Dress to Impress: A 6-Point Guide for an Interview

THE FIRST 60 seconds of a job interview can decide your future in an organization. In these 60 seconds you’re scanned from head to toe by the interview panel, which forms an early impression on the basis of your appearance and self- confidence. Many of us like to carry our personal style to the interview board. This is a big mistake that must be avoided at all costs.

“Your dress and appearance are part of the overall package. Inappropriate dressing can change the opinion of an interviewer,” says Patrick David, executive vice- president, global human resources strategy, Hinduja Global Solutions.

Here are some important tips that will make those first 60 seconds work in your favour:

1. Do a background check of the organisation where you’re applying for a job. It will make you understand the job profile and help you dress up accordingly.

For instance, if you’re going for a 9 to 5 job, a pin- striped shirt with formal trousers will do. For a marketing job, go for a suit with a matching tie. “ If it’s an advertising job, you can relax a bit and wear something casual,” says celebrity stylist Rishi Raj. That doesn’t mean you’ll wear a pair of low- hung jeans with a tattered T- shirt.

2. Coco Chanel had said, when in doubt, overdress. That doesn’t hold true for job interviews. Keep your style simple with basic clothes. Women can try salwar- kameez – it always works in favour of them; men can wear a pair of trousers with a shirt. For luxury brands, it’s a different ball game.

“We expect our sales managers to be dressed in westerns. The women have to be dressed formally in business suits,” says a spokesperson for Genesis Luxury’s human capital division. “Certain luxury brands even have a dress code.”

Grooming Musts for an Interview!

1. Don’t overwhelm the person interviewing you with too many layers of clothes or tacky jewellery.

2. Avoid wearing black and navy blue suits; after all, you’re not going to some high-school prom party.

3. You’re bound to be nervous before the interview, so don’t make it worse for yourself by tripping on a sari.

4. It’s better to avoid bright-coloured shirts, trousers and ties. Your style must not distract the interviewer.

5. Women can wear a waistcoat over their shirts, if they don’t wish to make their look completely formal.

6. Make sure your footwear isn’t noisy. It will convey the wrong impression to the interview board.

3. Women must not wear too many accessories – it can be distracting. You don’t want the panel to discuss your jewellery and not your credentials. Also, make sure your accessories don’t make too much noise. “A pair of pearls for the ears and a simple gold chain will do,” says Raj. Go for silver jewellery or steel, which isn’t too big in size. You must avoid wearing too many bangles and rings. These may put off the interviewer.

4. If you haven’t worn a sari before and aren’t too comfortable in one, avoid it. A kurta with churidar looks best, but keep away from floral prints. “Bandhej looks ghastly; avoid it,” says Raj. Keep it simple with a border running through the base and on the sleeves. Do stick to neutral colours and happier shades such as pink, lemon, or coffee. “Saris and salwar suits should remain classically formal,” advises David.

“Depending on the culture of the organisation, which may be sometimes difficult for an interviewee to assess, a business suit is appropriate.”

5. Men who like wearing suits should stick to a woollen- mix as it falls better. Don’t go for linen as it crushes badly.

Avoid wearing black and navy blue suits; after all, you’re not going to some high- school prom party. Match your tie with the print on your shirt, if you fail to work out the colour combination. “If there are thin stripes on your shirt, your tie should have bolder stripes,” says Raj.

Also, make sure your shirt is wrinkle free and doesn’t have any synthetic in it.

In the hospitality business, the rules are different. Says Sandeep Lakra, human resource head, ITC Maurya: “We prefer candidates who come for executive or managerial positions, or front office and marketing opening, to come in business suits. For someone seeking a junior position, or vying for engineering and administration posts, a smart shirt and trousers will do.”

6. Stick to clean leather shoes with no wrinkles. If you’re short, don’t wear shoes with pointed toes as these will make you look shorter. Go for tapered trousers to add height. Women should go for short heels, not going above twoinches.

These add height and give you a good gait. If you’re wearing Indian, you can also take a chance with flats – something like a Kolhapuri will look good.

