Interview Upgrade: 100 structured behavioral interview questions to help you ace the interview and get your dream job
Structured interviews result in increased predictive validity and decreased differences between demographic groups. They are better at indicating who will do well on the job. They aim to cut down on confirmation bias. And they force interviewers to debate facts and performance rather than gut feel. Structured interviews are the dominant interview method used by the best tech companies in the world.
Interviewing is intimidating, yes, but it doesn’t have to be. The more you prepare, the less intimidated you will feel. How do you prepare? By using this guide, by practicing questions the same way you would if you studied for the GMAT, LSAT, or SAT’s, and having situations/scenarios in your memory to draw upon in the interview.
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What are Behavioral Interview Questions?
“Tell me about a time…”
IMPORTANT TO NOTE: Remember SAO: Situation (S), Behavior (B), Outcome (O). All answers you give to Behavioral Interview Questions should have all three parts. You should detail the situation, detail the action that was taken, and detail the outcome(s). Winners close details by speaking to outcomes. Always, always, always speak to S, B, and O.
Example 1: Proud accomplishment: Think of an incident during the past year in which you were particularly proud of your performance, or the performance of a coworker, and share it with us. The incident must be related to performance on the job. The incident may have involved people, facilities, information, or another item relevant to performance on the job.
Recalling the incident, please answer the following questions:
What circumstances led to the incident? (Situation)
What did you or your co-worker do that was very effective at the time? (Behavior)
Why was this incident very helpful in getting the job done? (Outcome)
Example 2: Incident that should have been handled differently: Think back over the past year and describe an incident that should have been handled differently. The incident must be related to your performance or the performance of a coworker on the job. The incident may have involved people, facilities, information, or another item relevant to performance on the job.
Recalling the incident, please answer the following questions:
What circumstances led to the incident? (Situation)
What did you or your co-worker do that was very ineffective at the time? (Behavior)
What were the effects of the actions? (Outcome)
What should have been differently?
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Structured Behavioral Interview Questions
My suggestion to anyone who is looking to get better at structured interview questions is to use this little trick. Instead of going through 100+ behavioral interview questions and writing down answers and trying to memorize them, instead realize that there are typically ~10–15 competencies that any company is looking to screen for. Your job is to (prior to going into an interview) have two stories for each competency in your brain. So… 20 examples. It sounds like a lot… but when you think of the fact that “Hey, if an interviewer asks me a question that relates to Self Awareness, I’m going to use one of these two stories…” it becomes a lot easier. Here are the dimensions below (Note: These IMO cover what 90% of startups assess for… so if there’s questions they ask you in your interview that aren’t covered here, I’m sorry).
Cognitive Ability (Problem Solving): Smart people who can learn and adapt quickly. Can they solve ambiguous problems with no known answer? Are they constantly striving to develop hypotheses, test, and learn?
Analytical abilities: Describe the project or situation which best demonstrates your analytical abilities. What was your role?
Lack of information: Describe a time when you had to solve a problem, but didn’t have all necessary information about it in hand. What did you do?
Qual & quant data: Give an example of a customer problem you had to solve that involved both quantitative and qualitative data. Outline the customer problem, data you had available, metrics you wanted to impact and the goal target for those metrics, the solution, and how you determined if it was successful. What was the impact?
Creative solution: Describe a time when you came up with a creative solution/idea/project/report to a problem in your past work. Tell us about a problem that you solved in a unique or unusual way. What was the outcome? Were you satisfied?
Multiple solutions: There is typically more than one way to solve a problem. Give an example from your recent work experience that would illustrate this.
Validity: In a current job task, what steps do you go through to ensure your decisions are correct/effective?
Foresight: Tell me about a time you predicted a problem with a stakeholder. How did you prevent it from escalating?
Competitive comparison: If our competitor, X, released a new product, Y, how would you advise our team to respond?
Developing information: How do you go about developing information to make a decision? Give an example.
