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How Behavioral Interviews Really Work
By Stefan Mai
May 29, 2025
Most down-leveling decisions happen because of behavioral interview performance, not technical gaps. While you might ace the coding challenge, a weak behavioral showing can cost you the level, or even the offer entirely.
Companies want to understand not only that you have the technical skills, but that you have experience and effectiveness that will translate to their culture and environment.
To nail this interview, it helps to understand how behavioral interviews really work behind the scenes. Let's dig into this often-misunderstood interview type and what it means for you as you prepare.
The Interviewer's Rubric
The first thing to understand is that your interviewer isn't winging it. Companies train their interviewers to try to be objective with their assessment. And interviewers are often recording their assessments and making the case to other parties (hiring committees, bar raisers, hiring managers) whether you should be hired or not, not just "I liked her".
To do this, interviewers come to the conversation with a predefined set of competencies and signals they must evaluate: things like "drives results," "technical judgment," or "develops others." They're using a structured rubric, often with specific examples of what strong and weak responses look like for each competency.
Interviewers will take note of positives and negatives from the responses you give (very common to see these as literally "+" and "-" in interviewer notes). They're going to try to connect the responses you give to the competencies or signals that they are evaluating. So, for example:
At the end of the interview, most interviewers must make two distinct decisions: hire/no-hire and level determination. These are related but separate judgments, and the evidence required for each varies significantly. As an example: a great story that demonstrates mid-level competencies won't help if you're interviewing for a staff role. So if you're talking about conflict, make sure that the conflict is level-appropriate in scope and nature (a staff-level conflict might involve disagreement about the direction of two teams whereas a junior-level conflict might be a debate about how to structure a particular class in a code review).
The Three Types of Questions
In order to get to the signals they're trying to assess, interviewers will tend to ask three types of questions.
Open-Ended "Showoff" Questions
Most interviews will begin with an open-ended question. These sound like "Tell me about a project you're most proud of" or "Walk me through your biggest technical achievement." The interviewer is almost certainly using this as a base to ask more detailed follow-up questions to get at the signals they're targeting, so the key to responding to these questions is (a) staying high level, and (b) asking the interviewer where they want to get into more details.
Some candidates will immediately go low-level in their responses, giving lots of technical details that are hard for the interviewer to parse in just a few minutes. Strong interviewers will pull them back up so they can get the signals they need, but weak interviewers (and there are a lot of them) will allow you to continue to blabber about things that aren't adding +'s to their writeup.
Using a bi-directional approach is really helpful, getting information from your interviewer about what they want to hear about most. We'll talk about these in just a minute as we go into techniques.
Specific Behavioral Questions
The meat of the interview and most common type of questions follow the classic "Tell me about a time when..." format, targeting specific situations like conflict resolution, handling failure, or driving cross-team initiatives. The intent of these questions is to try to get at a real example the candidate has from their experience, which is theoretically more predictive of what they'll do in the future vs what they might say they'll do.
For behavioral questions, using the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) or CARL (Context, Action, Result, Learning) will help to structure your response, but weight your response heavily toward Action and Result. Interviewers are trained to probe for specifics, so be prepared with concrete details about your role, your decisions, and the outcomes.
A big mistake I see frequently from candidates is not making the challenge or problem clear. Humans are trained to think about stories and narratives in terms of conflict and resolution: we need to understand what was at stake to appreciate why your actions mattered. If you jump straight into describing what you did without establishing the problem's significance, your interviewer can't properly assess the difficulty of the situation or the impact of your contribution. Start every behavioral response by clearly articulating the challenge: What was broken? What were the competing priorities? What would have happened if nothing was done? Only after establishing these stakes should you move into your actions and results.
Philosophy and Style Questions
Finally, some interviews will be sprinkled with questions like "How do you approach code reviews?" or "What's your management philosophy?" geared toward assessing your thinking process and whether your approach aligns with the company's values. These are prohibited at some companies which mean that candidates who haven't experienced them firsthand are frequently caught off guard.
