Acing the Behavioral Interview

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Hello everyone and welcome to my newsletter where I discuss real-world skills needed for the top data jobs. 👏

This week I’m sharing some tips on handling the behavior interview. 👀

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I’ve been in technology a long time. The interview process hasn’t changed. The core of the entire process is three parts.

• Phone Screen - A phone screen is a preliminary interview conducted over the phone (or via video call) to determine if a candidate is a good fit to move forward in the hiring process. This is almost always done by HR.

• Behavioral or Traditional- A behavioral interview is a job interview technique where the interviewer asks questions about past experiences to predict a candidate’s future behavior and performance. Instead of hypothetical questions, it focuses on real-life examples of how the candidate handled specific situations. This will often be with whomever wants to interview you.

• Technical - A technical interview is a type of job interview that focuses on assessing a candidate’s technical knowledge, problem-solving skills, and practical abilities related to the role—especially in fields like software development, machine learning, engineering, and IT. This will be with the technical people often within your vertical.

Depending on the company, there may be more of one kind than the other. Additionally, the technical interview is often the longest and hardest. However, you’ll need to get past the phone screen and behavioral to get to the technical. 👍

Another type of interview that is possible is the traditional interview. A traditional interview is a face-to-face (or virtual) conversation between a job candidate and an interviewer that follows a more open-ended and conversational format. It’s the most classic form of interviewing and is commonly used across industries.

How do you know whether you’ll be getting the traditional or behavioral? Most technology positions involve a recruiter. A technical recruiter is a recruiter who specializes in finding, screening, and hiring candidates for technical roles. Most of the time, they will tell you everything they know. 

I’ll author an article about the traditional interview in the future. I choose to write this one first for two reasons. Someone asked me too. Secondly, it’s been the style of my last three interviews.

We’ve already defined the behavioral interview but let’s revisit that definition.

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A behavioral interview is a job interview technique where the interviewer asks questions about past experiences to predict a candidate’s future behavior and performance. Instead of hypothetical questions, it focuses on real-life examples of how the candidate handled specific situations.

Here is the main idea behind the entire interview style. Past behavior predicts future behavior. The behavioral interview has four core sections easily remembered by the STAR acronym.

• Situation

• Task

• Action

• Result

In the STAR method, the Situation is the first step, and it sets the context for the story you’re about to tell. Where and when did it happen? Who was involved? The problem, challenge, the objective.

EXAMPLE: Last year, while working as a data analyst at Uber, our team was tasked with improving the reporting process, which was manual, slow, and prone to errors. (This can be said about the majority of reporting systems in existence today.)

Think of the Situation as the intro to your story—it should be brief but clear enough to make the rest of your answer make sense.

Next is the task. The Task is where you describe your specific responsibility or role in the situation. It answers the question: What was your part in it? They want to know how you handled the situation, not other team members.

EXAMPLE: My task was to analyze the current reporting workflow, identify inefficiencies, and develop a solution that would automate the process and reduce errors.

The next step in the process is Action. The Action step explains what you did to complete the task or solve the problem. 

EXAMPLE: I interviewed key stakeholders to understand their pain points, mapped out the current workflow, and used SQL to build an automated report generation script.

Take note of all the actions items in the statement.

• You interviewed all the people who will be using reports. (Stakeholders)

• You mapped out the workflow.

• You wrote the SQL script.

The answer makes it sound like you were the team. This is a great answer even if it’s not entirely true. I’m not telling you to lie, but embellishment goes a long way. 😂

Lastly we have Result. What was the outcome? If you can, make it appear your input was the key to solving the problem.

EXAMPLE: As a result of the changes I implemented, customer satisfaction scores increased by 25% within three months, and we saw a 30% increase in data retrieval speeds across the entire reporting system.

In these interviews it’s important to focus on your accomplishments. Yes, it’s strange because once you’re hired the only thing you’ll hear about is the importance of the team, which is utter bullshit. Don’t tell them that though. 😀 

Each of these will take some time because there are always interruptions and follow up questions. When an interview wants to talk, let him/her. When they are, shake your ahead in agreement with hands open toward the interviewer. Check out my PsyOps article to learn the basics of mirroring.

While there are many directions behavioral interviews can take, these four topics were asked on every one of my interviews.

• Teamwork

• Conflict Resolution

• Failure

• Achievements

I’d suggest you create a STAR scenario for each one of these. Here, I’ll help with the first one. I don’t know for certain, however; the first two will probably occur the most often.

The first one we mentioned above was teamwork. So, let’s take a look at an example using the STAR approach if you were a network engineer. Again, this is high-level and I’m not a network engineer but you get the idea. 🙂 

Here’s an example specific to teamwork.  Tell me about a time you had to work closely with a team to complete a networking project.

Situation
When I was at Uber, we were upgrading its entire network infrastructure across three regional offices mid-town Atlanta. As a network engineer, I was part of a cross-functional team that included systems administrators, security analysts, and project managers. The project had a tight deadline and zero tolerance for extended downtime.

Task
My specific task was to lead the redesign of the core switching and routing architecture to improve performance and reliability, while coordinating with the security team to ensure compliance with updated policies.

Action
I initiated joint planning sessions with the systems and security teams to map out dependencies and potential conflicts. I developed a phased migration plan and shared it with the project team to ensure everyone understood when and how changes would be implemented. When the security team raised concerns about port configurations, I worked directly with them to validate ACLs and implement real-time testing in a sandbox environment.

Result
Thanks to clear communication and collaboration, we completed the upgrade one week ahead of schedule with no major outages. Network performance improved by 40%, and user complaints dropped significantly. The project was later used as a model for future infrastructure upgrades within the company.

It’s ok to embellish some of your quantifiable wins. No one is going to call and ask. Ensure your results sound realistic but impressive. This is a great finishing line I use often. The project was later used as a model for future infrastructure upgrades within the company.

Use the prompt below for a framework on handling other STAR questions. You’ll be allowed to use a pen and paper to scribble one if necessary. I’ll often jot down the words so I can glance at them when I’m answering the question.

PROMPT: create an example of a behavioral interview using the star approach for conflict resolution as a data analyst

The traditional interview is much easier for most. It is also the most widely used. However, the behavioral is becoming more widely adopted in technical settings over the past few years.

After you’ve been told another interview is being scheduled for you after the phone screen, ask the recruiter the format of that interview. If they seem confused that’s good, it will be traditional. 🙂 If it’s behavioral, you’ll know what you need to do next. 🙏

Lastly, remember they are hiring you for your technical acumen, not your problem resolution skills.

Thanks and have a great day. 👏