Behavioural Interview Notes §

Best resource that I’ve found is this YouTube video.

Be Genuine §

Why do you want to work at the company? Where do you want to take your career? What do you want next?

Own your Strengths, Weaknesses, Successes, Failures §

Be introspective, don’t hide your failures or faults.

Equally, don’t be afraid at discussing your strengths and own that. Being specific helps shift these sorts of responses from arrogant to good answers.

Any Questions? §

Write your questions down so that you don’t forget them.

What are the tough questions that you want to know about? Don’t shy away from these questions. You are interviewing the company back.

• When people do good work, how does this company recognise this?
• What is the work-life balance like?
• How does the test/release process work? Do you have QA engineers?

Signals §

• Genuineness
  • If they sense dishonesty, it’s game over. You have to show genuinely who you are, what you value, what you get excited about and how you are authentic
  • Do not try to tailor your answers to what you think the interviewer wants to hear
• Communication
  • Don’t just focus on the technical stuff - interpersonal is extremely important
  • Can you effectively communicate your frustrations?
  • Can you communicate across teams?
  • Have you given critical feedback?
• Collaboration
  • Will you share your toys? Or are you toxic and steal all the good projects?
  • Do you want to foster the people around you and raise them up?
  • Are you able to jump into a team and immediately be successful?
  • If someone makes a technical decision that you disagree with, do you resent them for it? Or do you let it go - the world moves on - being magnanimous when the technical problem appears?
• Passion
  • How much do you care about your work? Your team? Shipping things?
  • Or do you mostly care about status, salary, achievements?
  • Are you passionate over a long period?
  • What are you passionate about outside of work? Bring that spark to the interview

Is is very easy to signal clear no’s - harder to signal clear yes’s. It’s a no list, not a yes list. An example of this is taking a misstep from your career and blaming it on the circumstances instead of learning and looking inwards.

That said, these questions aren’t gotchas, they’re really about where you take these questions.

Examples of open-ended questions §

What would you bring to a team? What does a team mean to you? Are you a net positive contributor?

• Talk about a project you worked on
• Talk about a project that you worked on that failed
• Talk about a time when you didn’t think you could do something
• Talk about a time when the people around you disagreed about something, and how you resolved it
• What are you bad at?
• Biggest success?

Advice §

• Checksumming your history
  • Trying to understand what your progression has looked like over time
  • Making sense of your personal story - know your own story, your projects, your own job history
  • Know what you’ve told your interviewer through your CV
  • They’re going to want to know the contributions that you’ve made or lead
• “We” is a dangerous word in these interviews
  • Don’t be humble where it’s not applicable
  • It’s great to say “my team and I shipped x”, but you must say “I did these things which helped us ship x”
  • You are not getting your team the job