The Behavioral Interview

Sometimes people may assume that all you need to land a job in Industry is technical skills but this is never the case. In today's evolving ecosystem of technical collaboration, pair programming, and sprint teams you will never be working alone so teamwork, communication, and soft-skills are incredibly valuable. This is where the behavioral interview comes in. This is almost always one of the first rounds that people have to go through in the interview process. Sometimes a company may not have a specific interview designated as behavioral and rather chooses to assess these traits through an alternative like online surveys/quizzes (Amazon) or a combined interview format that has a behavioral and technical component (Karat interviews).

Expectations

You should expect to be a part of a 20-40 minute conversation that relates to your resume and past experiences this could either be in-person, over-the-phone, or over video call. Most likely companies will ask you to talk about an experience you had working in a team environment, if you faced any obstacles in that team, and how you overcame them. Finally you should expect the interview to probably be with either a recruiter, HR representative, or a manager. In some cases your interviewer may be a representative of the Intern Program in which case their job title could be anything from Software Engineer to Vice President.

When it comes to purely behavioral interviews you won't be expected to answer question on your past skills and technical experience even surrounding a particular project that may be relevant to your conversation. For example even if the interviewer asks you to talk about a certain team project on your resume you do not need to go into the technical details of what you worked on rather listen intently to the question they asked you because it likely is more focused on the team you were working with and the ensuing dynamics.

Preparation

Some people may think it's unnecessary to prepare for a behavioral interview, after all who needs to prep for a conversation, right? Well, the thing with behavioral interviews is that you want to be able to answer any question that the interviewer has accurately, concisely, and with confidence. And doing all that on-the-spot is not easy. To prepare for questions about your past experiences in a team go through your resume and past group projects (that may not be on your resume) and think about the team dynamics you've been a part of. Having team experience that is technical in nature is excellent but even non-technical experiences are important and can highlight your leadership, communication, and problem-solving skills.

You can look up some sample behavioral interview questions on the internet and craft responses for each of them. If you get asked multiple team-related questions try to think of different examples for each, it's okay if you only have one main example of working in a team but being able to provide evidence for a history of successful collaboration built over several experiences (in any field) is a huge plus. It's also common for large companies to offer resources or guidelines to their interviewing process that may include sample questions which you should definitely attempt answering before your interview. You can also check glassdoor for previous interview experiences and potentially for previous questions people have been asked.

When you are practicing for your behavioral interview make sure to attempt answering questions out loud. Sometimes you may think of an answer in your head and it sounds great but when you say it out loud during an interview you suddenly realize there's a big gap in the story or something you are referring to doesn't put you in the best light. You might say these answers out loud in front of a mirror or just to the walls in the room but it can also help to have a friend or someone you trust mock interview you with some of the sample questions you have found.

A Conversation

Let me emphasize that a standard behavioral interview is really meant to be a conversation: it's meant to be a back-and-forth and there can be humor involved. Don't get so wound up that you forget to be yourself, letting your personality shine through is always a plus! Though it's a conversation you obviously are still in a professional environment so don't get too informal too often, and really I would recommend that only if the interviewer themselves has spoken informally should you engage in informal conversation. But do remember that it's a back-and-forth if you are unsure what the interviewer is asking then ask them to clarify! Communication is one of the key criteria they are assessing during this interview and if you answer a completely different question than the one they asked it certainly doesn't look good.

It's completely normal to feel nervous, after all your career could depend on the success of this interview, just make sure that you don't let the nervousness make you feel negative or stop you from talking. For me, I used to try to channel my nervousness into a sort of fake excitement so that I would get more talkative and seem enthusiastic about the position. This was mainly just done by me thinking about how nervous I was and believing that the reason I was nervous is because the interview was such a big opportunity for me and I wanted to do well on it no matter what. Now that may seem simplistic but it worked for me, a lot of people have a lot of different ways to get over being nervous so if that's an issue for you or has been in the past then try to think of a solution that works or has worked for you.

How to respond (STAR)

The STAR format is a consistent and proven method of answering behavioral interview questions well.

• Situation: What was going on
• Task: What were you supposed to do
• Action: What did you do and why
• Result: What happened because of what you did; did you accomplish the Task?

As an example here's how I might briefly respond to a question on a passion project I enjoyed working on.

