Why Behavioral Interviews Matter More than Ever in 2025
AI is changing software engineering and hiring managers are scrutinizing your soft skills like never before. Here’s how to stand out.
Looking for a software engineering job in 2025 is different from anything most engineers have experienced in their careers. The hiring bar is higher and the competition is tougher—and behavioral interviews are more important than ever.
The rise of AI-assisted coding has changed what employers need from engineers, or rather changed the priority of what they need, and the lack of open software engineering roles means there’s more competition than there has been in 20 years.
Here’s how these trends are reshaping the job interview process for software engineers and what you can do to adapt.
AI and the March of Abstraction
Advances in software engineering is a story of increasing levels of abstraction. In the 1940s, programmers wrote directly in machine code, something which many of today’s software engineers can’t even define. In the 1950s, when assemblers and later high-level languages and compliers were invented, they raised the abstraction level to something at least some humans could read—with enough training.
This story has played out within each genre of development as well: each platform beginning with rudimentary tools and progressing to ever more abstract frameworks. In web development for example, developers in the mid-1990s directly manipulated HTML and JavaScript files. Fast forward through templating frameworks like PHP to high-level JavaScript frameworks like React, which themselves have levels of abstraction (TypeScript to JavaScript to minified JavaScript).
AI-assisted coding is the next frontier in raising the abstraction level: COBOL was originally seen as “coding in English” but now we are really coding in English—describing to the computer what we want using plain language.
AI and the Growing Importance of Behavioral Interviews
Just as FORTRAN obviated the need to understand the bitwise layout of your computer’s registers, AI is fundamentally changing software development by reducing the importance of syntax knowledge and expressive coding. Engineers now can focus more on high-level problem-solving and architectural decision-making, then directing AI tools to act accordingly.
This shift increases the value of certain soft skills in the workplace as directing machines (1) involves close-to-human levels of communication, (2) makes scaling yourself possible for ICs, not just managers, and (3) means less time during the day coding, so more time will be spent collaborating and creating work for the agents to code.
In this (present and future) world, employers will look to these soft skills in their interview process, which are all assessed in the behavioral interview:
Communication (to agents): Coding now means clearly defining requirements and outcomes for AI tools and then adjusting the outputs if they are inappropriate.
Communication (to humans): Because more coding work will be done by machines, you’ll have more time to communicate with humans. The most productive engineers will be the ones who can maximize that available time.
Driving Results: Understanding business and product contexts goes from a nice-to-have in engineers to a must. You must be able to accurately describe the motivation behind what you’re building and not rely on product managers or product owners to translate the needs into effective directions. “Full-stack” now means owning the entire vertical: from business need to need fulfillment.
Proactivity: Waiting for direction on what to build or how to build it is now the agents’ job. Your job is to identify the outcome and align the human elements behind it, gather the resources you need, and ship it out the door—increasingly by yourself since a first past at UX, visual design, data architecture, etc. are all suggested by generative AI.
Conflict Resolution & Empathy: As collaboration with humans increases, interpersonal skills become more essential.
Growth Mindset: All of this change is happening in one of the most rapidly moving “Explore” phases of technology and product development that I’ve ever seen in 20 years working in the industry. The rapid pace of AI advancements requires continuous learning.
There are also some traditional “hard skills” that will be in more demand, namely the knowledge of tradeoffs and best practices in system design, as the initial AI-produced designs may be poor quality. Just because I’ve mentioned behavioral and system design interviews now, I will go out on a limb and predict that pure, non-AI assisted, coding interviews will become less important as “produce this output from this input” algorithm design and implementation become something wholly done by machines.
2025 is a Different Job Market
The job market is challenging in ways it hasn’t been in 20 years, with AI reducing demand for some traditional engineering roles and companies correcting for pandemic-era overhiring. Check out The Pragmatic Engineer’s analysis on the job market, showing that open SWE roles haven’t been this low since the early days of the pandemic.
With this level of competition, candidates need to standout from among their peers and behavioral interviews provide you a unique way of standing out among a number of other engineers with similar technical skills. They provide a chance to tell real-world problem-solving stories and demonstrate collaboration and impact as opposed to coding or system design interviews, which focus on hypothetical problems.
Standing Out in Behavioral Interviews
You’ll stand out in a behavioral if you can tell stories about how you used technology to solve business problems, especially in contexts closely related to the role. Here’s how to do that and more:
Make a solid first impression when the interviewer is most receptive by crafting a solid “Tell me about yourself.”
Highlight real-world work experiences (teamwork, projects, decision-making, etc.) by ensuring you emphasize the Action part of STAR/CARL stories. Read more about that in my CARL article and
Showcase unique insights by including Learnings as part of each CARL story you tell. Check out the same CARL article.
Pick the right projects to talk about. Learn more about how to respond to “Tell me about your favorite project.”
Direct the interviewer to a variety of stories and leave them with a larger impression of your accomplishments by leveraging the Halo Effect.
Show deep interest in the company and the role through the questions you ask them at the end of the interview. Haven’t written more about this one yet :)
Final Thoughts
The future of software engineering interviews is shifting as AI automates algorithm design and implementation, making soft skills like communication, leadership, and problem-solving more critical than ever. Behavioral interviews are no longer just an afterthought. They are the most important tools companies use to assess a candidate’s long-term potential.
If you’re preparing for interviews, now is the time to sharpen your behavioral skills. Your ability to tell compelling, impact-driven stories will set you apart in a crowded field.
Hi Austen,
Thank u for ur article. It's good and insightful.
I am interested to know about how to ask good questions to the interviewers at the end of the interview. Will u write an article about it recently?:)