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Behavioral

Intro

Behavioral interviews are always challenging to me.
It's something that really can't have a wrong or right answer. It really depends by what the company/people is looking for and what's the culture of it.

Advices

As I said, I find it hard to prepare to such interviews.
It's not something technical that you do or don't know. And sometimes (in my experiences) even a wrong word/phrase could cause a negative outcome of the interview

Tip

If it's available, go to the carrer page of the company to know more about its culture.
Take down some note about it and try to match those with you experience examples

Usually, the best thing to do is to talk about a very specific example and don't speak in general

Good

Let me tell you about that time I help my team mates solving a production bug in our user registration service:
. . .

Bad

I always try to help people when they need something

And having some specific examples of different situations you had in your carrer/life, will help a lot in answering those questions.

For every story you had, try to point out key elements from this 6 categories that usually are questions that could be asked:

  • Challenges
  • Mistakes/Failures
  • Enjoyed
  • Leadership
  • Conflicts
  • What you'd do differently

Example Questions

Here you can find a couple of examples of questions that companies could ask (online you can find many, many more).
By the way, it's impossible to prepare to all possible questions. There are too many.
Instead, try to think and write down some really good examples from your carrer like moments where you handled negative feedback or you were collaborative, etc...

Examples

  • Why this company?
  • What are you looking for?
  • Something from your carrer you are very proud of>
  • A time you had to show disagreement?
  • Something you regretted later?
  • A time you introduced a new practice in the team which proved to be beneficial

Again, those are just to have an idea but don't focus too much preparing answer for those questions but rather on examples.

Questions

At the end of the interview, you should have time to ask some question on topics you are interested in. Here's some examples of questions you could ask after a Behavioral interview:

  • Are you happy with your work/life balance?
  • What's your typical day at work?
  • One thing that you like about working in <company> and one that you don’t
  • being in a squad working on a specific area, are you able to have different challenges over time?

Resources

Reads: