Upleveling your behavioral responses | Coaching Notes #2

Also, how to answer, "Why (company)?" in a memorable way

Another week of super interesting behavioral interview coaching sessions, again mostly with candidates preparing for OpenAI and Anthropic, though other traditional big tech companies were thrown into the mix.

If you’re a senior+ engineer, PM, or leader preparing for behaviorals and want to spend some time with me, check out more at https://thebehavioral.tech/coaching

Here are the notes from this week, all from senior+ engineering candidates…

Strategy first, tactics second, on every leadership question
When I asked one candidate how they maintain high engineering standards, they gave me design docs, unit tests, and code reviews. Seems legit, but not what a senior manager sounds like. A senior manager leads with a point of view, something like “I build for autonomy and high ownership, which means I invest heavily at the front of a project so engineers can move fast without me.”

Don’t anchor on the wrong thing (like your current title)
One candidate, hoping to reach for a promotion to staff level by changing companies, opened their Tell Me About Yourself with “I’m a senior engineer at (Company)...” That sets the ceiling before you have said anything else. Define yourself the way a staff engineer would: by the domain you own and the business outcomes you are responsible for. “For the past seven years I have been the technical leader behind the platform that (does business things) across tens of billions in annual revenue.”

Outline your thinking
Multiple candidates this week made strong decisions in their stories without making the reasoning visible. At the staff and director level, they are scoring your framework as much as the outcome. When you advocated for a phased release instead of a big-bang launch, name the tension you were navigating: first-mover credibility on one side, brand risk on a technically volatile product on the other. One sentence of explicit reasoning makes you sound like a principled leader rather than a smart engineer who happened to make the right call.

Don’t shortchange your role
One candidate described their scope as a manager by saying that once a decision is made, they implement it. Whether or not that is operationally accurate, it is not how you want to present yourself. You had opinions about the tradeoffs before the decision was made, you advocated for the outcome, you shaped it. The framing you choose to describe your work reveals the level you are operating at.

Your “Why (company)?” answer needs to map only to that company
Two candidates this week had “Why (company)?” answers that could have been submitted to three different companies. “I want to work on the hardest problems and not watch from the sidelines” sounds ok but is not memorable because anyone could say it to anyone. The best version of this answer ends with something specific to that company’s unique position. One candidate was preparing for Anthropic’s dev infra team. The strongest version of their answer was that the tools built internally there will directly shape how the rest of the industry thinks about AI-assisted development. Meta and Google cannot (currently) support that claim, but Anthropic can.

Give your story a table of contents
For any multi-part project, tell the interviewer what they are about to hear before you start. Something like: there are three parts to this — how I identified the opportunity, how I got leadership aligned, and the hardest technical problem we had to solve. That framing keeps the interviewer oriented, signals that you can synthesize complex work, and makes it easy for them to direct you to the part they care about. Stories that run linearly and trail off make it hard to know what the key moments were.

I wanted to share with you that your book really helped me for passing behavioral interviews this year, especially with CARL and the 3 big questions! Thank you for writing the wonderful book!
— SZ, newly hired at Instacart

If you want help preparing for behavioral interviews—identifying your best stories, extracting relevant details, crafting responses—then grab Mastering Behavioral Interviews and if you haven’t already, subscribe to this newsletter. It’s free!