The screening call
Nobody is assessing engineering here. They are checking that you are real, available, affordable and coherent for sixty seconds. Keep every answer under ninety seconds — the recruiter has twenty more calls today.
Four beats: what you are, what you own, one concrete proof, what you want next. Sixty seconds, not four minutes.
Do not walk your career chronologically. Starting at 2020 and working forward is the single most common way this answer dies — by the time you reach the interesting part they have stopped listening.
I am a full-stack engineer, six years, all of it in TypeScript. For the last three at Skynox I have been the technical owner of four production client applications — Next.js on the front, NestJS services behind, deployed on AWS. That means I own architecture, release and reliability, not just features. The work I am proudest of is GetDandy, an AI front-office platform where I designed the service layer across five environments and cut infrastructure cost by a quarter. I have just moved to Bangalore and I am looking for a product role where I own a system for years instead of handing it over.
- Which of those four applications was hardest and why?
- You said you own reliability — what does that mean day to day?
- Why full-stack rather than specialising?
This works because it names a real limitation without blaming a person, and then converts into a reason to want their job. Every good "why leaving" answer is secretly a "why you" answer.
Nothing is wrong there — I have grown a lot and I still like the team. The limit is structural: it is a client studio, so the natural end of a project is handover. I have never had the experience of owning a product for three years, living with my own architectural decisions and fixing the ones that turn out wrong. That is the specific thing I am looking for now.
"The management is bad", "there is no growth", "the pay is low". Even when all three are true, saying them tells the recruiter what you will say about them in eighteen months. If money is genuinely the reason, say "the market has moved and my compensation has not kept pace with it" — that is honest and it is not a complaint about people.
- Did you raise this with your manager? What happened?
- What would have made you stay?
Give the number with its structure attached, because for you the structure is the leverage. Your package has no PF and no deductions, so your take-home and your cost-to-company are effectively the same figure. Almost no Bangalore offer works that way, and the recruiter does not know it yet.
My current fixed is ₹12.2 lakh, and the important part is that it is entirely fixed and entirely in hand — no variable, no PF deduction, so I actually take home ₹1,02,000 every month. That is why I compare offers on monthly in-hand rather than CTC. For this role I am looking at ₹26 lakh, and I am flexible on how it is structured.
Inflating the current number. It is checked against your payslip and Form 16 at offer stage, and a discrepancy withdraws the offer at the last moment, when you have already resigned. Never do it.
That paragraph does four jobs at once: it is truthful, it is verifiable against your payslip, it teaches the recruiter that your effective rate is higher than your CTC looks, and it anchors before they anchor you. The full arithmetic is in R12.
- Is that fixed or does it include a variable?
- Can you share a payslip?
- That is on the higher side — what is the minimum you would consider?
Give the real number, then immediately give the shortest credible path: "It is X days on paper. I have a good relationship with my lead and I have negotiated buyouts before, so realistically I can be with you in [shortest honest figure]."
If your notice is long, this is the moment to plant the buyout: ask whether they reimburse it. Many companies do, it costs them almost nothing structurally, and it is the easiest concession you will ever win — but only if you raise it early rather than at offer stage.
- Would your employer let you buy out?
- Do you have any bond or service agreement?
Say it in the past tense. "I am open to relocating" and "I have relocated" land completely differently — one is an intention, the other is a fact they can plan around.
I have already moved. I am in Bangalore now, I have a place, and I am here to work from an office. Remote was fine for three years but I want to be in a room with a team again.
- Which part of the city are you in?
- How do you feel about five days in office?
Never say "no, you are the only one." True or nearly true is fine here, but do not invent a specific company or a specific number: you may be asked to name it, and a fabrication that unravels ends the process.
I am in final rounds with two other companies and I expect to hear back next week. I am not in a rush to accept the first thing — I would rather choose properly — but I am working to that timeline.
- Which companies?
- At what number?
- When do you need to decide by?
Use the four-beat shape and rehearse it out loud tonight, because you will give this answer in every single loop you enter:
- Problem. An AI front-office platform needed to answer inbound calls and hand off cleanly to humans.
- Your role. You designed and deployed the service layer across five environments.
- The hard part. Five environments with different data, secrets and provider keys, plus a real-time dashboard over agent performance and reliability metrics.
- The result. Infrastructure cost down twenty-five percent.
No jargon the recruiter cannot repeat. "Service layer" is fine; "typed DTO validation at the boundary" is not — save that for R5.
- What was your specific contribution versus the team's?
- How many engineers?
- How long did it take?
Have three separate numbers ready and keep them consistent across every conversation, because they get written down and compared later. For your profile: TypeScript six, React six, Node roughly four. If a number is smaller than the job asks for, give it and immediately give the strongest adjacent evidence rather than padding it.
Rounding every number up to your total experience. A recruiter who asks four of these and gets "six, six, six, six" stops believing all of them.
- Highest qualification and year of passing. B.Tech IT, Pantnagar, 2019.
- Any employment gaps? None — May 2020 to today, continuous.
- Have you led a team? How many people?
- Are you interviewing for frontend, backend or full-stack roles? Answer full-stack, and if pressed say frontend-leaning full-stack — that is what your resume actually shows, and pretending otherwise gets exposed in R5.
- Are you comfortable with the office location and a five-day model?
- Do you have a passport? (Asked by service companies with onsite roles.)
- What is your date of birth / do you have a PAN? (Background verification prep.)