Thought about interviews - Do's and Not to do's
Interviews are a free way to test your skills - getting yourself tested for concepts by experts and in turn becomes rewarding too if you are really adept at the skills in question.
If there's a knowledge gap that is discovered, you would know about it and this is an opportunity to learn, fix the gaps, improve and in turn grow as a professional.
What you must not do during the interview:
- Never argue with your interviewer. You would most likely get rejected.
About asking the questions to the interviewer during the end of an interview, some of my favourite questions are:
- How's the culture of the organisation? Work Life Balance?
- Do you enjoy your work?
- What would be the Career progression opportunities in the firm/ What will be my Career path in the firm?
WIP
When asked about your strengths, what will you say during an interview?
Your interviewer may ask you about your strengths, for which you may think over and name a few.
Here's my preferred strengths which I say:
- I have the ability to learn fast.
- I constantly learn new things.
- I don't waste time.
- I put in my maximum efforts on the task in hand.
Questions to ask from the interviewer during an interview
During any interview that you may participate in, you may be asked to ask a question from the interviewer towards the end of the interview.
Some of the safest questions that you may ask are:
- Ask about the organisation's work culture - this shows that you are interested in the organisation, working style.
- Ask about learning opportunities that will be there in the organisation for your role. Learn how your potential organisation supports the learning as that would be transformational for your career.
- Do you enjoy your work / working in the organisation? - That may give you a hint about their career and if they are satisfied by the organisation.
- If your potential job role includes then ask about will the travel be within the country or in a region as mentioned in the Job description.
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Top ways to not waste your hard earned money
As they say, a penny saved is a penny earned. On day to day basis, we make multiple transactions and quite a few times they lead to some kind of loss. It can be because of our bad luck/ bad memory/ not having right systems in place.
Here, in this never ending blog post, I will try to collate all the possible mistakes that I had committed in the past which can be used as reference for you to not repeat the mistakes that I made. So bookmark this page and keep on coming back in every alternate days.
Let's start the list of never ending mistakes:
- Paying education fees through the Credit Card - In India, if you pay Education fees by credit card, it may cost you upto 2% transaction fees by the payment gateway. You may think that it's fine, I will get points for the transaction and hence the transaction fees would be compensated for that. But many credit cards don't reward you for making education fees. Since education fees are often a large sum, the 2% markup can amount to a huge sum. You could save that 2% by paying directly through the bank transfer.
- Purchasing products through EMI - In India, recently many credit cards issuing banks have started charging EMI conversion fees which amounts to INR 199 + taxes. Therefore, if you were relying on interest free EMIs then the overall savings/ affordability would be reduced by ~INR 200. Therefore, if you are purchasing a product which had interest fee component of less than INR 1000, it won't much sense to convert the transaction into an interest free EMI, however, if the total interest free component would be in multiples of thousands, then perhaps the EMI conversion charges won't pinch that much. My SBI, Axis and HDFC credit cards are charging this fee.