Procedure: Developing and using a detailed procedure is often very important in a job. Tell about a time when you needed to develop and use a detailed procedure to successfully complete a project. Give a specific example of a time when you used good judgment and login in solving a problem. Give me a specific example of a time when you used good judgment and logic in solving a problem.
Cost/Benefit Analysis: Your manager wants to buy new software that will increase the team’s productivity and asks for your recommendation. How would you reply?
Weighing alternatives: Have you ever had a situation where you had a number of alternatives to choose from? How did you go about choosing one? How did you assemble the information? How did you review the information? What process did you follow to reach a conclusion? What alternatives did you develop?
Innovation: Tell me about a new, innovation idea you have had that you developed on your job? How did you develop them? What was the result? Did you implement them?
Effective Communication: Do they communicate ideas effectively? Does the candidate have persuasion capability in conveying their ideas and gaining buy-in?
Leveraging data to convey a decision: Tell us about a time when you had to analyze information and make a recommendation to your team (manager, coworker, execs, you pick). What kind of thought process did you go through? What was your reasoning behind your decision?
Persuasion: Give me an example of a time when you were able to successfully persuade someone to see things your way at work.
Persuasion: When you have difficulty persuading someone to your point of view, what do you do? Give an example.
Negotiation: Describe the most challenging negotiation in which you were involved. What did you do? What were the results for you? What were the results for the other party?
Information flowing to manager: How do you keep your manager informed about what is being done in your work area?
Information flowing to direct reports / peers: How do you keep direct reports informed about information that affects their jobs?
Complex information: Tell us about a time when you had to present complex information that was technical. How did you ensure that the other person understood?
Strengthening relationships: Describe a situation when you were able to strengthen a relationship by communicating effectively. What made your communication effective?
Written communication: Describe the most significant written document, report or presentation which you had to complete. Tell us about a time in which you had to use your written communication skills in order to get an important point across.
Verbal skills: What have you done to improve your verbal communication skills? Give an example.
Admitting communication failure: Describe a situation where you felt you had not communicated well. How did you correct the situation?
Presentation style: How would you describe your presentation style?
Struggling situation: What kinds of communication situations cause you difficulty? Give an example.
Speaking up: Tell us about an experience in which you had to speak up in order to be sure that other people knew what you thought or felt.
Email / slack / messaging correspondence: Describe how you write emails to convey an idea? If you generally don’t use email and instead use Slack or Microsoft teams, speak to that. Give a detailed example.
Customer Obsession: Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They obsess over customers and work vigorously to earn and keep trust.
Data driven decision making related to customers: Give an example of how you leverage data to make decisions pertaining to customers. What data, describe the situation, behavior, and impact the the customer and to the business.
Product improvement for customers: Regardless of what department you’re in, you’ve had interactions from customers and gathered feedback. Tell us about a time when you used facts and reason to persuade your team/manager/coworkers/direct reports to make a high-impact change for a customer pertaining to the product/service you were providing/selling.
Dealing with an angry/unhappy customer: Give a specific example of a time when you had to address an angry customer. What was the problem and what was the outcome? How would you assess your role in diffusing the situation?
Building rapport with customers: How do you go about establishing rapport with a customer? What have you done to gain their confidence? Give an example.
Ownership: Leaders are owners. They think big. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company.
Defining vision: Describe what steps/methods you have used to define/identify a vision for your company/department/team.
Seeing around corners: Tell us about a time when you anticipated the future and made changes to current responsibilities/operations to meet future needs.
Defining strategy: How do you set strategy and priorities? You can speak to the strategy of your most current employer, and your role in defining strategy. Please also speak to a change in strategy you made and why. Give an example.
Defining goals: How did your efforts impact the strategy and goals?
Your direct impact: What impact did you have in your last job? Give an example related to your impact, not just your department or team, but you specifically.
Biggest idea you’ve had: What was the biggest idea that you came up with in your career? How did you apply it?
Above and beyond: When did you go beyond the call of duty to get a job done? Give an example?
Risk taking: What is the riskiest decision you have made? What was the situation? What happened?
Project creation: What projects have you started on your own recently? What prompted you to get started?
