Like it or not, career success hinges on how you present who you are and your past experiences. Most tech professionals are formally trained on the tools of the trade, but are left on their own to navigate behavioral interviewing. Talented professionals often do poorly and, vice versa, lesser qualified professionals sometimes rock interviews because of storytelling abilities.
For many, defaulting to STAR method becomes the norm. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with STAR, it’s a method of structuring one’s stories, but leaves much to be desired in terms of the substance to be shared. This typically leads to stories with:
- Too much jargon upfront — losing the interviewer from the get-go via superfluous details
- Rushed narrative about actions taken — the simplistic “…then I made a data-informed recommendation, which convinced everyone about my idea”…
- Results that over-emphasize monetary impact, with low personal attribution — somehow every story ends with making the company millions of dollars
Principles
Make the tagline of your case memorable. Preface with generalizable guiding principles, as a way to convey how your approach scales to future scenarios. “Let me tell you about a time where I led a complex cross-functional project that really made me learn the importance of [insert principle] to galvanize strong collaborations and ultimately drive business impact. The scenario was as follows…”
Principles might involve influencing without authority, disagreeing but committing, listening and speaking in the ‘language’ of each stakeholder. This anchors the takeaway upfront and conveys what durable best practices you abide by.
People
Actions are more convincing if you paint a picture of what the challenge was, often stemming from org siloes, ambiguity, lack of process, mistrust.
Strong actions tend to be a function of interpersonal skills (building social capital, empathy, win-win solutions) and tactical process (co-goaling, methods of accountability), a blend of soft and hard skills.
Share your thought process, looking for tradeoffs and potential downsides of a decision, using contrasts to get your point across (e.g. “I could have done X, but I knew that would lead to result Y, so instead I took action Z”).
Process
Balance reactive and proactive behaviors. Putting out a fire in a challenging situation is good, but what is more impressive is how you systematize solutions, working to improve the situation for the long term. What steps did you take to ensure the problem would not happen again in the future? How did you improve systems and ways of working?
Impact can be multi-faceted. Rather than defaulting to generic monetary impact as the action’s result, consider how teams adopt a new process you developed, you improved synergies across teams via bridge-building, or you guided colleagues to rethink assumptions that accelerate performance.