As part of my time with ACM UTD I worked on a general guide to navigating industry when coming out of the Engineering and Computer Science school at UTD. The overall goal of the project was to create a guide that could give people all the information my peers and I had learned while at UTD and all the things we could tell our younger selves. My role in this project was to create a comprehensive guide on getting into the tech industry since that's what I had experience with. I wrote around 8-10 articles over the course of a semester and asked a trusted peer to help me edit and revise them. We were able to publish the entire guide using GitHub Wikis and now it's available to anyone interested in pursuing an ECS education at UTD!

This was a pretty succinct response and you usually want to expand a little more on the Task and the Action part of your answer to make sure the interviewer gets a good picture of your particular involvement.

Also, this response format is tried-and-trusted but you don't have to follow it super precisely. It's more of a guideline rather than a law so feel free to skip around or add extra information even if it doesn't fit into the format if you think it could be relevant to your answer.

The Reverse-Interview*

An interviewer will always end by asking you if you have any questions for them. NEVER let this opportunity go to waste by just saying "umm no I don't think so." Or "No, I think I'm good."

Why this is a significant

You only get a finite number of interviews so try to squeeze as much as you can out of them as they are your gateway into a company and their culture. Asking questions at this stage can allow you to better understand the company's work environment and potentially hint at any red flags that may you not want to work there in the future. By asking questions at the end of your interview that are thoughtful you can be perceived an enthusiastic applicant who isn't just there because they have to be. Also, by asking your own questions at the end you have an opportunity to personalize the interview and make yourself seem more memorable as the ending conversations aren't the same old questions the interviewer has asked 20 other people for the same position.

The Right Questions

When I talk about the Reverse-Interview it's more related to conceptual or cultural questions not really statistical ones. Don't get me wrong sometimes you just need to know the plain facts, for example you definitely should know the working hours, the salary, the benefits, etc. before you start a position. But these type of statistical questions can be asked to your recruiter or maybe looked up on the internet after your interview, your interviewer probably wouldn't even know these type of stats off the top of their head anyway.

At the beginning of most interviews, your interviewer will introduce themselves and probably provide a job title. I try to take a couple of notes during my interviews especially during this ending portion and include a note at the start to keep their job title/position in mind when asking questions at the end. If you don't happen to remember this detail then it's also not a big deal to simply touchback on it and ask "Oh I think I remember you mentioning what you do but I forgot could you remind me what it is?" or something to that extent.

Try to base your questions off what you already know about the interviewer as they're likely to get you better responses.

When your interviewer is someone in HR or a manager

Ask them about the internship/job program and what it entails. What sort of projects have people done in the past? What things have stood out to them about certain projects in the past as interesting or exciting. You can also talk to them about past interns/new-grads and their interactions with them, do interns interact with management a lot or does it depend on the manager?

When your interviewer is an engineer or someone in a position you are interested in

Ask them about their day-to-day tasks and activities. Do they usually do the types of activities they expect to do in a day? Do they have the same tasks every day? Do they work in a high-pressure environment and do they enjoy that? On average how often are they working on tasks that they want to work on?

You could also ask them about technical details about their jobs (probably without going into too much detail) such as whether they work on web, back-end, database, cybersecurity teams or something else. What sorts of tools or technology their team uses and if they knew that before they got the job or picked it up afterwards.

One of my favorite things to do and probably the most helpful for me was to talk to current engineers about their career trajectory/path. How did they get to where they were? Did they switch fields or switch areas of interest a lot? Was it hard to land their current job? Why did they move from their past position to this one? These sort of career questions can really both help you find your own path and normalize how different and unique everyone's path can be.

Regardless of the interviewer..

Ask about the company and its culture. What's their favorite part about coming in to work? How close are they with their manager or team? What's something they wish they could change about their workplace/job? Does the company have a lot of socials/events that they've attended?

Clearly there are a lot of different sorts of questions you could ask and definitely not enough time to get to all of them. Try to pick a few base questions that can help to kick-off this final conversation and let natural flow prompt further ones. Something that can really help you to narrow your choice of questions is thinking about what you yourself value/appreciate in a company/job. Do you want the company to have a lot of philanthropic causes? Ask about it. Do you care if the work environment is high-pressured or would you rather be in a laidback setting? Ask about it. I tried to address this prioritization process more in the Where section of The Introduction.

*The Reverse-Interview was a term coined by Mustafa Sadriwala and may or may not be an actual word