Learn the essential skills and insights to succeed in behavior-based interviews. While many developers focus on preparing for technical interviews, you should also prepare for the other parts of job interviews. This course will help you navigate behavioral interviews with ease.

✏️ Course developed by @DestinationFAANG 

⭐️ Resources ⭐️
▶ PPT deck with all the content: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16DNAiuCC_UohosO61I1UQvIdWFrjlUz7/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=112476210230339613138&rtpof=true&sd=true 
▶ Books:
  - Cracking The Coding Interview
  - 101 Great Answers to the Toughest Interview Questions
▶ Online Courses: LinkedIn learning, Coursera, Udemy
▶ Reddit: r/jobs, r/interviews, r/cscareerquestions
▶ Websites: Levels.fyi, Glassdoor, 
▶ Other important resources:
  - https://www.levels.fyi/blog/amazon-leadership-principles.html 
  - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-life-hacks/presentations/behavioral-interview-questions-answers
  - https://www.tryexponent.com/blog/the-complete-google-behavioral-interview-guide  

⭐️ Contents ⭐️
⌨️ (0:00:29) Course outline
⌨️ (0:02:38) Understanding different types of interviews
⌨️ (0:04:03) Behavioral interview fundamentals
⌨️ (0:10:34) Master of the STAR method
⌨️ (0:19:59) Self-assessment and researching companies
⌨️ (0:32:38) Case study 1: Netflix
⌨️ (0:39:01) Case study 2: Amazon
⌨️ (0:42:12) Behavioral interview question categories
⌨️ (0:50:09) Top 50 behavioral interview questions
⌨️ (2:01:20) How to deal with tough questions
⌨️ (2:06:19) Non-verbal communication
⌨️ (2:08:19) Strategies for preparation and useful Resources

🎉 Thanks to our Champion and Sponsor supporters:
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This in-depth course is tailored for job seekers at all levels, providing you with the essential skills and insights to succeed in behavior-based interviews.

While many developers focus on preparing for technical interviews, you should also prepare for the other parts of job interviews.

Parth is an experienced instructor and provides a bunch of insider tips and industry expertise.

So whether you're targeting a role in a top company or just starting your professional journey, this course is your key to navigating behavioral interviews with ease.

So now we are going to have a full course on how you can master your behavioral interviews.

So first let's understand that what is going to be the outline of the course and what you can expect from this course.

Number 1 thing we are going to learn is the introduction and the importance of behavioral interviews, what they are and why do they matter in the actual interview system.

Next we are going to learn about the star method.

It is a way for you to articulate your answers for the behavioral interview questions so that you can represent them in a better format.

Next we will learn about how you can prepare research and present your answers in a methodical tactical manner.

And I will, we'll talk about all the different strategies that they are about researching yourself, the company you are applying for the culture you need to understand.

And we will go deep with a couple of case studies as well.

Plus we will learn about the different categories of behavioral interviews.

And then we will reach to the meat of our problem.

That is 50 different behavioral interview questions.

And what is the intent for those questions and what should be the expected answers that the interviewer is going to look forward.

So this is going to be the most important topic.

And next in the end, we will talk about how you can deal with difficult questions.

What are some of the nonverbal communication cues you have to understand.

And in the very end, we will talk about some resources and followups that would be really useful for your upcoming behavioral interview preparation.

Now, first, let me introduce myself really quickly.

My name is Parth Vyas and I have been in the IT industry for 10 plus years now.

On the side, I run my own YouTube channel called destination fang, where I teach about different technical system design and behavioral interview topics, questions, and concerns.

So if you want, Feel free to go ahead and check it out.

My hobbies include watching lots of movies, playing lots of call of duty and going on lots of hikes.

Now, lastly, let me just talk about a few fun facts about myself.

Last year I became a dad of 2 beautiful twin daughters and originally I was born and raised in India, but since last 10 years I've been living in Canada.

Now let's see that what are the different types of interviews we can expect to face in any sort of tech interview process.

Now, number 1 is a technical interview, which can vary from either data structure and algorithm related problems, or maybe some technology agnostic or technology specific kind of questions, maybe like Java, Python related problems, or if you're applying something for data scientists, maybe there can be some variations for that technical interview process.

