How to tackle behavioral interview questions with different departments?
Given the following email:
Please follow the link to select a date and time that works for you.
The last step of the interview process will involve meeting with the leadership team, who are the leaders of each department (HR, Operations, Marketing, Product, and Strategy). This will be an informal session where you can get to know each other better and discuss topics such as what motivates you, your strengths and weaknesses, and your understanding of our product offering. We encourage you to review our website to refresh your knowledge before the meeting.
How would you approach preparing answers for the questions?
Discussion
(1 comment)- 7a year agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
Interesting, it's not common for a software engineer to be interviewed by so many different department - I'm guessing this is a tightly knit startup or something?
How would you approach preparing answers for the questions?
People are impressed when you seem genuinely interested in what they're doing. Your goal now is to really understand what all these different departments do. Some ideas on how to do this:
- Go through their website (bare minimum, which is why they told you this in the email)
- Find out relevant employees on LinkedIn to understand what they do
- Spend some time putting yourself in their shoes to come up with challenges they're likely facing. You'll want to come up with questions to ask - Questions are often just as important as your answers in these kinds of rounds.
On top of these, I recommend my blog post about behavioral questions: Software Engineer Interview Guide - Behavioral Questions
When it comes to your answers, I recommend this discussion to get maximum credit for your experience: "How can I most effectively talk about my projects?"
