Acing the Interview: Behavioral Questions "Tell Me About A Time When..."

Picture this, you've made it past the resume screen in an interview, you're talking with the recruiter on a phone call, and they ask you one of the most difficult questions that

anybody can answer in an interview.

Tell me about a time that you blank.

I use the word blank here because your mind may go blank.

The blank in the question could be filled with any number of different possible questions.

You find yourself struggling to come up with an answer to that question that adequately meets what the interviewer is looking for.

and is honest and true to your experiences.

This is a huge can of worms for neurodivergent people.

We may struggle to find an answer to those questions.

We may have a hard time expressing the answer to that question.

We may actually have a response, but it's difficult to know what is the response that an individual is looking for and what do I actually feel confident talking about to an

interviewer.

These things aren't easy.

And it would be so simple to say,

Just memorize 500 different possible questions and have a response for each of them.

And I'm gonna tell you, that's not possible.

I'm autistic.

My memory sucks.

There are some autistic people who have great memories.

There are some people out there whose memories are some where in between.

Not every person is going to be able to memorize the exact answers to questions in advance.

That is unrealistic and exhausting and tiring.

You could try to figure out, okay, for this company,

What are the possible questions that they could ask me?

And yeah, that's possible, but also companies really lock that sort of thing down so we can rule that one out.

The only thing that you know you can confidently do is answer the question as best you can and really try to understand what is it that an individual is actually asking me?

How can I generate a response to this question and feel confident that I got at the heart of what the interviewer is asking me?

When you are prompted with this question, tell me about a time that you had a difficult conversation with a coworker, for example.

You may have had an actual experience with a coworker that would answer this question directly, but it's also just as likely the case that you may not have ever had this

experience or you don't remember that this experience actually happened.

When a recruiter asks you this question, you'd be surprised to know that they're not actually looking for a play-by-play of exactly how it happened and exactly how you

responded.

Recruiters aren't mind readers.

They're not going to know if this experience actually occurred or not.

What you need to do in a situation is respond to the question how you would act and what you would say if you needed to have a difficult conversation with a coworker.

It's much easier for you

to have a conversation with them based on what you would act, what you would say, what you would do.

And that has to be based in some sort of reality.

So maybe you do have an experience that you have had with a coworker that was difficult.

Maybe it wasn't a conversation, maybe it was a project, maybe it was something else, maybe you were doing a presentation.

But you can use the basis of that experience and adapt it or modify it based on what a recruiter is actually asking you about.

That's what they want.

It is unrealistic for recruiter to assume that 100 % of all the people they talk with are going to have had 100 % of the experiences that they are prompting candidates about.

Not everybody has done everything.

And instead what they want to know is, what would you do if you had a difficult conversation with a coworker?

What are the things that you would prioritize as an individual in order to manage a situation in a way that that would respect?

and care for everybody involved.

You may think to yourself, I have never even had a difficult conversation with a coworker in general.

I may never have dealt with a difficult coworker, period.

What do I do then?

You still want to think about what would you do in that situation?

No matter what the question is, you want to have a couple of different scenarios and examples ready that you can modify based on the question that's being asked.

Taking the difficult conversation one for example, you can modify that based on whatever the question is, whether it's a difficult co-worker, a difficult manager, a difficult

teammate, something else that you can take to modify it based on how the question presents itself.

Let's say that the conversation isn't about a difficult coworker, but a difficult manager that you had to work with.

How would you interact with that manager?

You can modify the details of that and still keep it truthful to what you would do or what you would say in that scenario.

You're not lying to the recruiter because they're not looking for an answer that actually occurred exactly as you're saying it.

They want to know what you would do if this were to be reality, and that's a huge distinction for neurodivergent job seekers.

You don't have to have memorized an exact experience that actually happened to you, but you do need to be confident that were this reality to come to pass, what would you do and

how would you act?

And you need to be confident or have the appearance of being confident

in what you would actually do in that situation, with the example of a bad teammate or difficult manager in this scenario.

You may never have had experience doing any of those things, but you need to come prepared with an answer to that question should it come up in an interview.

You may have heard about the STAR method and I will 100 % endorse the STAR method for answering interview questions.

