Interview guide

How hiring has changed

Most interviews still test what you know. More of them now test how you work: what you hand to AI, how you check it and what you decide yourself. Prepare for both.

• Expect questions about your process as well as your stack: what has changed in how you work over the last two years, and why.
• Seniority shows in judgement more than in years: the trade-offs you made, the risks you saw and what you would do differently now.
• Interviewers trust evidence they can follow. A clear account of one real decision is worth more than a list of technologies.

Know the format

Ask us which rounds you will face, who runs them and what each one is for. Then prepare for what is actually being tested.

• Recruiter or HR screen. Motivation, logistics and package. Be clear about what you want and what would make you move.
• Hiring manager. Scope, judgement and fit with the team. Bring two or three stories with real decisions in them.
• Live coding or pairing. How you think aloud, test and recover from mistakes. Ask beforehand whether AI assistants are allowed.
• Take-home exercise. Scope it honestly, state your assumptions, and include tests and a short note on what you would do with more time. If you used AI, say how, and how you checked the result.
• System design or architecture. Trade-offs, failure modes, cost and security. Start from the requirements and constraints, not from the diagram.
• Security case or threat model. Your reasoning about risk and priority, not a list of tools. Say what you would not do, and why.
• Leadership or panel. Decisions under uncertainty, team design and disagreement. Prepare one story where you were wrong, and what you changed.

Talk about how you work with AI

Saying you use AI tells an interviewer very little. Specific stories tell them a lot. Prepare one for each of these.

• A step you removed. What changed in the order or shape of your work, not just its speed.
• How you check. What catches an error when you are not reading every line: tests, reviews, evaluations or a second source.
• What stays yours. Which decisions you never hand over, and why.
• A time you overruled the tool. What it suggested, what you decided and what happened next.
• What got bigger. Work you now take on that used to need someone else.

Show evidence, keep confidences

Concrete evidence beats adjectives, but the work you did for employers and clients is not yours to share.

• Describe the problem, your decision and the result. Leave out client names, code and data you do not own.
• Personal projects, open-source contributions, talks and articles can be shown in full.
• Use numbers when they are yours to share: scope, scale, time saved or incidents avoided.
• If you are asked for a work sample, ask what you can share safely before you start.

Questions that reveal the real job

Your questions are part of the interview. Ask what you need to know to decide, and listen to how the answers are given.

After the interview, and at the offer

Look at the whole offer, not just the headline figure, and decide what matters to you before the numbers arrive.

• Follow up. A short note within a day is enough: thank them, mention one thing from the conversation that made the role more interesting, and confirm your interest.
• The whole package. In Belgium, compare gross pay together with the package: holiday pay, a 13th month where it applies, meal and eco vouchers, group and hospitalisation insurance, and any company car or mobility budget.
• Freelance terms. Confirm the day rate, the expected number of days, the contract length, the notice period on both sides and how expenses work.
• Your notice period. It depends on how long you have worked for your current employer. Know it before you agree a start date.
• The clauses. Read any non-compete, exclusivity or intellectual-property clause before you sign.
• Counter-offers. If your employer makes one, go back to why you started looking. Money alone rarely fixes those reasons.