Top 10 Reasons For Failure in Interviews

1. Poor attitude :  Many candidates come across as arrogant. While employers can afford to be self-centered, candidates cannot.
2. Appearance :  Many candidates do not consider their appearance as much as they should. First impressions are quickly made in the first three to five minutes.
3. Lack of research :  It’s obvious when candidates haven’t learned about the job, company or industry prior to the interview. Visit the library or use the Internet to research the company, then talk with friends, peers and other professionals about the opportunity before each meeting.
4. Not having questions to ask : Asking questions shows your interest in the company and the position. Prepare a list of intelligent questions in advance.
5. Not readily knowing the answers to interviewers’ questions :  Anticipate and rehearse answers to tough questions about your background, such as recent termination or an employment gap. Practicing with your spouse or a friend before the interview will help you to frame intelligent responses.
6. Relying too much on resumes : Employees hire people, not paper. Although a resume can list qualifications and skills, it’s the interview dialogue that will portray you as a committed, responsive team player.
7. Too much humility : Being conditioned not to brag, candidates are sometimes reluctant to describe their accomplishments. Explaining how you reach difficult or impressive goals helps portray you as a committed, responsive team player.
8. Not relating skills to employers’ needs : A list of sterling accomplishments means little if you can’t relate them to a company’s requirements. Reiterate your skills and convince the employer that you can “do the same for them”.
9. Handling salary issues ineptly : Candidates often ask about salary and benefit packages too early. If they believe an employer is interested, they may demand inappropriate amounts and price themselves out of the jobs. Candidates who ask for too little undervalue themselves or appear desperate.
10. Lack of career direction : Job hunters who aren’t clear about their career goals often can’t spot or commit to appropriate opportunities. Not knowing what you want wastes everybody’s time.
11. Job shopping : Some applicants, particularly those in certain high-tech, sales and marketing fields, will admit they’re just “shopping” for opportunities and have little intention of changing jobs. This wastes time and leaves a bad impression with employers they may need to contact in the future.

Intel Interview Questions Paper

The following questions are used for screening the candidates during the first interview. The questions apply mostly to fresh college grads pursuing an engineering career at Intel.

1. Have you studied buses? What types?
2. Have you studied pipelining? List the 5 stages of a 5 stage pipeline. Assuming 1 clock per stage, what is the latency of an instruction in a 5 stage machine? What is the throughput of this machine ?

3. How many bit combinations are there in a byte?
4. For a single computer processor computer system, what is the purpose of a processor cache and describe its operation?
5. Explain the operation considering a two processor computer system with a cache for each processor.
6. What are the main issues associated with multiprocessor caches and how might you solve them?
7. Explain the difference between write through and write back cache.
8. Are you familiar with the term MESI?
9. Are you familiar with the term snooping?
10. Describe a finite state machine that will detect three consecutive coin tosses (of one coin) that results in heads.
11. In what cases do you need to double clock a signal before presenting it to a synchronous state machine?
12. You have a driver that drives a long signal & connects to an input device. At the input device there is either overshoot, undershoot or signal threshold violations, what can be done to correct this problem?

13. What are the total number of lines written by you in C/C++? What is the most complicated/valuable program written in C/C++?
14. What compiler was used?
15. What is the difference between = and == in C?
16. Are you familiar with VHDL and/or Verilog?
17. What types of CMOS memories have you designed? What were their size? Speed?
18. What work have you done on full chip Clock and Power distribution? What process technology and budgets were used?
19. What types of I/O have you designed? What were their size? Speed? Configuration? Voltage requirements?
20. Process technology? What package was used and how did you model the package/system? What parasitic effects were considered?
21. What types of high speed CMOS circuits have you designed?
22. What transistor level design tools are you proficient with? What types of designs were they used on?
23. What products have you designed which have entered high volume production?
24. What was your role in the silicon evaluation/product ramp? What tools did you use?
25. If not into production, how far did you follow the design and why did not you see it into production?

Important UNIX Commands Interview Questions

1. Construct pipes to execute the following jobs.
    1. Output of who should be displayed on the screen with value of total number of users who have logged in displayed at the bottom of the list.
    2. Output of ls should be displayed on the screen and from this output the lines containing the word ‘poem’ should be counted and the count should be stored in a file.
    3. Contents of file1 and file2 should be displayed on the screen and this output should be appended in a file
.
From output of ls the lines containing ‘poem’ should be displayed on the screen along with the count.
    4. Name of cities should be accepted from the keyboard . This list should be combined with the list present in a file. This combined list should be sorted and the sorted list should be stored in a file ‘newcity’.
    5. All files present in a directory dir1 should be deleted any error while deleting should be stored in a file ‘errorlog’.

