5 Keys to the Hiring Manager Interview from a Meta Senior Manager
Guest post by ex-Meta Senior Manager, Stefan Mai
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Time to dive into this week’s learning!
Hi fellow High Growth Engineer, Jordan here 👋
Today’s article features a special guest, Stefan Mai, an ex-Meta Senior Engineering Manager and now founder of HelloInterview.
In his time at Meta, he’s conducted over 2,000 interviews and has seen every mistake in the book. He will share the biggest mistakes with you and what to do instead.
Without further ado, I’ll pass the mic 🎤 to Stefan 👏
You crushed your technical interviews only to get dreaded news days later: you’ve been down-leveled or rejected. Most engineers can pinpoint the exact answer they failed to give in their coding interview or the place where they stumbled in their system design, but when it comes to behavioral interviews, it’s a total black box. Rejection hurts.
The good news is that behavioral interviews aren’t complicated. Many candidates fail to prepare themselves effectively.
After conducting north of 2,000 interviews and coaching 100’s of engineers, managers, and directors, I’ve crystallized 5 keys to bump you ahead of 30-40% of candidates. Let’s walk through some common mistakes and how you can avoid them.
1) Prepare your anecdotes for common topics
I once had a candidate who seemed amazing based on their resume, but response after response sounded like they came from a distant past or someone else. It was obvious they were struggling to remember and weren’t ready.
As an interviewer, I try to be as charitable as possible: I’ll ask follow-up questions, avoid making assumptions, and account for the pervasive nerves and pressure of the process. But if you can’t give me the positive signals to see you’ll be successful - I can’t just assume.
So what should you do? Well, make it easy for yourself. Interviews are stressful and not the place for deep introspection. Preparing anecdotes for the most common topics will ensure that you’ve got material waiting to help you answer that question and don’t have to go rummaging through your memories.
The 4 steps I recommend are “Collect-Prune-Organize-Practice.”
Collect: Study your resume's most recent 3-4 bullets deeply. For each bullet, consider the story on 2 axes:
1) The story. Write how it started, who was involved, the objectives, the key challenges or difficulties, and the impact.
2) Competencies you displayed. Write how you demonstrated conflict resolution, perseverance, adaptability, growth, leadership, and collaboration.Prune: Remove unnecessary details as long as you can still get your point across.
Organize: Use STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to ensure you cover relevant details when you tell the story. Summarize your examples in 2-3 sentences but have room to expand when follow-up questions come.
Practice: Take common behavioral questions and practice, on the fly, mapping them to your stories. Can you confidently respond, using the points you identified, in a few sentences? You got this!
If you want more guidance and practice building your stories, my co-founder and I built a small tool called Story Builder which you can use to collect and refine your stories easily. It’s totally free.
2) Talk about what you did, not just what happened
Companies are looking for candidates who can make things happen.
If you’re a Junior Engineer, they want you to be able to raise issues, get unblocked, and deliver tasks and projects.
If you’re a Senior, they want you to take on bigger projects and harder challenges.
Your goal is to show the interviewer you can do that because you already have!
Unfortunately, there are many ways you can accidentally give the opposite impression.
This paraphrase from an actual interview shows what not to do:
❌ I was part of the [impressive project] which was responsible for [impressive result]. There were a lot of complexities we had to solve: the legacy code was brittle, there were no tests, our PM didn’t have all the requirements, and we had tight deadlines. It was really tough and we worked overtime to make it happen. I’m really proud of what we accomplished.
There is a wide spectrum of interpretations for this story:
Most Generous: “The candidate was leading a major project with tons of complexity, and due to their contributions, the team crushed its goals.”
Least Charitable: “The candidate was an underperforming member of a team that accomplished great things despite their lack of effort.”
A good response steers the interviewer toward the correct interpretation by sharing what you did to make it happen, not just what happened. How do you do this?
Don’t sell yourself short. Many candidates are humble and reflexively take as little credit as possible. Humility is good, but your interviewer needs to know what you did and expects you to talk about yourself.