Project management: Give an example of a project you created, owned and managed? What was it? What were the goals? What was the result? What did you miss? What could you have done better?
Detail oriented: Some people consider themselves to be “big picture people” and others are “detail oriented”. Which are you? Give an example of a time where great attention to detail was required to complete a task. How did you handle that situation?
Learning & curiosity: Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore.
Professional development: What have you done to further your own professional development in the past five years?
Skill development Tell us how you keep your job knowledge current with the ongoing changes in the industry. What sorts of things have you done to become better qualified for your career?
Transformative learning experience on the job: Tell us about a recent job experience that you would describe as really transformational in your life that was a real learning experience? What did you learn from this experience?
Personal development: Tell me about something you enjoy learning about outside of work that you are really passionate about?
Book: What is the most current book you’ve read, why did you read it, what did you learn, and are you applying anything related to it in your life? How so?
Hires and develops the best: Leaders attract others to them, raise the bar with every hire and promotion, recognize exceptional talent, and coach seriously.
Criteria for assessment: What are the criteria you make in assessing talent during the interview stage? Followup question: How would you rate yourself across these dimensions on a scale from 1–5 where 5 is Very Good and 1 is Very Poor.
Biggest hiring success: What was your biggest success in hiring someone? Who was it? What role did they play in the success of the business? Why was this so special to you?
Biggest hiring mistake: What was your biggest mistake in hiring someone? What happened? How did you deal with the situation? What did you learn from that experience?
Coaching / training: Tell us about a coaching or training program that you have developed or enhanced.
Evaluating productivity of your employees: How do you evaluate the productivity/effectiveness of your direct reports?
Feedback: What do you believe is the most effective way to deliver feedback? Give an example of this interview right now. Please tell me one thing I could do to improve this interview.
Performance reviews: What is your preferred method of conducting performance reviews? What are the criteria that you would ideally like put into the assessment (be specific)? What cadence of reviews do you prefer?
Promoting employees & merit/comp raises: How do you handle promotions, merit/compensation awards? How do you make decisions as it relates to this? How do you think about compensation raises specifically (% of salary, spot bonuses, any creative methods you’ve deployed in the past)?
Transparency into work flows with direct reports: How do you know what your direct reports are doing? Followup: How do they know what you are doing?
Inconsistent direct report: Have you ever had a direct report whose performance was consistently marginal? What did you do?
Delegating: Tell us how you go about delegating work? Give an example.
Biggest success and mistake delegating: What was the biggest mistake you have had when delegating work? The biggest success?
Peak performance: How do you get direct reports to work at their peak potential? Give an example.
Employee exceeding expectations: How do you deal with people whose work exceeds your expectations? Give a real past example.
Define “success”: How would you define “success” for someone in your chosen career? Give an example for a person within a domain discipline you have.
Coaching to develop skills: How do you coach a direct report to develop a new skill? Give an example.
Frequency of feedback: How often do you discuss a direct report’s performance with him/her? Give an example.
Crafting development plans: Tell us about a specific development plan that you created and carried out with one or more of your employees. What was the specific situation? What were the components of the development plan? What was the outcome?
Disciplinary action: Tell us about a time when you had to take disciplinary action with someone you supervised.
Brutally honest feedback: Tell us about a time when you had to tell a staff member that you were dissatisfied with his or her work.
Firing an employee: Tell me about a time you fired an employee, how you handled it, how it went, and what you learned from it?
Insists on the highest standards: Leaders have relentlessly high standards — many people may think these standards are unreasonably high.
Setting standards: How do you set standards for yourself and team? Give me an example.
Manager expectations are too high: You believe your manager’s expectations are too high for a given project. She/he has asked for an unrealistic deadline. How do you handle that situation?
A direct report believes your expectations are too high: An employee comes to you and says your expectations are too high, what do you do?
Authority: Tell us about a time when you had to use your authority to get something done. Were there any negative consequences?
Conflict: Tell us about a time when you had to defend a decision you made even though other important people were opposed to your decision.
