Guide for Behavioral Interviews

This post is part of a series titled, “How to Select Your Next Job”. I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments section below!

If you’re a Software Engineer, Engineering Manager (or PM, DS) looking to go through the interview process at various tech companies, you’re likely to different types of interviews:

1. Functional Interviews test whether you have the skills for your specific job function. Examples of this are coding and system design interviews for engineers or “product sense interviews” for PMs.
2. Behavioral Interviews test whether you have the right mindset, and experience, whether you’re a good collaborator, and will value the team and company interests.

At Facebook (or any other company), there are many different sub-types of behavioral interviews, depending on who is interviewing you (e.g. your hiring manager, a XFN partner, etc.):

1. Hiring Manager Screen: This is generally an interview with the hiring manager who will likely ask you a series of questions.
2. XFN Interview: Sometimes a PM or a Data Scientist, etc. They’ll look to understand how you collaborate.
3. People Management: If you’re interviewing for a people management position, then it’s likely that a good bulk of your interviews will be of this form.
4. Project Retrospectives or (“Jedis”): these will often focus on how you’ve handled situations in the past.

Note: there are some interview types that focus a bit more around technical deep dives about something you’ve worked on in the past (Project Presentations). Many of the tips that we’ve discussed in thie post will also apply to those types of interviews, but there’s a dedicated medium post to this specific type of interview that you should read.

The purpose of this post is to give you a guide for how to prepare and be really successful with the Behavioral Interview.

Question Types

It’s important when answering behavioral questions to distinguish between different types of questions and understand what the interviewer is expecting from you in their question.

“Tell Me When” vs. “How Do You” (or anything in between)

Generally there are two categories of questions and answers that your interviewer will expect from you:

1. “Tell Me When” or “Give me an Example” (TMW/GAE) questions where the interviewer is expecting you to tell them a story.
2. “How Do You” (HDY) questions where the interviewers is looking for you go give them a general framework for how to solve a common problem.

Example TMW or GAE questions:

• Tell me when you took initiative to solve a problem.
• Tell me when you had to admit to making a mistake.
• Give me an example of when you failed to retain a high performer on your team.

Example HDY questions:

• How do you manage a challenging relationship with a peer?
• How would you utilize input from other functions in decision-making?
• How do you create a culture of X (e.g. frugality, collaboration, etc.)

Note: there technically is a “third class” of questions that pertain to the specific role/company you’re interviewing for or about you in particular. An example of this type of question would be, “What are your weaknesses” or “Why are you interviewing at our company?”. This post won’t go into detail about answering these types of questions — I might do another post on how to handle these types of questions.

If the interviewer asks you a “Tell Me When” question, they’re likely looking for a story, and if they asks you a “How Do You” question, they’re likely looking for a framework.

What Type of Question are you answering?

Your job when answering the given question is to make sure you understand what your interviewer’s expectations are. Obviously if the interviewer phrases the questions with “Tell Me When” or “How Do You”, it gives you signal on whether they’re asking, but it’s always good to double-check. You can do so in an non-awkward organic way after the inteviewer has asked you the question.

• Ex: “Just to double-check, you’d like me to tell you about a time when I managed out a low performer, rather than what my general framework for handling low performers is, correct?”

Use Numbers + Rule of 3

Since your interviewer will be frantically taking notes, it’s helpful to use numbers when talking about things.

For example, “When I onboard onto a new team there are 3 things I generally try to do, #1 get to know the product and tech, #2, <….>, etc.”

Another example, “When leading this project we were trying to solve 3 main problems: #1 give our customers a better introductory experience, #2, #3, etc.”

Numbering things has a lot of important benefits:

1. Helps the interviewer with note-taking/remembering. It helps the interviewer who’s taking notes keep track of what you’ve told them. If you talk quickly without notes, and an interviewer lost track of one of your bullet points, they might not realize it. However, if you’ve numbered your answers, your interviewer would realize they missed your point #2 and ask you to repeat it.
2. You both can easily reference it in a follow-up. The interviewer can easily reference the number (e.g. “let’s double-click on #2 a little bit more” or “I’d like to elaborate a bit more on #3 if we have time…”)
3. Helps you keep track and avoid repeating yourself. You’re more likely to keep track of what you talked about and give a more coherent and structured answer when you use numbers.

In addition, I also recommend for you to keep your lists of things at 3–4 at most. If you have more than 4, that’s too many and difficult for the interviewer to understand and keep track of. If you do have more items to talk about (for ex: you have a framework for how to onboard onto a team that has 6 elements) you should bucket and group them together into logical atomic units.

