How I Build and Run Behavioral Interviews

Overview
This post explains how to build and run effective behavioral interviews for hiring engineers and technical leaders. It covers budgeting time, thinking ahead about follow-up questions and rubrics, focusing on a few key skills, digging into details, and creating a scoring rubric.

Key Takeaways

• Allocate at least two hours to prepare the interview structure and rubric.
• Identify a small set of critical skills to assess.
• Prepare detailed follow-up questions for each skill.
• Develop a clear rubric to score candidates consistently.
• Review interview notes promptly to reduce bias.

Who Would Benefit

• Engineering managers hiring individual contributors.
• Technical leaders involved in recruitment.
• Recruiters designing interview processes for engineering teams.
• Anyone looking to improve interview consistency and fairness.

Frameworks and Methodologies

• Structured behavioral interview framework.
• Rubric-based evaluation method.
• STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) technique for candidate responses.