The best responses to these questions are thoughtful and structured. Before you start rattling off thoughts, ask the interviewer for a moment to reflect and consider "what makes a good {code review, manager, deployment, etc.}?" Use that as an improvisational framework for your response. "Good code reviews are timely, instructive, and improve the team's aggregate skill level vs slowing down velocity. Here's how I think about making that happen on teams I join…"
Implicit Assessments
While you're answering the explicit questions, interviewers are simultaneously making three critical implicit assessments:
Credibility: Do I Believe Them?
Interviewers are trained to spot inconsistencies, vague details, and stories that sound too polished. They'll probe with follow-up questions to test whether you actually did what you claim. The worst case is when a candidate comes across as robotic and scripted. In those cases, interviewers are going to dig into your responses aggressively to try to get to the ground truth, often more deeply than they would dig if the approach was less polished but more authentic.
Three things to keep in mind:
- Be honest. If you're delivering a story that's not your own, many interviewers can sense it and will catch on. They're often not going to write out that they think you're lying, they're just not going to include things into the assessment they don't believe to be true.
- Show what you learned. The easiest way to establish credibility is to share the hard-won truth you encountered through a project. Statements like "I always thought up-front planning would help make things smoother but in this case it hindered us" most often come from real experience vs hypothesizing.
- Avoid scripts. It can be helpful to have bullets about things you might want to touch on as you prepare, but don't try to rehearse specific verbiage for your response. Interviewers don't respond well to this.
Cultural Fit: Would I Want to Work With Them?
This isn't only about being likeable (although do avoid being an abrasive brute!), it's about demonstrating collaboration, handling disagreement constructively, and showing respect for others' perspectives.
Remember that interviewers don't have the same experience as you. So while it's entirely possible that John really was the asshole and everyone hated him, the assumption from a third party is that John probably has some rough edges but is trying … and maybe you're the asshole.
Even when describing conflicts or failures, avoid throwing others under the bus. Focus on your actions and learning rather than criticizing teammates or managers. Show that you can disagree professionally and find productive paths forward.
Communication: Can They Structure Their Thoughts?
Finally, your communication skills are constantly being evaluated throughout the interview. Interviewers want to see that you can navigate different levels of abstraction—from high-level business context down to technical implementation details—and adjust your communication style based on what your audience needs.
Structure your responses using an "inverted pyramid" approach: lead with the most important information, then add supporting details. Begin by establishing the business context and stakes, explain your decision-making process, and finish with concrete outcomes. This ensures that even if you get interrupted or run short on time, you've conveyed the essential points.
If you find yourself losing the thread or providing too much detail, don't panic. Simply pause and say, "Let me reorganize this to be clearer..." This shows self-awareness and actually demonstrates good communication skills in real-time.
Techniques to Use
One of the more important things you can do to maximize your success is to prepare adequately for your interview. Brainstorming and refining stories from your past experience can help you to avoid spending unnecessary energy racking your brain for examples from the hazy past. Our Story Builder is a great (free) tool to do this.
With stories ready, the task of the interview comes down to interpreting the questions, mapping them to anecdotes you've already prepared, and delivering responses that help the interviewer to tick boxes.
Utilize Your Interviewer
Half of this is utilizing your interviewer for guidance on how to proceed. We recommend three techniques here:
The "Table of Contents" Technique
When faced with an open-ended question like "Tell me about a challenging project," don't immediately dive into one story. Instead, offer a menu of options:
"I have a few different examples I could share—a technical architecture decision where I had to balance performance and maintainability, a cross-team project where I had to align stakeholders with competing priorities, or a situation where I had to recover from a significant production incident. Which type of challenge would be most relevant for what you're evaluating?"
This works because you demonstrate strategic thinking by categorizing your experiences, show breadth of experience across different types of challenges, and ensure you're giving them exactly the evidence they need for their assessment. It also prevents you from guessing wrong and spending five minutes on a story that doesn't address their actual question.
Use this technique for places where the interviewer's intent isn't immediately clear. It can be particularly effective early in the interview when you're still calibrating to their style and priorities.
The "Choose Your Own Adventure" Approach
Once you start telling a story, you can continue to give the interviewer agency in directing the conversation:
"At this point in the project, I had to make a decision about whether to refactor the existing system or build something new. I can walk through the technical trade-offs I considered, the stakeholder alignment process, or the execution challenges we faced. What would be most helpful?"
