Rapid Fire and Fresher Round Questions

The rapid fire round

Some interviews open with a fast sequence of short questions to establish a baseline before moving on. The answers are one line each, and hesitating on several in a row sets the tone for the rest of the interview.

Questions only. Practise these until each answer is immediate.

1. What does HTML stand for?
2. What does the doctype do?
3. Name three void elements.
4. Difference between id and class?
5. How many heading levels are there?
6. What does alt do?
7. What does <br> mean semantically?
8. Difference between ul and ol?
9. What is dl for?
10. Which element makes a link?
11. What does target="_blank" do?
12. What must accompany it and why?
13. What does rel="nofollow" mean?
14. Difference between th and td?
15. What does colspan do?
16. What gives a table its accessible name?
17. Which attribute is submitted with a form field?
18. Difference between GET and POST?
19. What does an unchecked checkbox submit?
20. What groups radio buttons?
21. What does required do?
22. What does readonly do differently from disabled?
23. Which enctype is needed for file uploads?
24. Default type of a button inside a form?
25. What does defer do?
26. What does async do differently?
27. Where should a stylesheet be linked?
28. What is the DOM?
29. Difference between textContent and innerHTML?
30. Which is safer and why?
31. What is querySelector?
32. What is event bubbling?
33. What is event delegation?
34. What is main for?
35. How many main elements per page?
36. What does nav do?
37. What is a landmark?
38. What does aria-label do?
39. First rule of ARIA?
40. What does tabindex="-1" mean?
41. What is a skip link?
42. Minimum contrast ratio for body text?
43. What does loading="lazy" do?
44. Where must you not use it?
45. What does srcset do?
46. What does a canonical tag do?
47. Difference between robots.txt and noindex?
48. Name the three Core Web Vitals.
49. What causes layout shift?
50. What does <meta charset="utf-8"> do?

Fresher and career changer questions

These come up when you have no commercial experience. They are not trick questions; they are testing motivation, self direction and honesty.

1. How did you learn HTML?
2. Walk me through a project you built. Why did you build it that way?
3. What is the hardest bug you have solved?
4. How do you find out how something works when you do not know?
5. What do you do when a page does not behave as you expected?
6. What is the last thing you learned about the web?
7. Which parts of front end work do you find most interesting, and why?
8. Have you used a screen reader? What did you learn?
9. How do you know your markup is correct?
10. What would you improve about the first page you ever built?
11. Do you follow any specifications, documentation or standards sources?
12. Tell me about a time you got something wrong.
13. How do you handle feedback on your code?
14. What are you working on at the moment?
15. Where do you want to be in two years?

The one that matters most

Walk me through a project you built.

This question is asked in almost every junior interview and it is the one candidates prepare least. Prepare a three minute answer covering:

• What it is and who it is for. Twenty seconds.
• Three specific technical decisions and why you made them.
• One thing that went wrong and how you fixed it.
• One thing you would do differently now.

The last two matter more than the first two. A candidate who can say I built the filter with hidden classes and then found the filtered items were still in the tab order, so I switched to the hidden attribute has demonstrated more than any list of features.

Preparing properly

• Build something real and deploy it. A live URL beats a description.
• Know your own code. Being unable to explain your own project is the fastest way to fail an interview.
• Practise out loud. Answers that are clear in your head come out badly the first time you say them.
• Prepare the negatives. The mistake question, the disagreement question and the weakness question all come up.
• Have questions ready. Not having any reads as not being interested.

Practice

1. Have someone ask all fifty rapid fire questions. Aim for under ten seconds each.
2. Record your three minute project walkthrough and listen back.
3. Write down your answer to the mistake question and practise it until it is comfortable.
4. Prepare three questions to ask the interviewer.