2. Explain the following commands.
$ ls > file1
$ banner hi-fi > message
$ cat par.3 par.4 par.5 >> report
$ cat file1>file1
$ date ; who
$ date ; who > logfile
$ (date ; who) > logfile

3. What is the significance of the “tee” command?
It reads the standard input and sends it to the standard output while redirecting a copy of what it has read to the file specified by the user.

4. What does the command “ $who | sort –logfile > newfile” do?
The input from a pipe can be combined with the input from a file . The trick is to use the special symbol “-“ (a hyphen) for those commands that recognize the hyphen as std input. In the above command the output from who becomes the std input to sort , meanwhile sort opens the file logfile, the contents of this file is sorted together with the output of who (rep by the hyphen) and the sorted output is redirected to the file newfile.

5. What does the command “$ls | wc –l > file1” do?
ls becomes the input to wc which counts the number of lines it receives as input and instead of displaying this count , the value is stored in file1.

6. Which of the following commands is not a filter man , (b) cat , (c) pg , (d) head
Ans: man

7. How is the command “$cat file2 “ different from “$cat >file2 and >> redirection operators ?
is the output redirection operator when used it overwrites while >> operator appends into the file.

9. Explain the steps that a shell follows while processing a command.
After the command line is terminated by the key, the shel goes ahead with processing the command line in one or more passes. The sequence is well defined and assumes the following order.

Parsing: The shell first breaks up the command line into words, using spaces and the delimiters, unless quoted. All consecutive occurrences of a space or tab are replaced here with a single space.

Variable evaluation: All words preceded by a $ are avaluated as variables, unless quoted or escaped. Command substitution: Any command surrounded by backquotes is executed by the shell which then replaces the standard output of the command into the command line.

Wild-card interpretation: The shell finally scans the command line for wild-cards (the characters *, ?, [, ]).
Any word containing a wild-card is replaced by a sorted list of filenames that match the pattern. The list of these filenames then forms the arguments to the command. PATH evaluation: It finally looks for the PATH variable to determine the sequence of directories it has to search in order to hunt for the command. 

10. What difference between cmp and diff commands?
cmp - Compares two files byte by byte and displays the first mismatch
diff - tells the changes to be made to make the files identical

11. What is the use of ‘grep’ command?
‘grep’ is a pattern search command. It searches for the pattern, specified in the command line with appropriate option, in a file(s).
Syntax : grep
Example : grep 99mx mcafile

12. What is the difference between cat and more command?
Cat displays file contents. If the file is large the contents scroll off the screen before we view it. So command 'more' is like a pager which displays the contents page by page.

13. Write a command to kill the last background job?
Kill $!

14. Which command is used to delete all files in the current directory and all its sub-directories?
rm -r *

15. Write a command to display a file’s contents in various formats?
$od -cbd file_name
c - character, b - binary (octal), d-decimal, od=Octal Dump.

16. What will the following command do?
$ echo *
It is similar to 'ls' command and displays all the files in the current directory.

17. Is it possible to create new a file system in UNIX?
Yes, ‘mkfs’ is used to create a new file system.

18. Is it possible to restrict incoming message?
Yes, using the ‘mesg’ command.

19. What is the use of the command "ls -x chapter[1-5]"
ls stands for list; so it displays the list of the files that starts with 'chapter' with suffix '1' to '5', chapter1, chapter2, and so on.

20. Is ‘du’ a command? If so, what is its use?
Yes, it stands for ‘disk usage’. With the help of this command you can find the disk capacity and free space of the disk.

21. Is it possible to count number char, line in a file; if so, How?
Yes, wc-stands for word count.
wc -c for counting number of characters in a file.
wc -l for counting lines in a file.

22. Name the data structure used to maintain file identification?
‘inode’, each file has a separate inode and a unique inode number.

23. How many prompts are available in a UNIX system?
Two prompts, PS1 (Primary Prompt), PS2 (Secondary Prompt).

24. How does the kernel differentiate device files and ordinary files?
Kernel checks 'type' field in the file's inode structure.

25. How to switch to a super user status to gain privileges?
Use ‘su’ command. The system asks for password and when valid entry is made the user gains super user (admin) privileges.