Next is a system design interview where you are typically talking about the broad ocean of computer science and distributed system concepts, where you talk about everything related to how you want, how you can build a more resilient and desirable system.

If you have to build your own Twitter or Google like system, how would you do that?

What are the trade-offs you would consider?

And Third 1 is the behavioral interview that we are going to put most of our emphasis on for this portion of the rest of the course.

Now behavioral interviews are very important for tech roles.

On top of it, they are also generically applied to all sorts of jobs because you can imagine every single company wants to hire an employee who is going to be a good culture fit and the purpose of behavioral interview is to identify that what type of person you are and will you be a good potential candidate to hire or not.

So now let's see that what behavioral interviews are.

Behavioral interviews are mostly tend to focus on your past experience of what are the things you have done, what are the situations you have faced, what are the experiences you have gained and based on those experiences, situations and answers you give the companies or the interviewers would predict that how successful candidate you would be in the future.

So rather than focusing on just random questions, they tend to put more emphasis on what you have faced, what you have earned and what you did in those scenarios.

On top of it, what did you learn from that?

The purpose of these interviews are quite simple.

They want to assess or they want to judge that how good of a candidate you would be, but based on the real life examples and real life experience you have faced in your previous career throughout this point.

So they are slightly different from the traditional interviews we used to have because typically we all have faced some sort of interviews where we are being asked questions like where do you see yourself in 5 years if you are in a situation where you have a conflict with someone how would you resolve that or if you have to do this Or if you have to do this or if you have to do that.

So basically, typically pre people used to ask hypothetical questions.

And then at some point they realize that rather than focusing on hypothetical scenarios and imagination of candidate, it would be good to understand that what type of situations they have faced and how did they deal with them.

So based on those real life examples and experiences, they would be able to judge that how good of a candidate you are, which means they wants to assess your interpersonal skills and problem solving abilities based on your real life experiences and real life examples.

So which is quite a major turn from the hypothetical scenarios that previously used to dominate the job market.

More focus is put on the examples and specific tasks that you have, you have achieved throughout your career, rather than just random questions or the typical questions that previously used to be the majority of part of the interview.

Now the question is, why does behavioral interviews matter so much in the actual hiring process?

The behavioral interviews are designed in a manner that they tend to predict your performance based on the answers you given based on the experiences you have realized.

Now think from the company's perspective, hiring any single candidate is a very expensive task and very resource incentive task for the companies because number 1, they will have to post the jobs that they will have to go through maybe a hundred resumes.

Then they would have to interview at least 15 to 20 candidates and the interviewers tend to be the senior level folks, Which means the higher and senior level folks are not doing their job, but rather they're spending their working hours interviewing various different candidates.

And what if they hire a candidate and after 6 months they realize that that candidate is maybe lazy or that candidate does not listen to their manager or does not follow directions.

Always have issues with all of the coworkers who is not a good person to work with all of these issues.

And then company would realize that now They might have to replace that person.

So replacing can also come with their own consequences.

Maybe they have to pay them some severance package.

And once again, they would have to go through this whole hiring process to find a better suitable candidate, which means companies really wants to make sure that they vet before they hire any single candidate.

And that's why even if you lack in technical skills, it can still be learned.

But if you lack in the correct attitude and the right mindset for sure, company is going to reject you immediately.

So that is why it is it becomes really imperative and important for any company to make sure that before they hire someone they critically judge their skill set their attitude how they behave with other people how should they behave in different teams and that's why these becomes really important because behavioral interviews they help to find the candidate with right attitude right mindset who is going to thrive in their jobs who is going to take the company forward with their vision and with their culture.

So that is why behavioral interviews are really important.

On top of it, behavioral interviews are actually a great tool for the interviewer as well.

Because you can dictate the pace and the answers you can explain and this is an open ground for you.

So treat it as an opportunity for you to convey or interview that.

Hey, these are the things I have been through.

These are the things I learned from that.

So it's an open ground for you to score as many goals as you can.

And think of even the real life scenarios.

Why do great teams always wants to hire someone who has been performing really good for last 2 to 3 years because they know that they can, they have the quantifiable measures or they have the real numbers to present that this player may be Christian or Messi, why they are good or why they are good because consistently they have shown that they can perform well under pressure situation.

They can deal with different tasks, different teams, different championships.

They have lost, they have been battered, they have been injured and still they jump back, still they came back.

