The Intern Interviewing Experience

Published on 22/05/2025

Intern interviews

As part of my duties at Kesko I recently had the opportunity to participate in the interview process for a new intern. The way the industry is set up currently, everybody wants a senior but nobody is really willing to take a chance on somebody so that they could one day become a senior. So I thought it was nice that we found the allowance for an intern position. I found the interviewing experience to be quite valuable and want to capture my experience for posterity.

Stage 1: The group interview

A team member made the suggestion that for the first round of interviews we instead have one large-ish group interview. We decided if there was any time to test this concept that it might as well be in a relatively low stakes situation like this. I don't imagine that this would fly for interviewing seniors, for example.

The setup

We decided on the format of the interview: We would spend the first few minutes introducing ourselves and briefly introducing Kesko and our team structure, then move onto the task we had devised for them. I acted as a Business representative, the other interviewer acted as a Product Owner. We asked them to come up with the plan of creating an MVP of an API for managing baskets in our K-Bygg ecom. We asked them what considerations they should make, how they would structure the API, how many API calls they would estimate they needed, etc.

Meeting agenda (1h)

The experience

I found the group interview style to be a good way to measure a persons sociability, or their comfort level with speaking up and asserting themselves. This, of course, doesn't correlate with technical ability, but one does need to work in a team and this helped us measure their ability to do so. It did take a little prodding to get people to open up and get the conversation flowing. Everybody was quite cordial and polite, nobody was talking over each other and the candidates did eventually get comfortable enough to start bouncing ideas off each other.

Towards the end of the task planning stage it started to become clear quickly who had the technical and social acumen needed to get them to the next stage of the interview process.

Feedback

As this was our first attempt at an interview style like this, we made sure to ask for feedback at the end. I personally expected that the interviewees would just say "yeah, went great, thanks!" fearing that being critical would block them from moving onto the next stage. But luckily, we did receive some valuable feedback:

Stage 2: In-person interviews

After our experiment with the group interviews it was time for something a little more traditional: The in-person interview.

Meeting agenda

Preparing the technical questions

Probably the hardest part of preparing questions is making sure that they are actually appropriate for a interns level of experience. Especially if it has been a few years since you were at that level. Of course one would love to have an intern with the skills of a senior but, unfortunately, we do have to live in the real world!

Of course, one could skip the hard part and use the plenty of great compilations of questions online. But a good way to figure out if you personally know what you are talking about is devising the questions, then the answers, then double checking that to see if you are actually know what you are talking about. It's like rubber ducking but you also get to be the duck.

In the end, I tried to think what the most likely things a new developer would first have to interact with when using our stack (React/Node.js) and then formulate questions from there.

The experience

I've always found myself to be quite an introverted person. Thus, being the person on the other end of the table for once spooked me a little. I made sure to put on my friendliest face and attempted to put the interviewees at ease as much as possible.

After all, nerves are the biggest problem to deal with when getting interviewed. I've had interviews that got tanked horrifically because I could not remember anything in the haze of panic. I didn't want to inadvertently do anything to freak them out.

It felt like I was just as nervous as the interviewees, but it went smoother than I thought it would on my end. Some struggle points were resisting the urge to prod the interviewee too much during a coding test if they seemed to be struggling, but not put them under too much pressure either. Also, when asking them technical questions: if they got an answer wrong I was not initially sure how I should respond. Instead of getting stuck in my head and trying to calculate every emotional and rational response to any possible behavior I could have exhibited, I simply smiled, nodded and moved along.

Conclusion

If I had to boil down my entire experience with this to one actionable point it would be: Don't get too much into your head about it. They're just as nervous, if not more. and they are the only ones that have a good reason to be! So just be natural. If, unlike me, you are not poorly socialized this shouldn't be a problem for you.