Behavioral Interviews: Framework and Strategy

1. The Framework

Use the Situation, Task, Action, Result framework. Also known as STAR.

Situation: The interviewer wants you to present a recent challenging situation in which you found yourself.
Task: What were you required to achieve? The interviewer will be looking to see what you were trying to achieve from the situation.
Action: What did you do? The interviewer will be looking for information on what you did, why you did it and what the alternatives were.
Result: What was the outcome of your actions? What did you achieve through your actions? Did you meet your goal? What did you learn? Have you used that learning since?

2. Tips

Come up with a pre-existing set of situations, tasks, actions, and results that are the most impactful and rehearse these before the interview.
When providing answers, talk about impact/depth/scope/breadth/complexity/ambiguity/influence. These dimensions show the overall depth and exposure to situations for higher level roles.

3. Example questions

Tell me about a time when you had no idea about the solution to a problem and you had to go and learn a bunch of new information to figure it out.
What is the coolest thing you’ve ever learned that made you better at your job?

4. Example of different responses according to

The aforementioned dimensions (impact/depth/scope/breadth/complexity/ambiguity/influence) are the main differentiators when it comes to selecting a candidate for a particular role. If you are applying for a senior role, it’s important to stress these dimensions in your response.

Let’s look at an example of how a recent graduate may respond vs. a staff engineer:

Question: Tell me about a time you had to solve a difficult problem.
Answer (as a New Grad): I was assigned a task that I didn’t know how to do. I asked my tech lead for guidance, did some reading on wiki pages and Stack Overflow, wrote a proof of concept that demonstrated I could solve the problem, and then I delivered the solution.
Answer (as a Staff Engineer): I was looking into how we could expand the product’s feature set to include governance. I spent several days researching our competitors and reading recent white papers to learn about innovation in the area. Eventually, I came up with a new idea that I believed was compelling. I spent time validating its purpose with customers, wrote a PRFAQ that our leadership agreed to, and built the team from the ground up to solve it. From a technical perspective, it was difficult because XX isn’t a well understood or solved problem in the industry and we had to make tradeoffs like YY. It took 30 engineers a year to build the feature, which has now become a critical vertical in our business.

As you can tell, the second answer to the same question has significantly more ambiguity, complexity, scope, impact, depth, and influence.

5. Inspiration

Read the mission statement of the company you’re interviewing for and make up questions that are relevant to their principles. For example, you can use Amazon’s leadership principles and make up questions that are relevant to each leadership principle. Every company will ask similar questions so this is a good starting point.

Thanks for reading this far. Be sure to check out all of my related interviewing posts:

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