Deeper dive into the signal areas for behavioral interviews
You might have seen me dripping out some content in LinkedIn this week with deep dives into each of the behavioral interview signal areas. Because I know some of you have interviews this week (good luck and thanks for telling me!) here’s all the content you’ll eventually see on LinkedIn, all in one place.
Scope
Do you know what your interviewer is thinking? You should…
Tech behavioral interviewers ask specific questions for specific reasons—they’re acquiring signal on you as a software engineer in specific areas. Understanding those SIGNAL AREAS is key to answering with the right context to get the offer you want.
Today’s signal area: SCOPE.
What is the candidate’s overall level of impact, seniority, the complexity of problems solved, and the level of trust we can put in their hard and soft skills?
I rarely see this one explicitly on lists about behavioral interviews as it’s typically acquired throughout the interview and not with specific questions. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less important. The hiring decision and certainly your final level will depend on the behavioral interviewer’s assessment of your scope.
Choose stories that showcase the challenges typical for the level of the role you’re applying for.
Expand stories to include the breadth of issues you encountered and actions you took on each project.
Reflect on what your stories taught you and the organization around you to solidify your seniority.
Initiative
What do you think the most important signal area in a behavioral interview is for software engineers at startups?
The case could be made for INITIATIVE.
Are you a “self-starter,” someone proactively looking for areas to improve? Do you have the willingness and skills to drive adoption of your ideas?
A startup doesn’t have time to organize all the work and distribute it nicely. As an engineer, you have to assess the business situation and build what’s needed without being asked.
Identify a story from your career where you took on something that wasn’t your job.
Highlight where your initiative required strategic behaviors like planning, advocacy, conflict resolution, and follow up.
Create a great story for your next behavioral interview by taking on something you see in your organization around you now!
Ambiguity
What was the #1 area I would explore in my more than 500 interviews at Meta?
It was AMBIGUITY.
Can they break down large problems into smaller ones and get started? Do they prioritize in a structured and appropriate way?
Meta was a chaotic and wonderful engineering culture that prioritized experimentation and impact over planning. Projects were rarely well-scoped or shovel-ready.
If you’re in a behavioral interview, here’s how you can showcase your skills at handling ambiguous situations:
Identify a story from your career where had to figure out what to do with little to start with.
Emphasize your structured approach to breaking down the problem and prioritizing the work.
Reflect to the interviewer whether your decisions worked out and why.
Perseverance
If there’s one attribute we assess in behavioral interviews that I want for my kids…
…it would be PERSEVERANCE.
When faced with difficulties, what does the candidate do? Can they motivate themselves to overcome?
Developing software in a large organization like Meta is full of challenges: roadmap pivots, legal approvals, alignment with senior engineers, staffing changes around you… It can be downright discouraging at times.
Here’s how you can showcase your perseverance:
Tell stories by piling the challenges on top of each other, to paint the picture of difficulty.
Be realistic. It was probably hard, so acknowledge that and whatever impact the challenges had on the business result (delays, costs, etc.).
Reflect to the interviewer how you used that perseverance skill in future projects.
Conflict Resolution
If you don’t believe this is an important signal area for behavioral interviews, then we’ll have to 🥊 …
…and use our CONFLICT RESOLUTION skills 🤗
When involved in conflicts, does the candidate take appropriate measures to resolve them and preserve relationships when possible?
While outright fights might be rare, disagreements abound in any reasonably sized software environment. When you talk about them in a behavioral interview, you need to walk the line between communicating about the scale of challenges you encountered while not sounding like you’re a difficult person to work with.
If your story can be framed as a misalignment by reasonable people, do that first.
If it can’t, then be diplomatic about revealing the personal faults of the other party.
Structured approaches to resolving conflict show seniority, things like written documents or data-driven experiments.
Honestly, your story is better if you were humble but right, although stories can be good if you were wrong too. You just create other risks that way.
Growth
There was one thing I just was totally unprepared for when I became an engineer at Facebook.
It was the pace, not of the coding so much, but of the number and scope of things changing around me: changes in roadmap, changes in the codebase, changes in staffing, changes in the performance management system (lol) …
During a particularly stressful time at Facebook while leading the iOS News Feed team, I remember changing my password to be something like, “I can handle what’s happening around me,” just so I could remind myself everyday to keep going.
The ability to grow, to respond to circumstances around us, to seek after learning opportunities and successfully integrate those into our future actions is key for any high-level success in a knowledge worker industry.
So, of course we evaluate this in a behavioral interview and look for a strong growth mindset, ability to bounce back from failures, the ability to respond to feedback, and a desire to better themselves.
Here’s how you can show it in your behavioral interview:
Be prepared with responses to “Feedback Received,” “Feedback Given,” “Greatest Mistake/Regret/Weakness.”
Structure your Tell Me About Yourself with a healthy dose of specific-to-the-role, forward looking desires to grow.
Always add the last R to the STARR method: Reflection. Consider what the take aways were from each situation you describe.
Communication
There was one myth I had to frequently dispel as a manager when supporting new engineers…
That the best engineers were genius wizard types, working alone for hours on end to cast magical spells upon the product/infrastructure/business. This was probably a result of their training in modern schools, which value independent contributions and only occasionally team contributions (but always where you can’t depend on your teammates b/c they were out drinking last night, lol).
It’s COMMUNICATION which makes teams work well. Software is a multi-player game.
Does the candidate communicate clearly in the interview but also, how do they communicate in the workplace? What tools and approaches do they use to communicate to large and small audiences?
If you’re reading this, you probably know how important communication is in SWE, since my LinkedIn feed seems filled with posts extolling the virtues of “soft skills.” So of course we evaluate this in a behavioral interview.
Here are some tips:
The stories you tell will always involve communication. Relate to the interviewer why you chose the method of communication you did.
Practice your STARR method responses (yes add Reflection) but also work in story telling techniques. Check out Steve Huynh’s video
for more.
For those about to behave, we salute you,
Austen McDonald
Ex-Meta Hiring Committee Chair and Senior Engineering Manager
P.S. Have a question about behavioral interviews or SWE career topics? Respond here and I’ll answer it in another newsletter.