What is a Behavioral interview?
It's referred to as a culture-fit interview or Competency-based interview in other words.
This interview is to find out how you've handled situations in the past to predict your future behavior.
Often begin with “Tell me about a time/situation where…”, “Give me an example of when you…”, “Describe a time/situation where…”
What's the point of a behavioral interview
Why do companies have this step?
They wanna see if you have good soft skills, many people think software engineering work is just about writing code. but it's really not true. there's a lot of collaboration and communication required with other engineers, PMs, Designers, and Managers. so the company likes someone who gets along with a team, has the right mindset, able to handle conflict.
The STAR Method
The key point in this interview is, always to answer with the STAR method.
STAR method means Situation, Task, Action, and Result.
Situation: Describe a specific event or situation you were in. e.g. "when I did a team project at school..." or "when I worked as a receptionist at XX company last year...", "When I had a client when I worked as a freelancer designer..."
Task: What was required of you? e.g. "one of my clients asked me to finish the website 2 weeks earlier...", "I had a disagreement with my co-worker when we were trying to use a new test tool..."
Action: What did you do? e.g. "I asked the reason why the client need it 2 weeks earlier, and we set the schedule together...", "We had research together and tested some tools to see what's an efficient way..."
Result: How did you solve it? What did you learn? e.g. "I learn the way to communicate better with my clients and even though that was hard, the trust between me and my client got stronger, so we worked again after that...", "even though there was disagreement, I learn different tools and other perspectives from my colleagues..."
Use experience from a team project. or previous work. if you just graduated from school, use your experience when you had a part-time job at a restaurant. or when you had a team project at Uni. or when you did a hackathon or some activities like volunteering work.
Let's see the example
For example, when the interviewer asks “Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a co-worker”
Then answer with the STAR method would be
Explain the specific Situation & Task you had: “When I did a team project with 3 other software engineers from my coding bootcamp, we needed to build login authentication for the app. I thought firebase is the best library, and the other engineer thought Auth0 is the best library. There was a disagreement.”
And then say what Action you took for the situation: "so the two of us went to a meeting room and talked to each other about why we thought this way is better, we explained our thought and reason, and show evidence to each other.
And then finish with the Result: The other engineer had a better approach. Auth0 was better for our case. So we agreed to use Auth0 instead of Firebase and that was actually best for our app.
Key Point
Say a positive result. show them you'll not be a troublemaker in a team. show them you're a team player and good at communication and collaboration.
And the important point is to add a positive attitude to the genuine and realistic answers from your own experience, not an answer from a textbook. "I don't disagree with anyone" or "I don't have any weakness" is not realistic. Focus on "even though I'm not a perfect human being, I'm always trying to get better and get a positive result"
Good Luck everyone, you've got this!