So they have the right attitude and that what makes them elite athletes and same thing applies for any single company as well that they wants to hire a person with the correct mindset that even if they make mistakes, they learn from that.

And that's why it's really important for you to pay utmost attention to the behavioral portion of the interview as well.

You can be the greatest technical mind in the world.

But if you don't have the correct mindset, no company is going to hire you because no 1 wants to work with someone who is not a nice person.

So always, always put more emphasis on the way you convey yourself, the way you are going to present yourself in an interview, because this is an open ground for you.

Now let's talk about the way you are going to approach the questions in an actual behavioral interview.

And for that, we have a very popular method called star method.

It is nothing but a mechanism for you to formulate and articulate your answers before you present them to the interviewer for any given question.

Star is nothing but the abbreviation for situation, task, action and result.

And what the interviewer wants you to do is that they want you to completely give all the answers in this sequence.

So this is a timeline that you have to follow in order to provide your answer.

So let's try to break down the star method and we will try to understand it with some examples as well.

So first, what you need to do is whenever any question is being asked at you, what you can do is you can explain that what was the situation, what was the backstory on why you needed to do that thing in which you are providing all the context you are providing that what happened, what was the scenario, what happened, what was happening with the company, what was being asked for you to do, what was the overall scenario that would impact your judgment or your decision.

What was the task that was expected of you that what you needed to work on, what you needed to complete, how you needed to do that, what were some of the additional constraints and you provide all of that information for the action.

You need to provide the exact specific things that you did.

And I'm providing more emphasis on the word you, because many times we tend to feel that In a larger project, we always say that, yeah, we were trying to build this and we were trying to do that.

We try to give credit to other people because it would seem like we are a person who feel gratitude for the work of others and appreciate that.

And of course you should have that quality, no issues with that.

But in the interview, the interviewer is trying to judge what you specifically did, what you were responsible for and what were the actions that you took.

And last thing would be that what was the result that was achieved?

And what improvements that made based on the actions you took?

So see the whole story that you are explaining everything and then you are saying that what you need to do.

You are going in 1 sequence from 1 point A to point B while explaining everything that was asked in the context of the of the question.

Now let's try to think of this with an example.

Maybe the interviewer ask you a question that give me an example where you had a disagreement with your product manager or with your supervisor and how did you deal with that situation.

First you would define what was the situation so situation could be that you already had a company that was that had a very nice tech stack on maybe Microsoft Azure and you had lot of services and applications already up and running but for that time your manager wanted to create the microservice cluster from the existing monolith application, and it needed to be done on an urgent and immediate basis.

So for that, if they had to deploy everything in the cloud, maybe there were some bureaucracies or some process that you might have to follow that would have caused some additional time constraint.

So that is why the manager's approach was that because we needed to get this done as quickly as possible.

Can you move everything on the on premises service servers?

And once we deploy in the production, maybe we can think about what we need to do later because managing the monolith application was becoming a huge burden.

Now the task on your hand was that you were responsible for creating though, or breaking down that monolith application into the cluster of microservices.

And you maybe the team was short staffed and you were tasked to complete this by this time and date and deadline, but your approach was that since the rest of the company is already working on the cloud computing, and you are trying to become a cloud native company where you are trying to get rid of all the on-premise server servers and devices.

Maybe you can mention that the, even though manager explicitly said that, Hey, this would speed up the pro production and speed ramp.

We need to ramp this up completely and pretty quickly.

Your suggestion was that based on the experience, it would make more sense to deploy all of these things in the cloud and create a cloud native app from the scratch, rather than building everything from the ground up and then deploying in the company server.

And then once again, providing or adding additional resources to move them to the cloud eventually.

And this was the disagreement between yourself and your manager.

So as an action, I explained to my manager, I convinced them that, Hey, these are the different challenges we currently have.

Since we are already trying to get rid of the on-premise services servers, they would be decommissioned soon.

And even if we build everything right now, and we, we migrate everything, though, the development and deployment might be faster, but still we would have to provide an additional resources and in order to move all of these Once again, back to the cloud.

We just spend all the effort in 1 time and build a cloud native application that is going to be more resilient and it would be, it would sell the company better in the long run.

