Why getting to a FAANG company is hard?

If you were able to make it to the interview phase, congrats! That is a huge step. But you are not done yet! Getting into a FAANG company is hard because, during the interview step, apart from the technical questions you have to answer what they called "behavioral questions". To answer these behavioral questions you need to use the S.T.A.R. method. But that is not the issue. The problem is that to be successful at the interview you need to find ideally a specific story for each behavioral question they ask you. Answering "Well, I have never encountered that situation" will definitely not be helpful. If you don't have enough experience from which you can pull out stories, you will most likely fail the interview.

This is a story of mine that will give you an idea of how to answer these questions. This story will also reveal to you the type of person I am, what type of leadership principle I adhere to, what type of impact I can make within any organization. Before we jump into my story, here is what a behavioral question may look like :

• Tell me about a time when you were faced with a problem that had a number of possible solutions. What was the problem and how did you determine the course of action? What was the outcome of that choice?
• When did you take a risk, make a mistake, or fail? How did you respond, and how did you grow from that experience?
• Describe a time you took the lead on a project.
• What did you do when you needed to motivate a group of individuals or promote collaboration on a particular project?
• How have you leveraged data to develop a strategy?

Here we go :

Situation

5 years ago I was working for Heineken headquartered in Haiti (also known as BRANA), as their IT business relationship Manager. My role was to drive innovation and manage the relationship between all the business units and the IT department. While working there I was invited to speak at a FINTECH conference. I was informed that part of the event there was also a hackathon occurring. I saw the hackathon as an opportunity for Heineken to have a dynamic online presence where we could display our products' prices, receive candidate applications online, take online orders and showcase our corporate culture and how amazing it is to work at Heineken. The issue is that in order to benefit from the hackathon as an enterprise you needed to be a sponsor of the event. Unfortunately, when I presented the idea to my manager, he declined to pursue it further due to budgetary constraints.????????????

Task

I did not give up. I knew the hackathon was going to be the right move for the company, so I began to look for solutions to the fiscal barrier my manager was facing. A website would increase our customer base and improve the customer service available to existing one. As the Business Relationship Manager at the time I had already developed some connections with key leaders from other departments at Heineken.?

Actions

I took ownership of the project. I I created a compelling presentation and decided to reach out to the few business unit (marketing, human resources, sales and corporate). My goal was to showcase the potential return on investment for their respective departments. The effort was a success! Each leader committed to allocating 20% of the sponsorship amount from their own department budgets. All that remained was for me to convince my manager to provide the remaining? 20% of the budget and then create a business requirement document for the project.

I was able to achieve consensus for this project by negotiating the following benefits with each department head:?the marketing department would have a dedicated page to show their different product offerings (various flavors of soda and beer); the HR department would have a page that would list job openings and highlight the perks of working at Heineken; the sales department would display their updated prices and options for customers to pre-order product; the corporate department would? give an insider's peek of what is new at BRANA.

My manager (the IT manager)? had no choice but to embark on the project and support me. BRANA decided to sponsor the hackathon After the hackathon, Heineken offered a 6 months contract to the two young developers? to finish the website.

Result

I led these developers during these six months to develop the website. I created the web design of every single web page, the flow of the website, all the way down to the detail of the button menus and the hyperlink of the website.

I managed the expectation and relationship with four key business process owners in the company and, in so doing, improved the collaboration with the IT department and the rest of the company.

Fun fact, I realized later on that I had managed the website development project in an agile way (at the time I barely knew what agile really meant). I made weekly meetings with all the stakeholders to present a new version (essentially a sprint in Agile) and had the developer pivot the project as feedback was being received. I did the user acceptance test and completed the necessary follow-up to launch the website.

In conclusion of that initiative was that I was able to present the final version of the website and it was approved to go live. As of today, this Heineken website is still online www.brana.ht

Through this experience, I learned a lot about myself. I learned that I am customer-driven, aiming always to put their satisfaction at the forefront of decision making. I am willing to go above and beyond to make sure I deliver the highest quality product possible.

And that I am a very agile professional.