Introduction to Behavioral Interviews

The goal of behavioral interviews

Behavioral interviews are conducted to gain knowledge about the candidate’s experiences and how they make decisions. It is a structured approach to evaluate how candidates will perform in the role based on their past experiences. Questions in this interview can cover a variety of topics, such as communication, conflict resolution, personal growth, and personal motivation. Behavioral interviews aim to see if the candidate can grow and adopt the company’s values.

These interviews are not limited to Engineering Managers only and are usually conducted for other engineering roles as well. However, the interview has a high bar for Engineering Manager roles as compared to engineering roles. EMs play a significant role in defining team culture. Their values and decisions have a great impact on the overall team’s health and leave a much larger footprint. Some examples of the decisions that require the involvement of EMs are hiring new team members, letting some team members go, promoting people, delivering critical feedback to the team, and doing a reorganization of the team. Lack of good judgment and poor decisions on an EM’s part can affect the whole team and sometimes the whole organization negatively. Behavioral interviews help identify the right qualities that are needed in the potential candidate, align with the company’s values, and can help them grow.

There is no uniform behavioral template that a candidate should match, and the criterion varies for different companies. Nonetheless, the general pattern of questions and expectations in this interview is very similar across all major tech companies. Usually, people who demonstrate a growth mindset can fit in most good companies. However, there can be situations where a person is a good fit for one company but not another. For example, the culture in a startup that is purely focused on hyper-growth will be completely different from the culture in a big, established company focused more on reliability and scalability.

Components of behavioral interviews

There is a single behavioral interview in most companies, which covers the following aspects:

1. A candidate’s impact and result-driven approach.

2. A candidate’s conflict resolution approach for handling conflicts with peers and leadership.

3. The candidate’s ability to handle difficult situations.

4. How the candidate maintains open and clear communication with their peers and team members.

5. The candidate’s focus on personal learning and growth.

Usually, questions during behavioral interviews are kept abstract. Some example questions are:

1. “Tell me about a situation when you had to handle a challenging situation.”

2. “Tell me a time when you made a mistake and how you handled it.” Think about a real mistake, for example, not keeping track of progress for an important project and relying on junior engineers completely, who couldn’t finish it on time. You should also think about the reasons behind this mistake and learn from it.

3. “Tell me about your failure and what you learned from it.” Failures can range from not being able to meet an important milestone, not being able to meet some big organizational or project goal, etc. The more important thing is to understand why it was a failure, why it happened, and what you learned from it.

4. “What are your strengths?” This is a common question, and it should be well articulated. Think about your real strengths and how you can make a difference. For example, you can be very well organized and better than most people, or you can have better relationship-building and maintaining skills, etc.

5. “What two things did you learn most recently? Alternatively, what are your growth areas?” It’s important for the interviewer to know that you are always looking to grow and understand your growth areas. You should have some concrete items for your growth and should be able to talk about how you discovered those and what actions you are taking to grow.

6. “Tell me about a time when you made an unpopular decision and shared it with your team.” This should also be a part of your story bank. The interviewer wants to evaluate how tactful you were in communicating this decision and if you were able to own your decision.

7. “Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with your leadership.” This question is also very common, and you should have multiple stories in your story banks about conflicts with your leadership.

The secret to answering all such questions eloquently is to prepare your story bank ahead of time. Think and articulate these stories in the form of writing. Be honest and prepared to answer follow-up questions. For all your stories, try to articulate situations, actions, results, and learnings. If you can’t recall a situation, then take your time, and tell the interviewer that you need a moment to recall a good example for this question.