Navigating the iOS Interview

Preparing for the Higher Level Interview

This type of interview is difficult to prepare for because the best answers tend to come from experience. While you can read about these topics online, it’s hard to truly create a strong opinion if you haven’t tried them out yourself. In general, the best and most insightful answers to these questions come from describing how you handled real-life situations.

My recommendation to prepare for these is to:

1. Fundamentally understand the concepts for a particular topic.
2. Think of stories from previous jobs and projects where you dealt with these topics and write them down.
3. Cross-check your answer with documentation and online resources to close knowledge gaps and polish how you speak about the topic. Remember to use industry terms to express yourself as clearly and professionally as possible.
4. Practice answering out loud and take notes when you get stuck.
5. Focus on YOUR strengths. There are multiple ways to answer these questions, so make sure to highlight your skills and specialties.

Resources for the Higher Level Interview

For an idea of the kinds of questions you’ll find in this type of interview, check out our GitHub repo: Higher level discussion topics and questions.

I also strongly recommend taking a look at Jackson Gabbard’s excellent YouTube Video, Intro to Architecture and System Design Questions on how to tackle these.

There’s rarely a single correct answer to these questions, so my best recommendation is to stay current. Carve out some time during the week to read up on blog posts, tutorials or listen to some podcasts like:

• objc.io
• PointFree
• NSHipster
• Soroush Khanlou
• Swift by Sundell

The iOS Specific Interview

All of the interviews above test your knowledge of concepts applicable to a wide range of software engineering stacks while using an iOS lens. The iOS specific interview is different from these in that it covers questions that deal with truly specialized knowledge only an iOS developer would know.

Check out our repo for the Top iOS specific interview questions.

Resources for the iOS Specific Interview

Apple’s documentation is your best resource for questions pertaining to the Swift Language or some of the more widely used Apple Frameworks.

I suggest you brush up on at least these five:

1. Foundation
2. UIKit
3. Core Data
4. Core Graphics
5. Core Animation

On top of that, I’d recommend checking out Alex Bush’s post on: 22 great iOS specific interview questions, answers and expectations. He also has a whole book, the iOS Interview Guide, which is full of great questions and general advice.

The Behavioral Interview

While the other interviews tend to focus mostly on specific skills, knowledge or experiences, behavioral interviews try to holistically assess you as a person and employee and how you would fit into their team. That means they’re targeting your competencies, personal goals and motivation for this particular job and company.

The three main questions the interviewer is trying to answer here are:

1. Why do you want to work here?
2. Do we want to work with you?
3. Can you do the job?

Motivation for the Job

First and foremost, make sure that you actually want to work for this company. This means doing a fair amount of research on their products and the company itself.

• Spend time on the company website.
• Look at reviews on Glassdoor.
• Talk to people in your network who have worked there.
• Download and play with their apps!

As you do your research, keep a running document of things you like, things you don’t like, things you would improve and how your experience can benefit the company. Take screenshots, record links, make some bullet points. It doesn’t have to be perfectly structured, but it’s super important to record these thoughts because your memory will fail you.

Keeping a document on a company you’re interviewing with is particularly important as you progress through the interview rounds. Each round will give you another data point to add. If you have everything captured in a document at the end, you can leverage it when making your final decision.

Here’s a job interview template with an example to get you started.

Doing this will allow you to successfully answer questions interviewers will undoubtedly ask you like:

• Why do you want to work here?
• Why are you leaving your current role?
• What do you think about our product and how would you improve it?
• Why should we hire you?

One key thing to keep in mind, especially if you’re interviewing at multiple companies, is to never give a generic response. Back up your answers with company-specific, personal examples.

Your Competencies

The other core criteria of a behavioral interview are your competencies like critical thinking, delegation and mentoring. These determine how you behave in different work scenarios, based on your knowledge, skills, personality and experience. The questions you’ll get asked here will be based on the required competencies your interviewer has identified as essential for this role.

The best way to address these types of questions is to give examples from your past and then relate them to the work you’d be doing in this role. In fact, many of these questions will be structured in a way to prompt such a response:

“Tell me about a time when you had to deal with multiple deadlines. What did you do and how did it turn out?”

That might sound cliché but there’s a very good reason why interviewers often ask these questions. They lead the candidate to use their experiences to answer the questions according to the STAR method:

• (S)ituation: Briefly describe the situation.
• (T)ask: State what you had to accomplish.
• (A)ction: Describe what you did to accomplish it with details.
• (R)esult: Explain the outcomes and benefits.

Even if you don’t get these particular questions, use the STAR method to clearly communicate your competencies and reassure your interviewer that you’ve got what it takes. Imagine that an interviewer simply asks if you think you’re a good leader. Your answer could be a short yes or no, but that answer on its own holds no real merit. You need to back it up with proof, and the only proof at your disposal is your past experience.

Here are some questions to practice with:

• Describe a time when you had to convince people to agree with you.
• Has a junior team member ever sought advice from you?
• What’s the most difficult project you’ve worked on thus far?
• 30 Behavioral Interview Questions.

Now, take a look at our full behavioral question and answer example.