Goal resetting: You’ve set a three month goal that 30 days in you believe to be unachievable and too aggressive for your team. What do you do?
Attention to detail: Tell us about a situation when it was important for you to pay attention to details. How did you handle it?
Moves with urgency: Speed matters in business. Many actions are reversible and do not need extensive study.
Quick decision making: Give an example of a time in which you had to be quick in coming to a decision.
Analysis paralysis: Tell me about a time where you felt analysis paralysis leveraging data, and how you ultimately made the decision.
When you were wrong: Give an example of a decision you made quickly that ended up being the wrong decision. Why was it wrong? What did you learn?
Gut decision: When was the last time you made a key decision on the spur of the moment? How fast was the decision made? What were the results? Describe the situation.
Risk taking: Give me an example of when you took a risk to achieve a goal. What was the outcome? How did you go about making the changes (step by step)? Answer in depth or detail such as “What were you thinking at that point?” or “Tell me more about meeting with that person”, or “Lead me through your decision process”.
Delivers results: Leaders make goals, make decisions, and measure results. Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them.
Goal alignment: Describe how your position contributes to your organization’s/unit’s goals. What is the unit’s goals/mission?
Goal setting: Give an example of an important professional goal that you set in the past. Tell about your success in reaching it.
Metrics ownership: What performance metrics do you own at your current employer?
Outcomes: Describe a project or idea that was implemented primarily because of your efforts. What was your role? What was the outcome?
Prioritization: Tell us about a time when you were particularly effective on prioritizing tasks and completing a project on schedule.
Managing your time: How do you manage your time?
Making mistakes: We all make mistakes we wish we could take back. Tell me about a time you wish you’d handled a situation differently with a colleague.
Failure: Tell me about a time you failed. How did you deal with the situation?
Flourishes in adversity and ambiguity: Leaders can adapt to constantly changing situations and when challenges arise, they thrive through it.
Adaptability: Describe a major change that occurred in a job that you held. How did you adapt to this change?
Lack of control: Tell us about a situation in which you had to adjust to changes over which you had no control. How did you handle it?
Handling pressure: There are times when we are placed under extreme pressure on the job. Tell about a time when you were under such pressure and how you handled it.
Changing priorities: What do you do when priorities change quickly? Give one example of when this happened.
Pivot: Tell us about a time when you did something completely different from the plan and/or assignment. Why? What happened?
Competitive situations: What is the most competitive situation you have experienced? How did you handle it? What was the result? What was your major disappointment?
Handling crisis: When was the last time you were in a crisis situation? What was the situation? How did you react?
Inspires. Leaders inspire others to achieve beyond expectations with commitment and optimism.
Proudest accomplishment: Tell me about your proudest professional accomplishment.
Inspiring others: Give an example of a time in which you felt you were able to inspire your co‐workers or direct reports at work.
Defining your inspiration: What inspires you personally? How do you get inspired?
Leading peers: Have you ever been in a position where you had to lead a group of peers? How did you handle it?
Taking the bull by the horns: Describe a time when you saw some problem and took the initiative to correct it rather than waiting for someone else to do it.
Demonstrates self-awareness: Leaders thoroughly understanding themselves. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing.
Disappointed in yourself: Can you recall a time when you were less than pleased with your performance?
Improvement area: If there were one area you’ve always wanted to improve upon, what would that be?
Public personal accountability for failure: Describe a time when you took personal accountability publicly for a failure.
Strengths: What do you consider to be your professional strengths? Give me a specific example using this attribute in the workplace.
Accepting criticism from a manager: What was the most useful criticism you ever received from a manager?
Accepting criticism from a direct report: What was the most useful criticism you ever received from a direct report?
Poor decisions: Everyone has made some poor decisions or has done something that just did not turn out right. Has this happened to you? What happened?
Professional victory: What professional goal have you set for yourself that you have successfully achieved?
Handling disagreement: When you disagree with your manager, what do you do? Give an example.
Personal / professional life tradeoff: Describe a time when you had to make a difficult choice between your personal and professional life.
