(Confession – I changed the title of the post for SEO sake, and the SEO engine is telling me to insert what the point of this posting is about -> Stories!!!)
Congratulations!
So your resume / LinkedIn profile caught the attention of the recruiters at one or more of the FAANG companies! Perfect!
And you breezed through the recruiter screening call with confidence. Now they’ve asked you / sent you a link to enter dates of availability for the Technical Screening Interview. Awesome!
Now what??
Dont freak out – take deep breaths and remember what was conveyed in Part 1 of this series. Calm, cool, collected… and writing stories will get you the rest of the way to having a successful Tech Screen.
Write your Stories for FAANG interviews
Why do Amazon Recruiters really emphasize formatting my experience into Stories? How do I do that?
Interviews at the FAANG companies, but especially at Amazon are focused on Behavior and Competencies. Answering how does the candidate stack up against the Leadership Principles (Amazon) / Core Values (all others)? Interviewers are commonly assigned specific principles or values to drill down into. “Taking Ownership” and “Having Backbone – disagree and commit” could be the two that your interviewer is to focus on. How you answer the questions in the interview can be greatly influenced by preparing Stories. Stories are a prepared set of linear and logical recounting of your projects/tasks/accomplishments following a timeline from Start of effort through to Delivery of Results.
People who don’t prepare (and I’ll confess that for my Amazon interviews I was one), a confusing retelling usually happens. It’s disjointed, bouncing back and forth along the timeline as you remember key elements that you want to communicate. Reviewing of a person’s background and experiences, especially in the case of Technical Program Managers/Program Managers and Product Managers, tends to focus on the wrong competency or none at all. The result is having your interviewer either redirect, paraphrase back to you to get clarity, or just decide to move on not having gotten anything out of that ten minutes of the interview.
What is the STAR method for preparing stories? Why is it important?
Most of you will already know this through other sites, but just for clarity here’s what the acronym breaks out as:
S – Situation: the issue or problem that needs to be solved.
T – Tasks: what needs to be executed and completed to fulfill the solution for the Situation. Often there are more than one or two tasks to accomplish this.
A – Actions: what you yourself did in executing on fulfilling the tasks over the time it took to get to the Solution
R – Results: all the goodness that came to be on delivery of the Solution
Regardless if you are interviewing for a purely technical role (Software Developer or QA), a business role (anything in Product, Marketing, etc.), Leadership (Director, VP, CEO) or a hybrid of the any combination of the three (Technical Program Manager, Solutions Manager, etc…), it’s very important to build your examples using this format. And it’s especially important to be able to give a metric to support your Results. Metrics are like exclamation points and bolded underlines; they’re the punchline for your story. They put the weight behind your experiences and provide by association how important your work was to your previous employer. Which is ultimately exactly what you want to do in your interview.
That seems like a lot of work to write these STAR stories – I dont know where to start, or how long they should be?
I will tell you here that you shouldn’t try to write a narrative – that definitely will feel like you’re writing a novel (or a blog post – wink). Instead use bullet points. Focus on the most important facts and actions that YOU took. Tasks should include how important this was for your company. 10-12 bullet points covering all of the STAR points that you are able to discuss freely in real time using these bullets as talking points in a natural way. Your head is in the moment, remembering and reliving the project or issue and able to answer any questions from the interviewer without hesitation.
For the Technical Screening Interview I would suggest you prepare 2-3 stories in this manner. It would be about 30-45 minutes effort if you follow how I suggest for you to do it.
For the Virtual On-site/Full Loop – 10-12 distinct stories (2-3 per interview) so that you dont repeat any stories between interviews. All FAANG interviews will look poorly on reusing the same story across different interviewers. It implies that you only have very few examples that would be worthy of telling.
Coaches at Prodigy are here to help you generate these stories, and prepare through mock interviews.
I provide examples of stories that I prepared and used to positive results – we then work on crafting and rehearsing your stories. Preparing you for the questions you would be likely to get in follow up to ensure that you are really delivering the best you. You need to win over the interviewer for them to advocate for bringing you on and hiring you.