It's something that my mother taught me and I absolutely swear by it for any neurodivergent individual who has a hard time organizing and articulating their thoughts.

STAR is an acronym that stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result.

This helps you frame the type of answer that you are going to give, such that you can be confident you've actually answered the question that the interviewer is giving you.

I will freely admit that me as an autistic person have given word vomit answers to questions before and left very unconfident that I've actually answered the question that a

recruiter has given me.

But when I know that I have framed questions

with the star method, I can rest assured knowing that I have actually addressed the bulk of the question and the heart of it and given the recruiter what they need to actually

move on to the next question.

And I'm not wasting either one of our times.

The S in star stands for situation.

You want to provide information about what is actually going on.

Who are the people who are involved?

What are you doing?

What's the context?

That helps set the stage.

And you don't have to go into a super high amount of detail.

You don't need to tell people what floor you were sitting on.

You don't have to talk about what you were wearing.

You want to give them enough information to understand who are the people involved and not more than that.

I want to go for a real question with Star that I have been asked in many interviews in the past to unpack how I would respond if I was going to be asked to me today.

S in Star stands for situation, and let's say that the question is, tell me about a time that you had to push for a difficult technical decision that other people were disagreeing

with you on.

This scenario may never have actually occurred to you, and I would be so jealous of you if that is the case.

You may have had all your technical decisions always be respected, approved, and you may never have encountered somebody who has pushed back against you.

But, the purposes of this question, you need to be able to answer that scenario, what if you do receive pushback?

What if people disagree with you?

How do you as an individual handle that?

And how do you articulate your response to that?

you have to come prepared with a response to that question, whether it has happened to you or not.

Let's say that the situation is I was at a previous tech company and I was on a team of front-end and full stack engineers.

I was a tech lead of a project and I was in charge of making a significant technical decisions that would be implemented later.

You've named yourself, I'm the tech lead.

You can name the people who disagreed with you if it's helpful.

You don't have to use their real names.

If it's easy for you to use their real names, fine, but you don't have to.

Recruiters are not gonna go look these people up on the internet and figure this stuff out.

Don't worry about that.

You want to name as minimal names as possible just to keep the conversation going.

Let's say that the person who disagreed with you, their name is Arnold.

You can make up a name if you want to.

As part of the situation, you have to give some context as to what's actually happening.

What is the project that people pushing back on or a decision in this project?

What is the project itself?

Let's say, for example, you are migrating an old solution or an old application to a new framework, a new technology, a new something.

And the situation, the context is that you are the tech lead and you have to decide certain decisions and you have to make certain choices about technology, about framework,

about infrastructure.

And you are charged with making those decisions and defending your decisions to the team and to other teams at large.

You have now solved situation.

You've given context to the recruiter so they have enough information to follow along with you.

This situation does not need to have exactly happened word for word as you are saying it.

The experience that I have just discussed with migrating something from an old solution to a new solution, I have experienced versions of that, portions of that.

I may not have actually experienced the exact scenario that we are going to go through right now.

But it is similar to an experience that I have had.

And I am modifying things from my memory.

I can have things written down.

It is just me composing things from my memory and replaying them and also adding things based on what I would do or what I would say in this scenario.

The T in STAR stands for task.

You have to explain your role, the reason that you are a part of a scenario in the first place, and what your actual motive for being there is.

And again, this does not have to have actually been your task, your role in a situation, but you should be able to speak to it confidently, even if it's slightly different than

how you actually were present in the scenario, had it actually gone down.

But you need to be able to articulate things from your perspective

if you were in this shoes, in this scenario, doing this for real.

But it does not have to have actually happened in the past for real.

But were it to happen in the future, this would be the task that you could do or that you would do.

The A in star stands for action.

This is you responding to what you're doing in a situation.

This is you carrying out your task.

It is an important part that actually says, what did you do?

What happened?

What was the actual event that occurred or events that occurred, which formed the basis of your answer to the question?

I would argue that the action is the most important part of your response here because this actually articulates what happened, what did you do, or what would you do?

If this scenario has never occurred to you before, what would you do in this scenario?

Let's say as part of the situation, the situation is still the same.

