Cracking the Tech Career: Insider Advice on Landing a Job at Google, Microsoft, Apple, or any Top Tech Company

10Behavioral Questions

Gone (mostly) are the days of hypothetical questions; instead, interviewers prefer to know how you have actually handled specific situations:

• “Tell me about a time when you overcame an obstacle at work.”
• “Tell me about a time when you've had to build a team.”
• “Tell me about something you're proud of.”

For many candidates, behavioral questions will form the bulk of their interview. It's important that you're well prepared for these questions. Preparation—in both the content and the communication—makes an enormous difference.

Evaluation

When an interviewer asks behavioral questions, she's trying to learn about what sorts of situations you've faced in the past and how you handled them. She might enter with a predetermined list of areas to probe (risk taking, initiative, customer focus, etc.), or she might just be seeing what she can learn about you.

In either case, you want to think about both the content and the communication of your answer. Both are important, and they influence each other. Stronger communication makes it easier for someone to understand the content. Better content simplifies your communication.

Mastering the Content

Blindsided by an unexpected question, many candidates just try to give any answer that matches the question. When possible, try instead to think about what the best answer to a question is.

What Interviewers Look For

There are three big things interviewers will be looking for:

1. Did you really do that thing on your resume? ...