Roadmap to Behavioral Interview Prep

Ten Steps to Balancing Your Prep Time

Allocating your prep time for all parts of technical interviews can be challenging—front loading the Coding prep because that’s the first part of most companies’ process while not compressing the System Design and Behavioral prep if you get a scheduled on-site, is a delicate dance. I won’t attempt a complete time allocation solution for this, and it’s different for every person, but here’s a roadmap to take you step-by-step through balancing Behavioral prep with your other prep work.

I’ve organized it for you, by when you should invest in each part, into three phases and 10 steps.

Phase 0: Do These Now

• Step 1: Identify Interesting Projects / Brag Document

• Step 2: Pick a Favorite Project

• Step 3: Prepare your Response to “Tell Me About Yourself”

• Step 4: Prepare Your Response to “Tell me about your favorite project”

• Step 5: Prepare “Why are you right for this role/company?”

Phase 1: When your Behavioral is Scheduled

• Step 6: Prepare Your Response to “Tell me about a conflict you were involved in”

• Step 7: Go Through Your Target Company’s Values / Top Questions

Phase 2: Week of the Interview

• Step 8: Journal About Projects and Identify Key Signal Areas

• Step 9: Prepare Questions for the Interviewer

• Step 10: Prepare Other Questions…

Phase 0: Do These Now

The initial conversation with a recruiter or a hiring manager is actually a mini Behavioral interview—they ask you about yourself and typically you describe some work you’ve done.

As such, you’ll need to prep those parts of the Behavioral interview right away since you could do a call with a recruiter today (let’s hope!).

Step 1: Identify Interesting Projects / Brag Document

The two most asked questions in Behaviorals are “Tell me about yourself” and “Tell me about your favorite project.” To answer these, you need a clear picture of your most impactful and interesting projects are from your career.

So start your Behavioral prep by taking a high-level pass at the Project Worksheet. It will help you organize your thoughts and be a jumping off point for future STARR (Situation, Task, Action, Result, Reflection) method journaling.

Just get your biggest projects down and pay attention to the Favorite Project axes to be ready for the next step.

Step 2: Pick a Favorite Project

After you’ve identified the primary projects from your career using a project worksheet or brag document, pick one that you’ll highlight in a Behavioral or in a hiring manager chat.

Check out my previous post to learn more about how to do this (https://thebehavioral.substack.com/p/the-one-choice-that-may-cost-you) but basically, you should choose the one that has the most…

• impact

• scope

• and personal contribution by you.

Step 3: Prepare your Response to “Tell Me About Yourself”

Start your Behavioral prep in earnest by jumping into preparing for a specific question, after you’ve laid some groundwork journaling about your projects and picking a favorite project in the previous steps.

The first question in most Behaviorals is, “Tell Me About Yourself” aka TMAY. I’m 99% sure you’re going to get this question (along with a few others; keep reading).

Also, it’s your chance to set the stage for the rest of the interview, direct the interviewer toward what you want to talk about during the interview, toward the brightest spots in your career, and ultimately showcase how you can be successful inside their organization.

The rest of interview might be completely directed by the interviewer—they ask the questions and you’re stuck answering them so you want to make sure you’ve given them the starting points to dive into the stories that highlight your strongest behaviors.

Your TMAY should have four parts:

1. Brief summary of who you are (like one or two sentences describing the kind of engineer you are).

2. Some sense of where you’re coming from (roles you’ve had).

3. Highlight of an accomplishment, maximum 2. Include business value you’ve delivered and tease something interesting about the accomplishment.

4. Forward looking statement about what you’re looking for / why this role is interesting to you.

Here are some tips for you:

• Aim for about 2min.

• Be sure to include the business context and real world results that your projects brought about; that’s the revenue or performance improvement, whatever the point of the project was.

• Be sure to mention the technologies you used, but avoid “skill soup”, where each role or project comes with a long list of every technology you touched.

Step 4: Prepare Your Response to “Tell me about your favorite project”

There’s another question to prepare that you’re 99% sure to get in a Behavioral interview: “Tell me about your favorite project” or “project you’re most proud of” etc.

Given that this is the second question asked in a Behavioral, it’s worth spending time really STARR-ing out a great response in advance.

As you journal, try to convey the complexity of what they worked on and signpost for the interviewer where they made the most unique and interesting contributions.

When I work with mentees on prepping for this question, their projects are usually more complex than they initially describe them.

• Mention all the moving parts you were involved with: ideation, planning, approvals, architecture reviews, indicate whether there were complex technical difficulties, the level of testing involved, whether rollout was multi-staged, whether you were involved in follow up actions.

• Highlight places where you demonstrated behaviors related to important signal areas for behavioral interviews (like conflict resolution, perseverance, or initiative) and the the values of the company you’re applying for.

