Years ago, during yet another round of corporate uncertainty, I took some advice that you should be keeping up your interviewing skills and do some interviews to keep in practice, even if you don’t want to change jobs. And you never know when you might find an awesome offer. So I made a goal to do at least one interview a year sometime during the summer.  It has been good for me to push my boundaries, talk to some cool companies, and get a feel for what I’m lacking in an interview.

It has gotten easier to get the interviews. They just seem to come to me now through LinkedIn.  So I guess that is the second tip (first being to do interviews semi often) for this category – set up a decent LinkedIn profile page.  I won’t drop company names, but I’ve talked to most of the big tech companies who do software with varying results.  I find many recruiters just do keyword searches in LinkedIn and reach out to engineers that might have some matching skills.  Then if they can get you on the hook, they pass you into the stack for the hiring manager/team to take a look and line up a phone screen or two.
So try to write a few bits of helpful hints as well as some technical questions I’ve learned in this category.