You are just migrating something from an old technology to a new technology.

Let's just call it JavaScript to TypeScript.

You in this action are responsible for deciding how do you choose how to migrate certain files?

How do you manage any breaking changes that come from adding types to your code?

How would you communicate these changes to other teams?

You want to articulate the specific steps that you took to address the situation and execute your task.

You don't need to be super minute in the detail.

As much as is necessary to actually address a situation, you can go into specifics, but you might also want to watch how specific you're getting.

You don't want to bore the recruiter, either.

You want to make things understandable to them.

They may not be technical.

And you can modify the response here to your action based on whether or not this is a technical individual or not.

If this person is not technical, you can just call it JavaScript and TypeScript and call it a day.

They might know what those things are, but they might not.

All that they need to know is that you are migrating from one thing to the other, and you are responsible figuring out the plan, the blueprint for doing that.

And your action is how you actually went about achieving that.

An example response for the action here could be that you facilitated a meeting between a bunch of different teams who are all dependent on your code and organized a response to

how people could address your breaking changes, assuming that they were going to occur as part of this migration.

You were able to communicate expectations very clearly.

You made sure everybody was on the same page and you ensured that nobody was left in the dark guarding these changes.

That is an example of a response.

You may never have actually done those things before.

But you as a person need to know what would you do now with the knowledge that you have today to actually address the situation and execute your task.

You may have been in a scenario in the past and you didn't do this and you wish that you had.

It is incumbent upon you to acknowledge what did I wish that I had done before that I would do today?

And can I talk about this as part of my response?

It is okay to say that.

It is okay to acknowledge that.

Maybe not in the question itself.

But it's okay to acknowledge that as part of your response.

I will communicate this to all the teams by a meeting, by an email, by a Slack, by some other sort of communication.

Because I know better than when I did this in the past.

And that's okay to learn from the past, to acknowledge a mistake that you've made, and be able to bring it into your response.

I would not be explicit about what the recruiter would say, I had done this before and it didn't work.

You can kind of hand wave that away because that might be too much information for them.

What's important for you in this moment is to consolidate that into your answer and be really confident that you will actually do this specific thing in the future because you

know better today.

I want to repeat and reemphasize this, that the situation does not have to have occurred exactly how you are articulating it.

You know better now.

Things in the past happen and you aren't as wise or as intelligent or as knowledgeable as you are today.

You may be talking about a situation that occurred two years ago and you can look back on yourself and say, wow, I wish I'd done these things very differently.

You can bring these things into the future, into the present day, because you are wiser, you are intelligent, and you are more knowledgeable.

And you have a responsibility to learn from your mistakes, learn from decisions that you've made, recognize what did work, and bring them into your decision-making tools that

you have today.

And the outcome of that is the result of the STAR method, that is the R.

What was the outcome of your action?

what actually happened in response to these situations.

And here is where you talk about, the teams were able to migrate over really smoothly, there were only a couple of issues that we were able to address, but we were able to keep

things within scope, the timeline was accurate, teams had a really easy time going along with things, and everything worked the way that it was supposed to.

But also, maybe it's not all sunshine and rainbows.

Maybe something didn't work exactly as you had planned it.

Do you be honest and tell the recruiter that, or do you embellish and bluff it off?

You can acknowledge in this response if you wish you had still done things differently.

If you are recounting a situation that did occur and you want to be truthful and you have the ability to be truthful to something that you did, it's okay to say, as part of this, I

wish I'd done something a little bit differently.

Showing humility and showing that you've learned is a great thing to do in an interview, and I don't think that's super wrong.

but you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot either and say, oh, it all fell apart, things didn't work out so well.

You do want to paint a positive picture based on your actions.

In this example, let's say that the migration went over mostly smoothly.

You were able to address some of the issues that came up and

mostly everything worked out.

And you can acknowledge maybe there were a few edge cases that nobody caught and you had to spend some time on them.

Edge cases happen.

It's almost never the case that things worked out exactly the way that we think they do.

And you can acknowledge, there were some edge cases.

We addressed those as part of the action.

You were able to identify them and resolve them before they got to customers.