26. What are shell variables?
Shell variables are special variables, a name-value pair created and maintained by the shell.
Example: PATH, HOME, MAIL and TERM

27. What is redirection?
Directing the flow of data to the file or from the file for input or output.
Example : ls > wc

28. How to terminate a process which is running and the specialty on command kill 0?
With the help of kill command we can terminate the process.
Syntax: kill pid
Kill 0 - kills all processes in your system except the login shell.

29. What is a pipe and give an example?
A pipe is two or more commands separated by pipe char '|'. That tells the shell to arrange for the output of the preceding command to be passed as input to the following command.
Example : ls -l | pr

The output for a command ls is the standard input of pr. When a sequence of commands are combined using pipe, then it is called pipeline.

30. Explain kill() and its possible return values.
There are four possible results from this call:
‘kill()’ returns 0. This implies that a process exists with the given PID, and the system would allow you to send signals to it. It is system-dependent whether the process could be a zombie.

‘kill()’ returns -1, ‘errno == ESRCH’ either no process exists with the given PID, or security enhancements are causing the system to deny its existence. (On some systems, the process could be a zombie.)

‘kill()’ returns -1, ‘errno == EPERM’ the system would not allow you to kill the specified process. This means that either the process exists (again, it could be a zombie) or draconian security enhancements are present (e.g. your process is not allowed to send signals to *anybody*).

‘kill()’ returns -1, with some other value of ‘errno’ you are in trouble! The most-used technique is to assume that success or failure with ‘EPERM’ implies that the process exists, and any other error implies that it doesn't. An alternative exists, if you are writing specifically for a system (or all those systems) that provide a ‘/proc’
filesystem: checking for the existence of ‘/proc/PID’ may work.

31. What is relative path and absolute path.
Absolute path : Exact path from root directory.
Relative path : Relative to the current path.

C interview questions on pointers

	What does it mean when a pointer is used in an if statement?
	Difference between arrays and pointers?
	What is the difference between far and near?
	When would you use a pointer to a function?
	Why should we assign NULL to the elements (pointer) after freeing them?
	What is file pointer and its working method?
	Why should we assign NULL to the elements (pointer) after freeing them ?
	What is indirection?
	Difference between :- 1) NULL pointer and NULL macro ?
	Following declarations are same const char *s; char const *s;
	What do you mean by normalisation of pointers
	When should a far pointer be used?
	In the following code, what is p2? typedef int* ptr ptr p1, p2;
	How I can add two numbers in c language without using Arithmetic operators?
	WRITE A C PROGRAMME TO FIND OUT THE AREA OF A CIRCLE USING POINTER.
	What are the disadvantages of using Pointers.
	What is a null pointer ?
	Between a long pointer and a char pointer , which one consumes more memory? explain
	How do you insert an element into a linear list without using pointers?
	What is a void pointer?

	Can you add pointers together? Why would you?
	What is :- pointer , NULL pointer , dangling pointer , far pointer , near pointer , huge pointer , generic pointer , smart pointer ?
	How reliable are floating-point comparisons?
	what is the difference between near pointer and far pointer?
	What is a pointer value and address?
	How many levels of pointers can you have?
	What is a null pointer?
	Are pointers integers?
	What is the difference between NULL and NUL?
	what is the pointers in c
	In the following code, what is p2? typedef int* ptr ptr p1, p2;
	How are pointer variables initialized?
	What is a ?null pointer assignment? error? What are bus errors, memory faults, and core dumps?
	What is a pointer variable?
	What will be the equivalent pointer expression for referring the same element a[i][j][k][l] ?
	Is **p and &(*p) same?
	How to operate pointers in any pragram & how to develop our logic while implementing pointer
	What are the uses of pointers in c and c++ language?
	WRITE A C PROGRAMME TO PRINT THE FEBONACCI SERIES USING PONTER? AS:0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21........N
	Difference between arrays and pointers?

	What is a null pointer?
	In a recursive definition of a list node shown below, how can we predefine NODEPTR ? typedef struct _NODE { INFOTYPE info; NODEPTR link; };
	What is a const pointer?
	What is far pointer?
	What is pointer?
	What is pointer?
	What is a pointer ? In some websites it is given that pointer is a datatype. How long it is correct.