This is the one that many think won’t matter, although this is the interview that sometimes matters the most. For example, at Amazon, culture is deeply rooted in their hiring process, where a “Bar Raiser” (someone who lives and breathes Amazon culture) can have the final say over you getting hired.
The thinking for that is quite simple: if you have the right attitude, you can learn new skills so minor shortcomings in your coding or system design interviews can be overlooked. However, if a person seems to be dispassionate about the product or doesn’t look like a team player, they are probably not worth hiring even if they are great hackers.
There’s also a famous book called The No Asshole Rule. Companies try not to hire people who can be toxic — the long-term cost of doing so can be enormous. Companies also don’t want to hire engineers who are not passionate about the product. Cultural fit interviews are there to weed out such people.
Take a look at Grokking the Behavioral Interview to learn more about questions that are typically asked during these interviews, and how best to navigate them.
Some of the basic rules of cultural fit interviews are:
Show interest in the product, and demonstrate an understanding of it. (I once had a candidate who told me that Facebook sells cloud services like AWS (Storage/Compute). He had even used one of those. Now, Facebook did buy Parse.com and kept it alive for a while, but Cloud Infrastructure was never Facebook’s primary/core business).
Be ready to describe scenarios where you had a conflict with your teammates or managers and how you resolved it. Please don’t say that you never had a conflict if you’ve been working as a software engineer for a few years.
Talk about what you want to accomplish in the company
Talk about some of your recent / most significant accomplishments as an engineer
Talk about some particularly crazy/difficult bugs that you encountered.
- Have an understanding and plan aroud passing the behavioral interview
- Have an understanding of the requirements and expectations for professional behavior at higher levels of function
- free course educative https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-behavioral-interview
- https://ca.topresume.com/career-advice/how-to-nail-a-behavioral-interview article
- https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-behavioral-interview/B6jy9p428vN List Org Values
- https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-behavioral-interview/39oPjP12ljp List major accomplishments (practice in advance)
- https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-behavioral-interview/qVq4o5xyYBG Hypotheticals
- https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-behavioral-interview/B8z2ZnQ1Evk Always Have Questions!
- https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-behavioral-interview/7A4LnMOwlM1 Sample questions to ask the interviewer
- https://newageleadership.com/what-got-you-here-wont-get-you-there-marshall-goldsmith-book-summary/#Here_are_the_20_ineffective_habits_of_leaders_as_per_What_Got_You_Here_Wont_Get_You_There-Marshall_Goldsmith-Book_summary 20 things that tank you (higher level leadership)
- https://www.richardhughesjones.com/how-women-rise-summary/ 12 things that tank you (more common in women)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxCD7Q_qDpU Google Behavioral Interview With A Tech YouTuber
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yfs4kCG-nNA - Software Engineering Job Tips From A Google Recruiter (Clement and Amy)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rAWA6CsAGU - Negotiating your offer (Clement and Amy)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV30jAw7dxA - How to Answer Behavioral Interview Questions Sample Answers (7 min)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld0cvWnrVsU - Cracking the Behavioral Interview for Software Developers (8 min)