Avoid “we” or “my team” where possible. Talking about specific team members or yourself is more precise.
❌ “My team migrated a major client”
✅ “I built the ingestion pipelines for migrating a major client leading 2 other engineers”.Speak about the hard-won learnings from challenges you faced. You don’t get credit for just being there. When you’re truly responsible for something, you should have many details about what made it difficult and what you did to overcome it. These help your interviewer to see your stories as credible.
You can make a table like the one below to link each task to the challenges you had to overcome.
Show what you did. Not what you were part of.
3) Speak to the responsibilities of the role
I once asked a Staff Engineer candidate about a major disagreement they navigated.
I wanted to see what kind of decisions they were a part of (hopefully major!), how they empathized with their coworkers, and how they could move forward with a win/win instead of getting stuck in a fight.
The candidate did not give me that. They shared a story about an argument with another engineer over their abstractions in code reviews. Hey look, code reviews are important and choosing the right abstraction is an important part of the job! But companies are expecting Senior Engineers to be proficient reviewers and staff candidates to elevate themselves to bigger challenges.
Each question you answer is an opportunity to show what level you operate and how it aligns with the responsibilities of the role you’re targeting. Filling the time with arbitrary detail vs targeted highlights hurts your ability to show off your capabilities.
You can make the most of your time using these 3 steps:
Get familiar with the baseline expectations of seniority across the industry. Staff engineers lead mid-sized teams, senior engineers tackle complex projects sometimes involving multiple engineers, etc.
Learn which level you’re interviewing for! Do some research on the company and talk to your recruiter. The number of candidates who don’t know which level they’re interviewing for is overwhelming—you can’t give good responses in a behavioral interview without this.
Pro tip: Many recruiters will usually give an interval like E4-E5. Prepare for the higher number. They’re indicating there’s potential here. You miss out on a huge opportunity if you target your stories toward the lower level.
Map the industry expectations into your anecdote catalog from Step 1. Former Meta Staff Engineer Evan King wrote level-specific responses to common questions that you can use to guide you.
Pick stories that map to your target level. Avoid steering towards stories that don’t.
4) Cut the jargon. Know what the interviewer is looking for
Everyone has met that guy who uses a lot of jargon to convince you he’s smarter than you. It never works.
In interviews, it can have an even more negative impact. The worst-rated candidates try to overwhelm their interviewers with technical details and jargon to prove their depth and authority. The problem is that 90% of your words fly over the interviewer’s head, and they view your communication skills poorly.
Here are 3 keys to fixing your communication here:
Decide what you want to get across. Generally, you’ll want to show you’re an accomplished engineer who perseveres to deliver complex/ambiguous projects with great results, works well in a team, and constantly gets feedback and improves. The technical details play a supporting role in proving that. They can help you explain the challenges you faced or the results you brought. But don’t get lost in them!
Figure out the minimum level of detail you need to provide to make the case. As you prepare your stories, delete any words and details you can while still getting your main point across.
Provide that detail in order of most important to least important. Start with the punchline, then add details (in other words, use BLUF). Some candidates mistakenly spend 2-3 minutes building context before they actually answer the question. In the worst scenarios, we’ve had to move on before they even get to their response.
Here’s an example of what not to do vs. what to do.
Question: “Tell me about the project you’re most proud of.”
❌ My team is responsible for widgets at WidgetCo. We’ve been busy with this long-standing migration and John, my tech lead, has been deep in the details. We also are running Spring Boot but looking to migrate to Rails because the CTO likes Ruby. We have lots of jobs we have to handle. The first job is an inventory check job…
✅ I built an async job execution platform! It was a technically challenging project but also had a huge impact: it reduced errors by 70%. Let me give you a bit of context: my team handles millions of jobs a day and needs a system to ensure they reliably execute every day.
The idea is simple: Start your stories quickly with the most important thing you want to get across and push the details to later if you get time to explore them. This gets much easier with a little bit of practice!
