Techvestor’s Sief Khafagi recently sat down for an exclusive interview for Brainz Magazine. In the interview, the Techvestor co-founder and managing principal discussed grit and how soft skills can help people nail a job interview.
Sief Khafagi launched his first business while earning his San Diego State University degree. The business helped motivate computer science students to ace interviews they were bound to have with big tech companies. Over time, Techvestor’s leader accepted a job with Facebook, becoming a recruiter for the company’s production engineering team.
These experiences uniquely position him as an expert on acing job interviews.
In his Brainz Magazine interview, Khafagi said that one of his keys to success with his first company, Jump Start, was that he helped new graduates focus on building their soft skills and not just their technical skills.
One of the biggest challenges that computer science students have to overcome in interviews is that they aren’t taught in school how to corroborate and bring their identity into the interview room.
All students are taught how to code while they’re in college, but what interviewers are looking for are people who they can connect with and have confidence in, the Techvestor leader said. That’s done by building soft skills such as communication and storytelling.
Khafagi added that soft skills are not just about smiling when talking to others but include things such as “how you smile, when you smile, and what you smile at.”
The Techvestor managing principal believes so much in the importance of soft skills in interviews that when his company held one-week boot camps on college campuses, not one single session focused on technical skills.
As Khafagi explained in his interview with Brainz Magazine:
“People with great tech skills and horrible people skills will never get hired. People with subpar tech skills and great people skills have a shot because people can learn and navigate, and it’s that grit and attitude that you’re bringing into a culture.”
In his interview, the Techvestor leader also discussed his challenging past, being forced to help provide for his family at the age of 14 after both of his parents were disabled in a car accident when he was young.
Having almost two dozen job interviews by the time he was 22 helped teach him what recruiters were looking for in candidates.
Sief Khafagi came up with the idea for Techvestor, one of the first institutional-grade investment platforms for short-term rentals, while he was working at Facebook. The company launched in 2021, and its aim is to help everyday investors passively invest money in Airbnbs which are operated and managed by professionals.
To learn more about Techvestor and to get involved, please visit techvestor.com.
To read Sief Khafagi’s full interview with Brainz Magazine, please visit brainzmagazine.com.
About Techvestor
Techvestor is a tech enabled real estate firm that offers a proprietary platform for investment in short-term rental properties. Techvestor allows investors to accumulate passive income through real estate investments that are facilitated by proprietary software and managed by its team of real estate investment professionals. Techvestor was co-founded in 2021 by Sief Khafagi and Sabrina Guler.
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