What does a company expect

from you?
There have been many debates on "how to hire the best candidate for
your company" over the past few decades. Also, there has been a
proliferation of guides and books telling you how to ace an interview. But
in my limited experience as a job hunter and some of my friends'
experiences, the one thing I can tell for sure is: "there are no tried and
tested methods". So, with this in mind, I set out to asking other people –
Why Should a company hire you? I am sharing the same here now.
Companies have their own methodologies, like Johanna Rothman or one of
my entrepreneur friend who advocates a week long project instead of an
interview to check the viability of a candidate as a potential employer.
The responses I got from the job seekers were varied, but I will try to
document them under categories and add comments from various people
as we move along:

1. Enthusiasm: The one quality which sets you apart. You might not
be the smartest, but you are enthusiastic and eager to learn. You
cannot fake this easily. Either you have it or you don't. It gets
reflected, in the way you solve technical problems, the questions you
ask during the interview when an interviewer asks you a puzzle, and
the final question that you ask from your interviewer at the end of the
interview.

My friends describe it to me as – right day, luck and attitude. But one

of them used an interesting word for this – "Innovation" and then
launched into the problem he solved during Atrenta exam which was
really a brilliant solution.
I will give you an example, one friend of mine got through in Cisco,
after getting rejected by 6 companies, 4 of them in the final stage.
And when I asked him how did you get selected today, he replied – "I
did everything right today by God's Grace". But, the thing which he
attributes to God, was actually his enthusiasm. This is his dream
company; he has worked on Computer Networks for the past 2 years.

2. Hard Work: Apparently, this is one of the most obvious qualities to

the students. One of the guys who got through in DE Shaw
summarized it as – "technical proficiency, for a tech job i.e. coding,
algo thinking capability".

You demonstrate your hard-work by your academic performance,

projects and performance in written tests. These things are always
 taken into account and we always lament when we miss out on any of
these.

3. Ethics: This I found to be one of the most overlooked quality by

students. But this is something, an employer values the most. He
might be looking for Humility or he might be looking at Honesty. What
do you think an HR Round is for? These guys know all the right
answers; they distinguish people on the basis of their honesty and not
the supposedly "Right" answers as advertised in guides.

So for instance, I was asked a programming Problem at Microsoft, for

which I knew the answer before-hand. I told the guy: I know this. He
was impressed enough to hire me. Don't try to fake, you will get
caught and you won't even know why you were rejected?

4. Communication and Inter-personal Skills: This is mostly

the reason why some people get rejected again and again, in spite of
being brilliant technically. You are of no use to me, if you can't
communicate that brilliant idea in your head to me effectively.

But many employers feel that if a candidate is good in first three, they
will be able to teach him the fourth effectively.
--Deepank Gupta(http://deepank.blogspot.com)