Doing so shows you understand that complex situations have multiple dimensions worth exploring, demonstrates your ability to think from different perspectives, and ensures the interviewer gets the specific type of evidence they're looking for rather than what you assume they want.
The Question Flip
After delivering your answer, proactively check for understanding and engagement:
"Does that give you the level of detail you were looking for, or would you like me to dive deeper into any particular aspect?"
This is a great way to show self-awareness about communication effectiveness, demonstrates that you care about meeting their information needs, and often prompts follow-up questions that let you elaborate on your strongest points.
Be warned though: only use this after substantial answers, not after every response. It's particularly valuable when you've covered a complex situation with multiple moving parts. Candidates who are constantly asking “is that good enough?” may be perceived negatively, as though they lack confidence or are trying to “target seek” to what the interviewer wants vs give an accurate reflection of who they are.
Structure Well
The other half of the challenge is structuring your stories well. How you structure your responses is as important as the content itself. The goal isn't just to convey information—it's to make it easy for the interviewer to extract the evidence they need while positioning yourself as someone who thinks clearly about complex problems.
Three ideas to keep you on the right path here:
Start with the Problem
First, always begin your stories by establishing stakes and context:
"The challenge was that our checkout system was failing for about 15% of transactions during peak traffic, which was directly impacting revenue and customer satisfaction. The engineering team was under pressure to fix it quickly, but we had three different theories about root cause and limited time to investigate."
Starting with the problem immediately establishes why the situation mattered and why your actions were significant. It also demonstrates your ability to understand business impact, not just technical details.
Poor responses often start with background context ("I was working on the payments team...") rather than the actual problem, which often quickly loses track of the point of the question. The interviewer cares about what you did and why it mattered, not just where you worked.
The Bridge Technique
When you don't have a perfect example for their specific question, don't panic or claim you've never faced that situation. Instead, bridge to a related experience:
"I haven't faced that exact situation where I had to fire someone for performance issues, but I did have to manage someone off the team when their role was eliminated due to budget cuts. The interpersonal dynamics were different, but many of the same principles applied..."
The reality is this is true of real conversations: people don’t always have a 1:1 match for a question they receive in conversation. Showing that you heard the interviewer but want to talk about something else shows intellectual honesty—you're not pretending to have experiences you don't have, and it demonstrates adaptability by connecting related experiences to new situations, and prevents the conversation from stalling with "I don't know."
The Contrast Framework
Lastly, when describing improvements or changes you implemented, structure your response to highlight the transformation:
"Before my changes, the deployment process took about four hours and required manual coordination between three teams, which meant we could only deploy during scheduled maintenance windows twice a week. After implementing the automated pipeline and standardizing our deployment scripts, we reduced deployment time to 20 minutes and could deploy safely multiple times per day. This let us respond to customer issues much faster and gave product teams more flexibility in their release cycles."
A big lingering question for interviewers is “so what”. The before/after structure makes your impact concrete and measurable, helps the interviewer understand the magnitude of improvement you delivered, and demonstrates your ability to think systematically about process improvement.
Use specific metrics (time saved, error rates, team efficiency) rather than vague improvements. If you don't have exact numbers, use relative terms like "reduced by roughly half" or "eliminated most manual work.” The key is to get to something real.
The Bottom Line
Behavioral interviews shouldn’t be underestimated, they matter a lot and are usually the place that candidates pay the least attention in their preparation.
Understanding this framework helps you prepare more strategically and respond more effectively. Your job isn't just to tell good stories; it's to provide clear evidence for the specific competencies being evaluated while demonstrating the implicit qualities that make someone a strong team member.
By utilizing your interviewer and structuring your stories well to emphasize the problem, match what the interviewer is asking, and emphasize the contrast or improvement, you’ll be ready to nail your interview. You got this.
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About The Author
Stefan is one of the co-founders of HelloInterview, a platform to help software engineers and other tech professionals to prepare for their dream roles. He's conducted 1,000+ interviews and hired dozens of individuals at big companies and small startups.
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