through paid advertising.  This is when you will lean on PPC the most. 

As your site matures, SEO will slowly improve, and so will your page rankings. Social Media and the PPC you bought will help your site along, and soon you will be listed highly in the Search Engine Results Pages.  Now you have momentum, and don’t need to depend on your PPC advertising as much.  You can decrease your PPC budget, and use it in other places of your company. 

Studies have shown, however, that if you are tops on organic search and tops on paid search, they work together and increase your traffic even higher.  This is for groups who have the ability to sustain a large online advertising budget.  Together, organic and paid search will push your traffic higher than ever before.  

7 Easy Steps to Improve your Blog Content

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Getting people to your blog is only half the battle.  What do you do then?  You need to hold their attention.  As the old adage goes, Content is King.  Here are 7 steps to keep your content focused.

1. Pick a specific topic

Your blog should already have a general topic.  Now you must narrow your topic and deliver a persuasive blog post.  Ways you can employ to be sure your post is by following these steps:

  • Ensure your post adds value
  • Make your post stand out in the crowd with a great hook and headline
  • Ensure you go beyond the what and give the reader the how
  • Use lists to deliver materials as they are easy to digest
  • Tell you persuasive story as a problem with a solution and positive results

2. Pull them in with a great headline

Great headlines take time to write.  You should write your title first.  It is the lynchpin for your post.  Or, instead of writing your own, you can use swipe files (a common practice in journalism circles).  There are lots of great examples out there:

3. Write an opening that grabs them

The headline may be what draws in a reader, but it is the opening paragraphs that keep the user reading.  Great ways to open your blog are:

  • With an intriguing question
  • An anecdote or quote
  • A mental image the reader can associate with
  • An analogy, metaphor, or simile,
  • An interesting statistic. 

4. Structure your post logically

Structural elements that will break up your posts into logical pieces will make them easier to read.  Clear subheadings are great ways to section off your posts into smaller ideas.  Bulleted lists or numbered lists are great ways to convey information that is easily understood.  People will scan your posts, so you must convey your idea quickly and keep their attention.

5. Transition smoothly

Keep your ideas in your blog posts running smoothly from beginning to end.  Use transitional words and phrases to connect one sentence to the next, and one paragraph to the next. 

6. Convey your message

You can convey your message many different ways.  Clear and concise copywriting is critical to get your message to your readers.  But you can use other techniques too.  Metaphors are like images; show just as much as they tell.  You, too, can leverage their strength.  And stories are a powerful way to show your point. 

7. Close with a purpose

When you close, you must tie up all your ideas together.  This is where you wanted to take the readers when you started your post, so make it worth their while.  Leave with a call to action.  Another good way is with a cliffhanger, which will keep your readers reading into the future. 

 

Follow these 7 easy steps and your blog post content will be more focused, more concise, read more frequently, and bookmarked more often. 

Thanks to copyblogger for a great set of articles, and for the 7 steps of blog posts.

10 Web Analytics Resources You Can’t Live Without

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Avinash Kaushik recently posted an article listing the Top Ten Web Analytics Blogs for 2007.  His selection method, based on Technorati and Feedburner rankings, received a lot of heat (don’t mind the pun) across the analytics blogosphere.  Turns, out there is a bit of overlap between Avinash’s list and my own anyway.  I thought it might be interesting to post my own personal list of Web Analytics Resources, including the web sites and the related blogs.   

  • The Official Google Analytics Blog – URL and Feed
  • Web Analytics Association – URL and Feed
  • WebConfs SEO Toolset – URL and Feed
  • Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik – URL and Feed
  • Web Analytics Demystified – URL and Feed
  • Web Metrics Guru – URL and Feed
  • Web Analytics World – URL and Feed
  • Lies, Damn Lies – URL and Feed

Two books on the bookshelf are:

 Are there any that I missed that are your favorites?

What Google’s Supplemental Results Change Means to You

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The job of search engines is to index every site out on the Internet, rank them according to relevance, and be able to return them based on free-form search. When you think about it, that’s a lot of data. When you perform a search, you want to see the most relevant listings first, and the not-so-relevant ones later. One of the ways Google has managed this is through the use of two different indexes – their main index, and their supplemental results index.

When Google crawls your web site, it determines if your site belongs in its primary index, or in the supplemental results index. Triggers that will get you put into the supplemental results index are:

  • Current Google PageRank
  • Complexity of your page’s URL
  • Repetitive text that looks like you are trying to game the system
  • Pages with no substantial content
  • Pages with redirect links
  • Orphaned pages
  • Changes to the algorithms that Google uses to rank pages

This means that if your page is in the supplemental index, your results will show up further down on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), or when there are not enough results from the main index. As your pages change rank, they move from one index to another. This makes sense – as your page becomes more or less relevant, it will move up or down the SERP and move in and out of the main index. The pages in the supplemental index also have less constraints on how they are indexed, increasing the accuracy of the supplemental index.

Google has made some recent changes to the supplemental results index. They have streamlined indexing, increased frequency of indexing, and tweaked the algorithms that differentiate the two indexes. They have also decided to stop labeling URLs as being from the Supplemental Results index.

What this really means is that you can no longer tell whether your page is in the supplemental index, which was how some folks know that their pages needed some help. Some people think this is a good thing (whether a page is in one index or another has no real value), and some people think it is a bad thing (you are removing critical information from the users and the developers). What do you think?

References:

16 Search Engine Optimization Resources You Can’t Live Without

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Following up on the Article by Avinash Kaushik, I thought it would be a good idea to detail what SEO resources I have been using. Below I have listed the web sites and the associated blogs that I read regularly, the free online tools that I use to check out the sites I work on, and a list of Articles that I have bookmarked that I refer to regularly.

Are there any SEO resources that you use, read, or participate in regularly that are not listed here?