And then later as, as sort of the actions you did some calculation that how much time and effort and resources will it take for you to move to the on-premise and then once again move to the cloud or if you have to build a build everything from scratch and directly move to the cloud, what would be the differences?

What are going to be the pros and cons of each approach?

and cons of each approach, what are going to be the benefits and after providing all of the resources and all of the details you explained to the, to your manager and then manager came to an agreement that, okay, Maybe it would make more sense to deploy to the cloud rather than relying on the on-premise servers that is already going to be decommissioned.

So as an action, you had your monolith application broken down into a very good cluster of microservices that got deployed in the cloud.

And now you have a more resilient cloud native service.

So this can be your answer in the star method where you break down every single component and you explain the pros and cons of each 1 of them.

You walk the interviewer through the scenario and explain that what were the exact specific actions you took?

Did you just completely discarded the approach from the manager or where you listening on both sides of the coin?

And after you give this kind of answer, it is going to be much more impactful.

Plus the interviewer would be able to follow along throughout your whole story and whole journey.

So once you give this answer, the interviewer can have better follow-up questions and they would know you better that you are the person who takes into the consideration of all the, all the things you think about the longterm.

You think that what is going to be the best for the company rather than just getting the immediate thing done for the sake of doing it.

So these are the things that leave a lasting impact on the interviewer's mind.

On top of it, it is always going to be really good practice to always frame your answers in this scenario.

That is why star method is really important.

And always, whenever you are trying to answer any question, make sure that you, you lay out the situation first and then you move or build on top of it, follow the timeline.

And this is going to be really easy for interviewer to follow on top of it.

You would be able to explain the whole thing.

And you can also recall the same scenario on your mind as well.

Initially my manager reached out to me and then we had this discussion and then we had this discussion.

I created these charts or these comparisons between both the available approaches.

And then we made a quantifiable and concrete decision that it would be better to go with approach a or approach B based on these scenarios.

And this was the task you did and this was the result you achieved.

So it really looks nice and always make sure that whenever you're trying to build your answers, you are framing them in the star method for that.

You might need to do some practicing behind And we are going to talk about all of this in the later part of the video that how can you prepare better.

But make sure that you are aware about the star methodology because more and more companies they want their answers to come in this frame.

So after understanding what star method is now, let's dive deep into how do you actually start preparing for different stories, different answers and different scenarios for that you will actually have to do some back work and then we will move forward.

So let's understand that the very first thing you need to do in order to prepare for your behavioral interviews, that is to self reflect, you will have to identify that what are the things you're good at, what are the things you're not good at, and how can you improve yourself?

So for that, you always need to go and make sure that you are using the correct and different methods to verify that what are the personal strengths you carry.

Some of the methods you can think of is maybe asking questions to other self reflecting on past experiences, getting feedback, maybe from your manager, from your co-worker or from your ex-employers, reaching out to different people, thinking or researching on the current situation you are in.

And Many times this may sound odd, but many times anonymous boards can be really, really helpful.

You can go ahead and start journaling if you want.

The reason I'm saying about anonymous boards is because many times if you explain your situation in places like Reddit or blind or someplace, most of the people, yeah, there will be some trolls, but most people are going to be neutral and they won't know you personally.

So they would completely be non-biased towards you.

So that can sometimes work in your favor, but it's a slippery slope.

So you need to be very careful with anonymous feedback.

But apart from that, there are a lot of different methods to self reflect and self identify that what should be, what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses and over the course of the period, you must have experience and learn something.

You've been in this world for a few years now.

So for sure, you must have some idea that, Hey, these are the things I'm good at.

If I have to give you an example about my strengths and my weaknesses, like, I personally believe that I tend to get really involved in the conversation.

I've somehow, I feel that my communication skills are slightly better.

I tend to dive so deep into the introduction and rather than just saying my things exactly, I tried to create a huge preamble before I dive deeper into the main issue.

So that was that is another of my weakness.

Maybe I can do some things to make changes.

And these are these self-reflection tools would be a would make you a better person in the long run.

That would be the number 1 step, not only in terms of behavioral interviews, but also in terms of on your day to day activities and daily self reflection, because with that over the course of a certain period of few weeks or even few years, you would become a significantly better person and your work ethic in your day to day activity, and also as an effective leader, mentor, or a team coworker.

Next you need to make sure that you reflect on your relevant past experiences because for any single behavioral interview, they're always going to dive deeper into the questions regarding what have you done in the past?