Earns trust & demonstrates empathy: The real job of a leader is not about being in charge, but taking care of those IN our charge. Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. This responsibility is a human job.
Lack of trust: Have you ever dealt with a situation where there was a lack of trust? How did you handle this situation? Give an example.
Diversity: What have you done to support diversity in your unit? What have you done to further your knowledge/understanding about diversity?
Diversity: Give a specific example of how you have helped create an environment where differences are valued, encouraged and supported.
Building report: Tell us about a time when you built rapport quickly with someone under difficult conditions.
Empathy for team members: What is the difficult part of being a member, not leader, of a team? How did you handle this?
Ethical dilemmas: Tell us about a specific time when you had to handle a tough problem which challenged ethical issues. Tell about such an occurrence and how you handled it.
Cooperating with a tough group: What is the toughest group that you have had to get cooperation from? Describe how you handled it. What was the outcome?
Involving managers in decision making: How do you involve your manager and/or others when you make a decision?
Handling difficult people: It is very important to build good relationships at work but sometimes it doesn’t always work. Tell me about a time when you were not able to build a successful relationship with a difficult person.
Maintaining composure: Sometimes we need to remain calm on the outside when we are really upset on the inside. Give an example of a time that this happened to you.
Culture clash: Tell us about a time that you successfully adapted to a culturally different environment.
Values clash: Tell me about a time your values misaligned with a business. Discuss what values were not aligned and what you did about it.
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What are Hypothetical (Case) Interview Questions?
“Here’s a hypothetical that you’d be likely to experience here…”
You should think of Hypothetical Interview Questions as cases. Some cases you’ll be given an hour to complete. Some you’ll be given a half hour. Some are meant to be answered on the spot. When someone is giving you a hypothetical, even if it’s based off of previous past data, they are asking you to think about how you would handle the given situation. Cases are (often times) less about getting to “the right” answer… (although many cases do have right answers), but much more often about how you demonstrate you’re ability to think about the problem, solve the problem, and convey the solution, the learnings, the underlying assumptions, your hypotheses, etc. The best cases are specific to the role… things you would actually see / be presented with on the job. Because of this, there is no better place to get better case preparedness than speaking to other people within your own domain (ex: Product, Marketing, Engineering, Sales, etc). Reach out to people you know within the same industry and ask them for their interview questions. Ask them to interview you. Ask them to review cases. Practice, practice, practice. Here’s an example below.
Example for a Product Manager: Imagine you’re working on an email product and a competitor starts charging a $5 monthly fee for their product. How would you assess the situation and what recommendation would you make to your team? Follow-up questions:
What factors would you take into consideration when making your recommendation?
What are the pros and the cons of your recommendation?
How would you assess if this was a sustainable model moving forward?
What impact would this have on the organization as a whole?
Cases are often times used to assess a candidate’s domain expertise: Does the candidate have the skills to handle the needed responsibilities of the job? Do they have the skills that will serve as the foundation in acquiring new skills to tackle future problems of the unknown? (Ex: If a candidate is interviewing for a Marketing Acquisition role, what is their Google Adwords proficiency?)
The most common interview structure I’ve seen at most tech companies is some variation of this:
Case 1 (45 minutes): On-the-job, role specific case w/ followup questions:
What factors would you take into consideration when making your recommendation?
What are the pros and the cons of your recommendation?
How would you assess if this was a sustainable model moving forward?
What impact would this have on the organization as a whole?
Case 2 (45 minutes): On-the-job, role specific case w/ followup questions:
What factors would you take into consideration when making your recommendation?
What are the pros and the cons of your recommendation?
How would you assess if this was a sustainable model moving forward?
What impact would this have on the organization as a whole?).
Case 3 (micro-case: 5 minutes): Designed to focus on a specific task skillset of the role.
Case 4 (micro-case: 5 minutes): Designed to focus on a specific task skillset of the role.
Core skillset expectations and personal assessment: If you were interviewing for this position what would you be looking for in the applicants as it relates to domain expertise? How would you rank yourself on those disciplines on a scale from 1–5 where 5 is very good and 1 is very bad?
