Interview Basics| Non-Technical Rounds - Behavior and Leadership
In the following article, I shall be talking about preparing for the behavioral round and leadership principles. This is only for people with 0–5 years experience.
I am yet to come across a person who hasn’t spiced up their contribution during interviews.💁
I have given a lot of interviews over time and one thing that is common across organizations are behavioral and experience based questions. To be honest, the behavioral questions are namesake, if you are a decent person and do not show any red flags during the technical rounds you are pretty much done. (Ex: Never abuse/get annoyed at your interviewer 🥸)
Internships: still focus on behavioral rounds, you can get some idea about this from IndiaBix.
Managers & Tech leads: Are asked a hell lot of leadership and experience based questions around conflict resolution. This article is not for them 🙂.
Developers: Companies have mostly moved out of the behavioral round routine and shifting to more experience based questions. Don’t get me wrong, experience based questions aren’t new, but their importance has increased in recent times.
If you have a fluent corporate tongue you are 95% done and it is gonna take you at max 2 hours to prepare for these questions.
Going forward I shall only be talking about the experience based rounds
How do companies conduct these rounds?
Google chooses to have a googlyness round, Amazon conducts each interviews with a portion dedicated to one of its leadership principles. Majority start-ups have a managerial round where in such questions are asked.
How to prep?
Prepare a Word doc and write down:
- All your relevant projects. Take note of :
- Challenges
- Deadline changes
- Any missing deliverables
- Impact generated > Try to quantify the impact, example users gained or revenue earned - From the projects and work above, choose:
- most interesting one
- Any bad decisions and instances of failure [Rolling out a feature too early or fast]
- Instance of team growth [Helping members resolve issues.]
- Personal growth [Your learnings]
- Did you ever ship anything incomplete? [You could talk about the feature being rolled out in stages if it's a project and how you saw it through.] - Time you lead a team. If you are struggling, use instances such as:
- Guiding interns and new recruits.
- Leading some college project or working on hackathons - Your process of learning any new technology
- You should talk about courses, any self projects and code reviews. How these have helped you grow. - Look for instances of failures, as they are perfect talking points.
- Think of feedbacks that have helped you grow.
- Prepare a decent answer on why you are looking for a change. (Do not just say - Money 😂)
Things to keep in mind
- Talk in terms of “I”. If you keep saying stuff like “we did this/that”. It would eventually push the interviewer to ask about your contribution.
- Quantify impact
- Along with talking about how great a product is, talk about how much usage and revenue it is generating.
- Talk about the responsibility of others in your project as well. (Ex: The rollout was not under me, but I was in-charge of taking care of documentation) This shows that you were indeed working neck to neck with others. - DO NOT blame the team
- It is okay to say that you are not growing in your current time.
- It is ‘not’ okay to blame mishaps like deadline miss or broken features on the management, as it shows the interviewer that in future you might be badmouthing their company. - It is okay to talk about failures and how you grew from them. The interviewer is looking for, what you have done to work on your shortcomings.
If you want a developer to push code you have to accept that there will be bugs at times. 🐛
- For less experienced people - It’s okay to say that you don’t have much experience in response to a couple questions. During early stages of your career you do struggle with a hell lot of things, so whenever opportunity presents itself talk about all of them.
