Interviews and masks
You can and should be yourself in interviews.
In order to interview, you might think you need to pretend to be a different person, walking an impossible line of conflicting traits. Calm but excited, confident but humble… talented but totally affordable.
You do not. You can be yourself and perform well in a behavioral interview! That’s because it isn’t about playing a character, but about telling a story you’ve told before.
What are you talking about?
When I say “behavioral interview” I’m talking about storytelling. Think “Tell me about a time you received critical feedback,” rather than “Invert this binary tree1” or “Tell me what an outer join is.” These are sometimes called “values interviews” or “culture interviews,” though each of those names carries a slightly different (and sometimes negative) connotation. Many interviews contain small behavioral bits, but the big behavioral interview is usually conducted by the Hiring Manager.
Isn’t this what the STAR method is for?
The STAR2 method is all well and good as a checklist of things you should be sure to cover, but it’s not a good way to construct that story. Steve “Meta” Huynh gives some good detail on this, including an example.
But in this article, I want to address a common mental blocker, not the tactical blockers that Steve addresses.
Playing a part
At first blush, these behavioral interviews feel artificial. You know you’re a strong engineer, and your past teammates know you’re a strong engineer3. But the first time someone gives you a prompt like “Describe a time you had to work on a team and something went wrong,” your response was probably not so great. After the rejection, it was natural to conclude: “I told them the truth, and they didn’t like the answer. Next time, I should lie.”
Let me push back against that conclusion with an example.
Practicing the story
Try to think about how you’d answer the question “What’ve you been up to this week?” from a friend or family member. Your answer is not going to be smooth. You’ll probably start with what happened most recently, realize some context is needed, explain some of that context, miss some pertinent facts, and thoroughly confuse the listener. Then, you realize they asked about your whole week, and try to remember what happened two days ago, think about checking your calendar, and give up.
Now to contrast, think about a story you’ve told a bunch of times. Maybe how you met your partner, or how you discovered your favorite hobby or author or artist? The first time you told that story, it sounded like that previous paragraph. These days, that story is smooth because people kept asking for it, and it got better each time.
With that in mind, try talking about your week again to your cat4. See the improvement in clarity and quality. Are you lying, or pretending to be someone you aren’t? No.
It’s about rehearsal, not lying
Every story is a tiny project, and the first draft of every project5 is a hot mess. Practice it, get feedback, and iterate before you deploy it in an interview for a job you care about.
The answer, as we all know, is `BinaryTree#invert`.
Situation, Task, Action, Result
If you don’t know this, see "I'm just not good at this.”
You do have a cat, right? They’re very easy to acquire.
Even this article!
I definitely agree with this sentiment. I definitely have some polished elements of my behavioral interview, from repetition. I do want to point out, though, that being a "different person" at work is something everyone does to varying degrees (without necessarily being maladaptive), but also there are some people, particularly neurodivergent ones, that don't really have the option of fully dropping the mask at work for a number of reasons.
Rehearsal is critical, and you spoke about storytelling, but there's a lot of art in telling a story. I highly recommend this book about how to do it effectively:
Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling https://a.co/d/fuZMeNL