It's okay to acknowledge that there were some

rough edges around your action, it shows that you're human.

It shows that you were acknowledging these things that occurred and are able to move on from it and not letting it settle you down.

Don't be afraid to be a little bit humble, but I do recommend not going into excruciating detail on every single thing that went wrong or could have gone wrong.

You can keep it pretty high level just to illustrate the point.

But at end of the day, it's okay to say that almost everything worked, and if in reality something was a little bit rough on the edges, you could acknowledge that as part of your

learning, as part of the result.

You could include that as part of the result part of STAR.

After the project was done,

We had a retrospective, we identified some other things that other teams could benefit from when they did other migrations.

So you are still turning this rough edge, this negative in air quotes, into a positive for other teams so that they don't make the same mistakes that you did, or are they are able

to identify the edge cases that you caught so that they are less likely to come up for them.

Probably thinking to yourself right now, this is one question and there are hundreds of questions and thousands of companies and tens of thousands of possible answers.

How do I have them all written out for me somewhere where I can just study them?

And you answered your own question whether you realized it or not.

You can write out possible scenarios that you can modify in order to respond to different questions.

I have done this in interviews before where I don't try to memorize

100 different possible questions with a thousand possible answers.

Instead, I would say I have a core set of about 10 or so different scenarios that I don't even have memorized, but I can refer to to jog my memory.

I don't have to memorize specific details, but I have the play-by-play and I do have it laid out in a star-like format.

Situation is doing a refactor.

Situation is we have a difficult somebody.

Because I can modify a difficult somebody to be a difficult teammate, a difficult friend, a tough manager, whatever it is, I can modify the situation and adapt it based on the

question that's being asked.

And it's much easier for me to Mad-Libs it up a little bit.

I can fill in the blanks and have a core set of scenarios that I can refer to for me to feel more confident.

And most of these scenarios are based in reality.

And I just have to modify the details a little bit based on what the recruiter was prompting me with.

And then the response, the star answer, is how I respond based on what they are doing to fill in the blanks.

We fill in the blanks together because they're going to have an idea of an answer to this question.

But what you actually say is going to be different than what they are going to expect.

In a weird way, you're filling up the blanks together.

You have a scenario that you are choosing to use to respond to a recruiter's question, and you fill in the blanks based on what they are looking for.

And you want to be truthful and answer the question based on what they're actually trying to get at.

You don't want to completely mis-answer their question based on what you want to say, but based on what the recruiter needs to hear.

And that can be challenging to find exactly the right scenario to a question.

if you've never had it happen to you before.

And that's why it helps to take some time before interviews to write out some scenarios based on things that may or may not have occurred to you.

Difficult coworker, large technical project, something that ran over time, something where the result had a problem if you caused a production issue.

There are lots of different possibilities that a recruiter could ask you for.

And I could list them out here, but it would take me a few hours to do.

My suggestion would be to look up these things on your own time to figure out what are the possible behavioral questions that somebody could ask me, and then think about 10

different scenarios or so that you can modify based on how you would actually respond.

You do not want to misrepresent yourself or lie about what you're actually doing here.

You need to be truthful.

And that is going to really help you feel more confident about answering these questions, about telling the recruiter what's going on, and empowering them to move you on to the

next part of the interview.

So just remember.

The STAR method is a great way of addressing an interviewer's questions.

But that doesn't matter if you don't have a basis for which you can process STAR through.

These scenarios can be fictitious.

You can completely make them up and have a brand new set of scenarios for every interview you do.

That might be exhausting.

Maybe that's how your brain works.

And that's totally okay.

You might reuse the same 10 STAR scenarios for every interview that you do.

And that's also totally okay.

Ultimately, how much work can you do before an interview to prepare yourself for the unknown?

The unknown is a behavioral question.

Tell me about a time that you blank.

It is unlikely you'll get exactly the kind of question that you've prepared for on an interview for behavioral questions.

If you do, great, I'm so happy for you and I'm confident that you're gonna feel great in an interview.

But the more likely scenario that you don't get exactly the questions you're studying for, you will still be able to respond to them confidently and fairly because you have a basis

for which to respond through STAR and to articulate your thoughts in a way that makes sense.