  • If you want a list of some of these signal areas, you can get a PDF here.

• Depending on your experience level and confidence in how you showcase your skills, your favorite project could be be about the same amount of time as the Tell Me About Yourself—2 minutes—or if you’re confident in delivering a structured and practiced response, it could be even 5-7 minutes.

Step 5: Prepare “Why are you right for this role/company?”

Typically a question asked more in the initial recruiter or hiring manager pre-screen and not in a Behavioral interview, this question is still worth preparing for now, as those conversations happen first.

The best responses to this question are a pairing of something specific about you with something specific about the company or role:

• If it’s a backend role and you love backend, then say that.

• If the company is known to offer strong mentorship and you’re looking for that, say that.

• If you have experience in the product space the team is working in, mention that.

Summary of Phase 0

Answering TMAY and Favorite Project in the interview might take up to 15 minutes, or more if the interviewer asks follow ups, which could be 1/3 of your entire time together. So if you complete Phase 0, you’re pretty far into preparing.

30% of interviewers make a hiring decision in the initial 5 minutes of the interview so again, it’s worth investing your time here.

Phase 1: When your Behavioral is Scheduled

Often recruiters schedule your on-site loop a couple of weeks out. Assuming you have this kind of time before your Behavioral interview, you’re ready to move into Phase 2.

Step 6: Prepare Your Response to “Tell me about a conflict you were involved in”

If I’m 99% sure you’ll get “Tell me about your favorite project” then I’m 98% sure you’ll get a question about conflict resolution.

Pick a story where the stakes were high and you were highly involved. Remember that this is a “behavioral” interview, so the interviewer is interested in what behaviors you demonstrated as you resolved conflicts. When you tell the story, give the blow by blow version, including what meetings you called, what documents you wrote, how you thought about the conflict, and what the resolution was (for the team/company/product, but also for the relationships involved).

Honestly, it’s better if you were right in the end, but there’s still a lot of value for a mature interviewer to glean from a story where you were wrong but handled it well (assertive but humble).

Step 7: Go Through Your Target Company’s Values / Top Questions

Companies really do tilt their questions toward their values, especially at a large company where the values are well-established. Review the stated values of the company and think about how you’ve demonstrated behaviors related to those values. Add those values to your Project Worksheet as columns and categorize your past projects by those values.

There are also lists of common questions asked by large companies readily available. Get those and journal through some STARR method responses. Some repositories for specific companies are listed in our resources doc but Google or Glassdoor will reveal many for any large company.

Unfortunately, these lists are typically less useful than “common coding questions” lists, since there is a wide variation between interviewers at the same company, so don’t put too much time here.

Step 8: Journal About Projects and Identify Key Signal Areas

Spend most of your Phase 1 time here. You will certainly receive questions you didn’t prep for, so the ability to understand the signal the interviewer is seeking and pair it with the right project story will be crucial to a successful interview.

Use the axes in our Project Worksheet (plus the values from the target company, see previous step) to indicate what signal areas each of your projects corresponds to.

Spend at least 10 minutes on each project doing STARR journaling to jog your memory about that project and workshop some phrases as to how you’ll describe it. This post is not meant to be a STARR journaling guide so I won’t go into much detail here.

Bring these journals to your interview and use them as a quick way to look up stories that correspond to questions you receive.

Phase 2: Week of the Interview

During the last week before your interview, it’s time to polish your responses and practice before the time itself.

Step 9: Prepare Questions for the Interviewer

Candidates under-prepare for the 5 minutes at the end of every Behavioral interview all the time.

It’s supposedly the “easy” part but it can be a time when you showcase your insight into the organization you’re applying to join or communicate what’s important to you as an engineer.

Avoid typically bland questions like “Tell me about a day in the life of an engineer on the team” or “Tell me what you like/dislike about the company.”

Instead, identify what you actually want to know about the company/team/hiring manager and ask an insightful question about that. Questions that really probe whether the role will help you get what you want out of your career are usually well received.

Check out some good starter questions here.

Step 10: Prepare Other Questions…

There are numerous questions you might be asked, but if you’ve spent some time journaling about your projects using the Project Worksheet or something similar that helps you classify the topics covered by each story (see Step 8), then you can use that journal in the interview itself to help you decide which stories to use for any question you get.

At this point in the preparation, check out the lists of general behavioral questions and start aligning them to what you’ve journaled about.

There’s a list of collections of these questions in our resources doc.

If some of the questions seem especially challenging, spend some time STARR-ing out responses them.

That’s it, Just 10 Steps

I didn’t say they were easy steps :), but hopefully this helps you prioritize and organize your prep time, balancing Coding and System Design with Behavioral prep.