Practicing Behavioral Interviewing

Why this session?

Most interviews have a segment that focuses on your soft-skills. In addition to discovering your core technical strengths, companies are interested in learning about how you will be delivering on your goals.

Behavioral interviews is an extremely popular technique with the fundamental premise that

Your behavior in the past is a very high fidelity signal about your behavior in the future unless … you have significant learnings from the prior experience. 

The Event: Practicing Behavioral Interviews using STAR (10th Aug, 19)

We had over 30 participants, with 9 of them pitched their answer to a popular behavioral interview question.

Shoutout to our esteemed panel

• Prachi is a Senior Software Engineering Manager at VRBO, Expedia Group. In her role, she interviews quite a lot and appreciates the nuances in behavioral interview pitches.
• William is a Sr. Manager, Software Dev leading Treasure Truck team. He has been with Amazon for nearly a decade. He has played various roles in his carer including a Test Manager, Technical Program Manager and a Software development Manager.
• Kartik is a Sr. Manager, Software Dev, Customer Acquisition & Registration at Amazon Business. He is an avid interviewer, and has been hearing good, bad and terrible responses to common behavioral interview questions.

Judges keenly listened to pitches from participants and provided key insights and critical feedback. Personally, I took away the following things today

1. Know your audience: It is important to establish a shared context with your interviewer. For example a "feature" means different things to a ML engineer and a Developer.
2. Recent stories are better: Don't fret over which stories to use. Typically, you should have demonstrated desirable traits in all your key stories. Try to pick more recent ones. This is what the interviewers prefer as well.
3. Land the sharpest stories: You are the best judge of your sharpest stories. Do not be a the mercy of your interviewers to extract the key points from your stories. Case in point was when one of the pitches had an engineer propose something which was extremely meaningful, but unfortunately, she in her story, she didn't mention her contribution strongly enough. Excellent feedback.

Next Steps

If you haven't done so already

1. Join the meetup to be notified of upcoming sessions - www.meetup.com/skillets (for Seattle based programs) and www.meetup.com/sfskillets (for SF events and online programs)
2. Join the slack group with ~3500 members - www.sdeskills.com/slack

References

1. Here is the presentation that was delivered during the previous iteration of this session - "Effective Story Telling Presentation Video"
2. Presentation from before - Story Building: Narrating your Experiences Effectively.