Most common mistakes you should avoid in interviews

After interviewing 50+ candidates for senior and junior software engineer roles for my team, here are the most common patterns I found:

1. People tend to overstate simple things with adjectives and jargons in their resume and they fail to justify the same in interview. 

Suggestion: Keep it simple, avoid obscure adjectives. Use common words. Do record a video interview of yourself, listen to what you said and image are you posting in interviewer's head. Improve, record, listen and repeat until you feel satisfied. 

2. People claim to know a thing very well, while in reality, they have just done a course/certification on it or have came across it sometime in their carrier.
Suggestion: Respect yourself and who you are, admit what you know and what you don't know. Then learn what is asked in your target job, use that new skill to build something, read the job description of wherever you are applying, imagine the scale and complexity they are dealing with. Can you handle it, with what you have learned ? If you feel yes you can, only then claim that you know it in your resume. If you feel you can't, improve yourself, try to design systems of their scale, imagine the challenges they might be having and how you can solve them. Improvise and then state it in your resume. 

3. People just lie that they know and then guess answers when they get drilled to details. 
Suggestion: When you don't answer something, all you project is you lack knowledge of a thing. But when you lie, you actually project lack of integrity. Don't do that. Lack of a skillset is tolerable but lack of integrity cannot be compromised. Irrespective of all the good impressions in the rest of the interview, interviewer doesn't feel good about you having  in their team. Be honest, people just love it. 

4. Solving coding problems in complete silence. 
Suggestion: Interviewers craft Coding problems to understand your thinking style, they already have the solution, you are not on a mission to do it anyhow. Think out loud, whatever is going in your head, speak it up, tell everything that is coming up. This gives a way for interviewer to peek into your hard works, all the practices that you have been through and all the manifestation that you have built into your head throughout your project experiences. When you become a black box, you are on your own. Most of the times it doesn't matter whether you solve the problem fully in the given time or not, if interviewer feels your thought process is up to the mark, you are good. 

Hopefully that was helpful. Happy learning!