How can you maybe create impact for your customer?

These are going to be the broader type of scenarios that you would be asked on and you would be judged on.

So a quick question or a quick tip, whenever you are working or whatever the experiences you have faced in your career so far, just start making good points or good stories in some piece of paper.

So that would allow you to have those talking points when you actually get to that stage in actual behavioral interview because many times in any behavioral interview, they are going to be asking you somewhere between 4 to 10 or somewhere between 5 to 20 questions, depending on how lengthy the interview are, what type of difficulties they want to have and what type of questions they are suggesting.

Now for these questions, you don't want to repeat the same story or same scenario again and again, and again, it would make really good impact if you can have different scenarios and different considerations for all the things you did.

So that is going to play out in your favor.

So, but many times it becomes really difficult to recall all of these things on the go when you are actually in that interview.

So it's always better to prepare beforehand, have all of those experiences noted down.

Maybe you can create some short bullet points for your star method.

You can say that, okay, the situation was that a manual deployment was getting out of hand and we were, we were having a lot of issues.

A task was that you needed to deploy something really quickly and it needed to be in the production as soon as possible.

The action you took is that you started working on the automated DevOps deployment scenario on the side.

You took care of the high priority items immediately and the low priority items you refrain from pushing to the production and then you kept them aside.

And then first you build that those automated CICD pipelines.

And then in the end, you deploy everything using CICD pipeline.

And as a result, now you are seeing that all the deployments in your company are happening automatically using the automated deployments.

So in this scenario, you can write bullet points as situation, manual deployments, task, maybe deploy something to production and also build CI, CD pipelines action.

You started building CI, CD pipelines and result.

So you can add a few more points for that.

So I would personally suggest to create at least 15 or 20 experiences based on different scenarios that you have faced in your career or you faced on a day to day basis and just note them down somewhere and have that have it ready because once you have those experiences, you the moment you would see them and you would understand that these are the things I've already done.

It becomes really easy to convey that in an actual interview that it would then it wouldn't even feel like an interview.

It would feel like a normal conversation between 2 people where you are just going over all the experiences you face and it would be like, remember when, when during this time, this was the situation, this is how we dealt with it.

And I learned this and I learned this and from based on this experience next time, I wouldn't repeat this.

So It can be a great exercise to reflect on the relevant experiences that you have currently faced so far.

That is once you realize that what are your strengths and weaknesses, once you have those stories ready.

Now, when you come closer towards the actual interview, start diving deep into the true requirements of any particular job you are applying for.

Understand what type of seniority for the job is understand that what type of requirement the company is having in every single job description.

Companies mentioned that what would be the generic technical skills needed on top of it, what would be the day to day basis or duties or behavioral skills required.

Maybe you have to deal with external customers, so you need some sales experience.

Maybe you need to deal with a team of larger individuals.

Maybe you need to lead a team of different people.

Maybe you need to behave as like a tech lead or a senior lead in any particular position.

So realize that what job description is suggesting to and then reflect on the relevant experiences you had tried to create mapping between all the things that you have done and you have learned so far and make sure that not to ignore the job description and ask the same questions to either the hiring manager or your recruiter beforehand that what type of expectation the company is having.

Is there anything about the company culture that should I know before you go deeper into the behavioral interview?

Because this is going to give you a great insight and idea about what type of questions that you can be judged on or you can be asked and maybe you can have those specific experiences ready because that comes in handy for some different companies because many companies they have a very specific set of culture and they need very specific set of individuals with the correct mindset and we will learn more about that in the upcoming case studies that we are going to study.

But make sure that once you have the strengths, weakness and self-reflection, you have these story points and then you go very deep into the job requirements so that you have that matching criteria or matching matrix between what is needed and what you currently have.

So it becomes pretty easy and your odds of successing in the interview becomes exponentially high.

Next, you will, you should never ignore the company culture and company values that a company tend to behave on and thrive on.

Most of the scenario, what I have personally felt is every single company tend to have a similar work structure where they want to do what's best for the company, what's best for their customer, what's best for their employees.

They want to build a product more efficiently, more securely, more reliably.

They want to help people who work in accordance with each other who are not having any like lot of significant issues.

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Master Behavioral Interviews (for Software Engineers)