After conducting interviews with hundreds of engineers and engineering managers at Meta, Twitter, and other companies, I noticed common patterns in how candidates approached answering behavioral interview questions. While many candidates performed well on technical dimensions, they often struggled to articulate their work, accomplishments, and challenges in an interview setting, which led to rejections.
This article covers pointers on how to effectively use the widely known STAR format to answer behavioral questions. It addresses common pitfalls and provides illustrative examples to help candidates understand how to use the STAR format to communicate clearly and stand out. This is the framework that has helped me successfully clear Engineering leadership interviews at Databricks, Twitter, Airbnb, Plaid, Notion, Uber, and other companies.