Handling TMW / GAE Questions

If you’ve identified your question to be a TMW question, you’ll have to tell a story. You should have 8–15 stories prepared ahead of time for this moment.

Please read this post as it describes how to prepare, practice, and tell amazing stories during your interview.

Aligning Expectations with the Interview

Your answer to an interview question won’t really connect unless you align with the interviewer on what they expect from you.

Ensure your answer is on point

One common pitfall that many interviewees make is not answering the right question. Don’t assume that your interviewer is effective at communicating what he/she intends to ask you about. As the person being interviewed, it’s your job to make sure you take your answer in the direction the interviewer is asking for.

Ask clarifying questions

You can often do this by asking clarifying questions to ensure that you’re taking the question in the right direction. Examples:

1. Original Question: “How do you generally handle engineers who are low performers?” Clarifying Question: “I have a set of different approaches for senior engineers vs. more junior engineers — also it depends on the reasons for the underperformance (e.g. technical ability? lack of motivation?). I can talk about my experience with either, is there one specific type you’d like me to dig more into?”
2. Original Question: “Can you talk about a time when you’ve handled conflict?” Clarifying Question: I’ve dealt with lots of conflict before: between engineers on the same team, between members of different teams, as well as between me and PMs. Is there a specific class/type you’d like me to elaborate on?”

The primary purpose of asking clarifying questions is to ensure that you spend your time in the interview delivering signal that your interviewer is actually trying to probe. However, there’s a second important psychological thing it accomplishes— it projects to your interviewer that you have a wide breadth of experiences and can jump into. This is particularly important because your interviewer has a limited amount of time and can’t probe the entire universe of possible experiences and therefore is relying on subtle cues/heuristics from your answer to extrapolate a general impression of you. Asking clarifying questions helps trigger those heuristics to come across as well-experienced.

Practice different time-length versions of answers

Remember, the goal of your preparation is not to give the best possible answer, but to be in position to give your interviewer the optimal signal you can within the 30 or 45 minutes that you’re being interviewed. Your answers should be trying to squeeze as much positive signal you can per unit time. Once you’ve written down your stories/anecdotes that will be useful for a wide variety of possible questions, be prepared to give different versions of each story/answer, depending on how deep your interviewer wants to go.

Because you can’t predict what types of answers/stories your interviewer will gravitate towards and want to ask more about, it’s important that you adjust your answers based on reading your interviewer’s desires. If your interviewer wants to dig deeper on a specific part of your answer/story, be prepared to oblige him/her.

For each possible story/answer, it’s good to have a short version (30 seconds), medium (2 minutes) and long one (5–7 minutes). The short version should give a very high-level TL;DR summary of generally what happened, and one to two sentences about what the outcome was and what you learned.

Customize your questions and answers

Full Reading: Questions to ask your Interviewer

When it’s time for you to ask your interviewer questions, nothing is as off-putting as asking questions that could be answered easily through some basic internet research. Avoid the n00b questions like “How many employees work at Facebook?”, “What’s the tech stack like?”, “How many hours do people work?”. Demonstrate to your interviewer that you’ve put in at least a decent amount of thought in the company. If the questions you’re asking are the same questions you could ask for a different company or team, then you’re not impressing your interviewer.

Base-level: Customize based role. For example if you’re being considered for a ML role, you can ask something like, “Are ML engineers responsible for fine-tuning the performance of their models when they’ve productionized them?”. This at least shows that you’re aware of the specific domain/role you’re in.

Medium-level: Customize based on company or team. This requires you to do some research on the company you’re interviewing for. Something like this would be good if you’re interviewing at FB: “I read Zuck’s public note from 2017 about his desires to build both an informed, civically-engaged and inclusive community. Given that it’s an election year, how does Facebook trade-off the need to inform people but also have them be both engaged and inclusive sometimes results in tolerating bad actors on the platform. What framework does he lay out in order to trade these things off?” The more specific and customized your question can be, the more you come off as being thoughtful about your company choice (ie. you’re not just joining FB because everyone thinks it’s cool).

Advanced-level : Customize based on interviewer. Often your recruiter will give you the names (and Linkedin links) of your interviewers ahead of time. The advanced level of customizing you can do is to do some research ahead of time on then — something like: “I noticed that you’ve been at Facebook for many years and worked on Messenger Notifications up until 3 years ago. I’m actually very interested in growth and engagement, since I’m the type of person who really enjoys quantitative objectives. How does a more mature growth team like that of Messenger compare to one that is more in the early stages (like Instagram Business Growth)? As an engineer did you get to influence the messaging product? My friends always complain that notifications on Messenger were X— what were the product/business reasons that led to that decision?” The more you can connect/resonate with your interviewer, the better.