[Career Talk] Behavioral Questions Preparation

Authored by Tony Feng

Created on Oct 26th, 2022

Last Modified on Nov 2nd, 2022

Intro

If you’re preparing for the tech role interview, the behavioral round is one type of interview that you cannot overlook. Interviewers use open-ended questions to find out if you match the company’s values and are a good fit for the role.

Usually, it is recommended to anser the questions according to Situation, Task, Action, Result (STAR). For example, “Tell me about a time that you led a challenging project?” You can answer like this:

[TASK] Last year, I was tasked with growing our latest SaaS app’s sales. [SITUATION] The company had just released a new version of the product and we needed to get media coverage and drive more sales. [ACTION] I worked with some of our largest clients to ensure that they had a smooth transition to the new version. [RESULT] We really had a spike in sales of 25% and added over a hundred new customers during the launch week.

In this post, I will briefly go through the famous Amazon’s Leadership Principles with corresponding behavioral questions. Hopefully, this post can help you (me) to practice the STAR approach based on past experiences.

Are Right, A Lot

Summary:

决策时，信息太多，怎么办？
决策时，信息太少，怎么办？
决策后，发现错误，怎么办？

Tell me about a time when you didn’t have enough data to make the right decision.

What did you do?
What path did you take?
Did the decision turn out to be the correct one?

Tell me about a time when you discovered that your idea was not the best course of action.

What was your idea? Why wasn’t your idea the best course of action? How did - you find out it was not the correct path? What was the best course of action?
Who provided it? What did you learn from the experience?

Describe a time when you brought different perspectives together to solve a problem.

What types of different perspectives were represented?
How did you seek out different points of view?
What was the outcome?
Were there any key learnings from this experience?
Knowing what you know now, would you have done anything different?

Bias for Action

Summary:

时间紧迫，信息不足，是继续收集信息还是直接决策？如何考虑风险？
时间紧迫，未咨询过上级而直接决策，如何处理？
团队进度缓慢，如何解决？

Tell me about a time when you worked against tight deadlines and didn’t have time to consider all options before making a decision.

How much time did you have?
What approach did you take?
What did you learn from the situation?

Describe a situation where you made an important business decision without consulting your manager.

What was the situation
How did it turn out?
Would you have done anything differently?

Tell me about a time when you felt your team was not moving to action quickly enough.

What was the situation?
What did you do?
What was the outcome?
Would you have done anything differently?

Customer Obsession

Summary:

如何发现和挖掘需求？
如何根据反馈去解决需求？
如何平衡客户需求和公司需求？

Describe a difficult interaction you had with a customer.

How did you deal with it?
What was the outcome?
How would you handle it differently?

Tell me about a time when you evaluated the customer experience of your product or service.

What did you do?
What was the result?

Tell me about a time when you had to balance the needs of the customer with the needs of the business.

What did you do?
What was the result?

Deliver Results

Summary:

发现目标无法达成或者无法在规定时间内达成，怎么办？
发现目标远远超出预期，如何复盘？
如何设定合理但具有挑战的目标？

Tell me about a time when you or your team were more than half way to meeting a goal when you realized it may not be the right goal or may have unintended consequences.

What was the situation?
What did you do? What was the outcome?
Looking back, would you have done anything differently?

Tell me about a time when you not only met a goal but considerably exceeded expectations.

How were you able to do it?
What challenges did you have to overcome?

It can be difficult to set goals for a team that are challenging, yet achievable. Tell me about a time when you hit the right balance.

How did you approach setting the goals?
What was the outcome?

Dive Deep

Summary:

如何找到事件发生的根本原因？
如何分析一个复杂问题？
如何使用一个标准去衡量是否该做出调整与改变？

Tell me about a situation that required you to dig deep to get to the root cause.

Who did you talk with or where did you have to look to find the most valuable information?
How did you use that information to help solve the problem?

Tell me about a problem you had to solve that required in-depth thought and analysis.

How did you know you were focusing on the right things?
What was the outcome?
Would you have done anything differently?

Tell me about a specific metric you have used to identify a need for a change.

Did you create the metric or was it already available?
How did this and other information influence the change?
What was the outcome of this change?

Earn Trust

Summary:

如何处理队友之间的想法冲突？
当你发现无法履行承诺时，如何处理？
如何处理队友划水或者跟不上团队进度？

Describe a time when you needed to influence a peer who had a differing opinion about a shared goal.

What did you do?
What was the outcome?

Give me an example of a time when you were not able to meet a commitment.

What was the commitment?
What were the obstacles that preventedsuccess?
What was the impact to your customers/peers？
What did you learn from it?

