Grokking Behavioral Interviews

Author:Murphy | View: 22065 | Time: 2025-03-22 19:26:07

I work for an institute which prepares professionals to land jobs in high tech companies such as Amazon, Meta, Google, etc. As part of the Interview preparation, many candidates want to have behavioral mock interviews. Their main goal is to figure out what is going to be asked in these interviews and how they should prepare for it.

I wrote down my experiences—both as a candidate and as hiring manager- in few pages of this book called "Grokking Behavioral Interviews". You can get the book here at Gumroad. I hope you find it useful.

Here is sneak peak into the book and a few tips and tricks that can prepare you for your behavioral interview.

What Are Behavioral Interviews

Behavioral interview questions are a staple in the hiring process. Usually hiring managers ask these question to assess the problem-solving skills and interpersonal skills of the candidates. Altogether, these questions aim to assess if you are good culture fit to the company.

To give you a flavor of these questions, some examples are the followings:

Can you describe a time when you worked as part of a team to achieve a goal? What was your role, and what was the outcome?
Tell me about a time when you had a disagreement with a colleague. How did you resolve it?
Describe a situation where you had to adjust to a significant change at work. How did you handle it?

How To Answer Behavioral Questions

Behavioral interview questions are designed to assess how you've handled certain situations in the past, which can be a good indicator of how you might behave in the future. The key to answering these questions effectively is to provide specific examples from your previous experiences that showcase your skills.

One framework that is very common and has helped me significantly is the STARL method. The STARL method stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result, and Learning.

This method helps you organize your response in a clear and concise way, and makes it easier for the interviewer to follow your story. To explain what each component mean, let's consider a hypothetical question:

"Tell me about a time you went above and beyond to deliver a task."

Situation

In this component, you describe the context of the situation. For example you say: "In my previous role as a machine learning engineer in company [X], I was working on a project called [Y] which was about [finding root causes to have lower KPI for each merchants in our system]. I had built the initial prototype and we were getting good performance. After discussing and sharing the result with our product manager, we decided to present the results to a few potential customers to gauge their interest."

Feel free to replace the words in brackets. You should explain the situation so that it sets the stage for what comes next in Task and Action.

Task

In the task component, you will explain what was your responsibility and your role in the situation. What was the specific task that was assigned to you or you took on?

For the example above, we can continue as following: "Our product manager has put together few slides that demonstrated the performance of our system, but of course it was not interactive. We knew and had discussed that if we had an interactive UI it would give a much better feeling to potential customers how the built system works. Unfortunately, there was not UI desginer available at the moment and we were on a time crunch as we were planning to meet with customers in 10 days. To increase our chance of acquiring the customers, I took the task of building a UI and informed my product manager about it too."

Next, in the action section, you will elaborate what you did exactly.

Action

In this component, you should focus on what you did personally, rather than what the team did. Explain what the rational behind those actions was.

For our example, we can continue as: " I first informed my manager that I'm going to spend my bandwidth for the next week on building a simple UI to the make our meeting with customers more effective. Then I picked few UI design libraries such as FLASK and learned them, and finally I put together a simple UI webpage and connected it to the prototype and that was it. The UI allowed us to select few merchants in a drop down list and pick a KPI for each merchant. Once clicking on "submit" button, it would connect to the backend system and would run the cause analysis module and list down findings."

Results

In this component, you talk about the results that your action had on the project, on the situation, and on the team.

For our example, we can say: "My product manager was very content with the UI. In the customer meetings, we presented the algorithm via the slides and showed the efficacy of the system via the UI I had built. This allowed the customers to play around with the UI and they were impressed by real-time results they were getting. Overall my quick actions, allowed us to have better impact on customers and increase our chance of acquiring them."

Learning

It is not uncommon to add a learning at the end of each behavioral question, where you express what it taught you.

For example, you can mention that: "I learned the importance of proactive problem solving. Even though I was not a UI designer and it was out of scope of my responsibilities, I took initiative and decided to address the gap by learning few UI libraries myself. Another important point that came to my attention was that putting the customer's perspective first can significantly improve the success of product presentations and sales opportunities. So in the future, I will always keep putting the customers first".

Prepare Before Behavioral Interviews

Before your behavioral interviews, sit down and reflect on all your previous roles in previous companies that you have worked. Often, the interviewers ask about not just the current role you are in, but they dig into your previous roles as well.

So reflect on each positions and major projects you have done. Note down, some challenges in each project and how you navigated them. Practice the STARL method so that your story telling is smooth.

Amazon Leadership Principles are a good place to give you a neat categorization of behavioral questions. Amazon has dozens of principles, some of them are very useful for behavioral questions. For example:

Bias for Action: prepare a few examples, where you took initiatives, where you went above and beyond your scope of responsibilities.
Think Big: prepare some examples of how you made an improvement that went above the current tasks at hand. For example, you may have proposed an evaluation framework that was used by many projects not just the current project at hand.
Dive Deep: demonstrate some examples were you had to dive deep into for example customers tickets or code base to diagnose the system.
Deliver Result: prepare few examples where you worked a task and delivered the result to the team or customers.

See the full list here.

Common Pitfalls In Behavioral Interviews

Here are a few common pitfalls and issues I've seen candidates face during behavioral interviews:

First, many times candidates are vague and provide very generic responses. Practice your story-telling skills by putting your answers in STARL method. This prevents you from neglecting details or providing unnecessary informations.

Second, do not focus on team achievements when answering behavioral questions. The aim of behavioral interview is to find out if you are a good fit, not your team. So always emphasize your role in the project and the actions you personally took to drive the project to success.

Third, do not overlook negative scenarios. Many times interviewers ask about the time you face a difficulty/conflict in the team, or in interpersonal relationships. Prepare for these scenarios, emphasize you resolved the challenge and what you learned from it (The Learning component in STARL). It's often a good idea to show you resolved the conflict using a data-driven approach. For example, if two colleagues were in conflict about using approach A or approach B. You can say that you used a data-driven method to test both approaches on a small set of data and figure out which one to move forward with.

By avoiding these pitfalls and focusing on structured preparation, you can significantly improve you performance in behavioral interviews.

Conclusion

Behavioral interviews are a critical component of the hiring process. Using frameworks such as STARL helps you to frame your stories effectively. Reflecting on your past roles, and preparing relevant examples can significantly boost your confidence and performance in these interviews.

Good luck with your journey, and may this guide help you land your dream job!