5) Be a person, not an advertisement
As much as I stand by all the above advice, you need to be careful of coming across inauthentically.
One time, I interviewed a candidate who said many great things. Still, they came across as forced, saying things like, “I enjoy working on innovative solutions to crucial business problems together with stakeholders.” They were telling me what they thought I wanted to hear, rather than honestly recounting their experience.
After some more back and forth, I had to pass because there was too much risk that the person arriving on day 1 would be different from the conversation—am I talking to an engineer or a script?
Most interviews will start with “warm-up” questions which both break the ice and allow you to express your professional personality. To prepare for these, ask yourself what you like to work on, why you’ve chosen to interview at a specific company, and what makes you different as an engineer. And be authentic with these.
Your interviewer wants to know you’re a great engineer, but they aren’t going to be responsive to you force-feeding them that conclusion. Show them via your stories and responses, don’t tell them what you think they want to hear.
Prepare, but don’t script.
📖 TL;DR
Prepare your anecdotes for common topics. Use “Collect-Prune-Organize-Practice” and this free story builder. Prepare on 2 axes.
The story: How it started, who was involved, the objectives, the key challenges or difficulties, and the impact.
Competencies you displayed: Conflict resolution, perseverance, adaptability, growth, leadership, and collaboration.
Talk about what you did, not just what happened
Be factual and humble. Say what you did. Avoid “we” or “my team” where possible.
Create a table of each task and challenge you faced. Talk about your challenges and how you overcame them.
Speak to the responsibilities of the role
Know the industry expectations of the level you’re interviewing for and call out your experiences that match that. Don’t sell yourself short by saying the first thing that comes to mind.
Check these level-specific responses to common questions for guidance.
Cut the jargon. Know what the interviewer is looking for
Decide what you want to get across to the interviewer
Figure out the minimum level of detail you need to provide to make that case
Provide that detail with the punchline first. Give the details after.
Be a person, not an advertisement.
Prepare, but don’t script. Your interviewer needs to see the real you. Be factual about your past experiences and authentic when talking about yourself.
🙏 Thank you to Stefan
Jordan here again 👋
Thank you to Stefan for sharing these 5 keys to the behavioral interview. Getting these lessons after his experience at Meta, as a bar raiser at Amazon, and coaching so many engineers to land their dream job is a treat.
To learn more from Stefan, I highly recommend following him on LinkedIn and checking out his interview prep platform, HelloInterview.
Fun fact: HelloInterview was also one of the first companies I accepted as a sponsor. I was so excited to do it because of how amazing their product was (and still is).
👏 Shout-outs of the week
What does a date actually mean on
— The effects you don’t realize of giving a specific date, and what to do instead. Loved the uncertainty curve drawing as well. A similar diagram I’ve taught is “Hill Charts” from BaseCamp.How to effectively “Manage Up” on
— Three concise, simple tricks to work with your manager better.2 years running a software engineering newsletter on
— Big congrats to for two years writing and massive growth. He shares his journey, what he did right, what he did wrong, and plans for the future. If you’re considered starting one, I recommend checking his article!
Thank you for being a continued supporter, reader, and for your help in growing to 76k+ subscribers this week 🙏
Next week, we’ll feature ex-Director at Google,
, who went from Intern to Director at Google in just 10 years. You’ll learn the 3 career principles that got her there.You can also hit the like ❤️ button at the bottom of this email to help support me or share this with a friend to get referral rewards. It helps me a ton!
Making the points about yourself is a massive one, and is something I’ve fallen foul of myself. It’s very easy to talk about things in the context of a team, but the interview is about YOU.
Thankfully it’s an easy thing to address, although it takes a bit of a mindset shift to talk in that way.
Stefan is a rockstar! My first mock interview was with him at Hellointerview.com
I got raw feedback that felt harsh at the time because I was very far from the best interviewer version of myself.
Everything above I applied and succeeded in multiple loops. Even though my skills and experience were the right ones for the roles I interviewed, I had little chance of passing without paying close attention to these details.