Tell me about a time when a team member was not performing well and impacted your work.

How did you handle that situation?
Why were they not performing well?
What was the outcome?
What did you learn from that situation?

Frugality

Summary:

如何权衡项目的质量与开销？
如何申请额外的资源去完成一个项目？

Tell me about a time when you had to make tradeoffs between quality and cost.

How did you weigh the options?
What wasthe result?
Would you have done anything differently?

Give an example of a time you requested additional funding/budget to complete a project.

Why was it needed?
Did you try to figureout anotherapproach?
Did you get the additional resources?
Why or why not?

Disagree & Commit

Summary:

描述一个场景，即便你不同意小组的观点但还是妥协了。
当你发现组内的决定会造成负面影响，你是如何反驳的？

Often, we must make decisions as a group. Give me an example of a time you committed to a group decision even though you disagreed.

What factors led you to commit to the decision?
Would you make the same decision now?

Tell me about a time when you pushed back against a decision that negatively impacted your team.

What was the issue?
How did it turn out?
Would you have done anything differently?

Hire & Develop the Best

Summary:

如何帮助队友发展他们的职业？
如何为队友提供建议，发挥所长？

Tell me about a time when you helped one of your team members develop their career.

How did you help that team member?
What was the result?

Give me an example of a time you provided feedback to develop the strengths of someone on your team.

Were you able to positively impact their performance?

Insist on the Highest Standards

Summary:

得到好的评价之后，如何精益求精？
如何持续改进一个项目？

Tell me about a time when you worked to improve the quality of a product/service/solution that was already getting good customer feedback.

Why did you think it needed improvement?
How did customers react?

Describe the most significant continuous improvement project that you led.

What was the catalyst to this change and how did you go about it?
What was the outcome?

Invent & Simplify

Summary:

举个例子关于如何化繁为简
举个例子关于如何创新

Give me an example of a complex problem you solved with a simple solution.

What made the problem complex?
How do you know your solution addressed the problem?

Describe the most innovative thing you’ve done and why you thought it was innovative.

Ask for one or two more examples to see if it’s a pattern of innovative thinking.
What was the problem it was solving?
What was innovative about it?

Learn & Be Curious

Summary:

如何跳出舒适区？
什么情况下进行更深层次的探索和学习？

Describe a time when you took on work outside of your comfort area.

How did you identify what you needed to learn to be successful?
How did you go about building expertise to meet your goal?
Did you meet your goal?

Give me an example of a time when you explored a new or unexpected area of an existing space.

Why hadn’t this been explored already?
Why did you move forward?
What were the results or what was the impact?

Ownership

Summary:

什么时候做了超出职责范围之外的事？
用短期损失换取长期利益

Tell me about a time when you took on something significant outside your area of responsibility.

Why was it important?
What was the outcome?

Tell me about a time when you made a hard decision to sacrifice short term gain for something that would create long term value for the business.

What was the outcome?
Knowing what you know now, would you have done anything differently?

Think Big

Summary:

发现创新，发现更好的机会
自己的建议或想法被采纳，为团队带来新的突破口

Tell me about time when you were working on a goal and saw an opportunity to do something much better than the initial focus.

Did you take that opportunity?
Why or why not?
What was the outcome?

Tell me about a time when you drove adoption for your vision/ideas.

How did you know your vision/idea was adopted by others?
How did you drive adoption for your vision/ideas?
How did you track adoption?
Would you do anything differently?

Strive to Be Earth’s Best Employer

Summary:

如何帮助创建一个多元，包容，公平的工作环境？
在高压的环境下，如何帮助同事解决困难？

Tell me a time when you helped build a more diversity, equity, or inclusion working environment.

What problems were you trying to address?
What did you do?
What were the employees’ reactions?
How did the changes help the employees?

Tell me about a time when you showed compassion toward someone during a stressful or high-pressure situation.

How did you recognize that it was important to demonstrate sensitivity? - What did you do to demonstrate compassion?
What were the outcomes for that person and the situation?

Success & Scale & Responsibility

Summary:

当你意识到项目可能在未来产生负面结果，如何处理？
讲述一个对队友，客户或第三方负责任的决定

Tell me about a time where you realized a project you were working on would have unintended, and perhaps undesired, consequences in the future。

How did you approach the potential downstream impact of this work?
When in the course of the project did you start thinking about this impact？
What efforts did you make to manage this impact?
What were the risks?

Tell me a time when you thought carefully about social responsibility as a critical aspect of your decision making.

Why was social responsibility important?
How did it (i.e., considering social responsibility) have impact on the decision-making process?