Core metric tracking: What metrics do you track on a regular basis (e.g. conversion rates, number of new customers, expenses)? How do you use those metrics day to day?
Decline in key metric: If you saw a key metric drop week over week, what would you do? Explain step-by-step how you troubleshoot [X] problem. (These problems should be role specific: “a sudden drop in our ecommerce conversion rate).
Major decisions: What are three major decisions you have made over the past 12 months? How did you make those decisions? Give specific examples.
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Some interesting interview questions from big tech
A few we’ve collected from Google, Facebook, Stripe, and more…
Why do you want to join Google?
What do you know about Google’s product and technology?
Who are Google’s competitors, and how does Google compete with them?
How would you re-position Google’s offerings to counteract competitive threats from Microsoft?
Describe a technical problem you had and how you solved it.
What are three long term challenges facing Google?
Name three non-Google websites that you visit often and like. What do you like about the user interface and design? Choose one of the three sites and comment on what new feature or project you would work on. How would you design it?
If ads were removed from YouTube, how would you monetize it?
How would you explain cloud computing to a 6-year-old?
Tell me about your best collaboration experience
What do you do to stay motivated?
What would you do if an interviewer didn’t show up?
What is the biggest compliment you have received in your current role?
What would be your biggest challenge coming into this role?
On your very best day at work — the day you come home and think you have the best job in the world — what did you do that day?
“When is it you have lost track of time in the best possible way?”
Describe the personality of an executive that you wouldn’t want to work for again
How would you build Facebook for blind people?
We pride ourselves on a great work- and home-life balance. How much balance would you feel you needed in order to be happy in both places?
AirBnB
If you had to teach or give a TED talk, what subject would you talk about?
What would you say at Airbnb’s funeral?
What position am I interviewing you for?
What impact has the internet had on the world? Positive or negative?
Have you ever developed a meaningful or lasting friendship with someone who you met briefly in an informal setting, like riding on the bus?
If you could pick one public person to embody who you stand for, who would that be?
Don’t you think I’d be a great Airbnb host?
When you walk into a room, what would be your theme song?
What would you write on the tombstone of the current hotel industry?
What can you teach me in a few minutes?
How do you cut a round cake into 8 equal pieces using just 3 strokes of a knife?
How would you be able to survive a plane crash?
What is the craziest idea you’ve ever had?
Stripe
Standard SQL and communication questions.
Interview with a product manager: How do you measure the success of a given product, define a north star metric for a given product, how do you move the metric, how do you set goals, metric x is going up/down, why?
Interview with engineering manager: Focused on figuring out how you work with engineers, technical understanding of products you built, why you made some of the technical choices, how do you remove roadblocks, how do you push back against engineers etc.
Interview with a design manager: Focused on how you think about products from a design perspective, product you like/dislike and why, how to improve a stripe product from a design perspective, how would you design a product for x (could be anything, try to be as specific and clear as possible)
Interview with other PMs: Focused on Product Sense, a little bit about previous work but mostly focused on why you like/dislike a product, how to improve x, how to improve adoption of a Stripe product, if you built an app from scratch what/how would you build?
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Brainteasers… let’s hope you don’t get these.
Brainteasers became popular by Google back in the day. Today, they are no longer used in Google interviews… and many other companies have abandoned this approach. But here are some just in case.
How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.
How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?
The odds of someone asking you brainteasers is low. While it may happen, what they are ultimately trying to determine is HOW you think… most interview questions rarely have ONE answer, but instead have many. Do your best.
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In Conclusion
That was a lot. I know. But, if you want to ace the interview, you have to put in the work. There are very few shortcuts in life, and this isn’t one of them. Although… at least it’s comprehensive. Remember, the better you prepare for an interview, the more confident you will be and the better you’ll do. Prior to the interview, just like taking a test in college or high school… relax, get calm, and be YOU.
I hope this guide was helpful for you. Good luck!
Durkin
The Operators