Why You Fail At Behavioral Interviews

????‍♂️ Hi there, I’m Austen, a former Senior Engineering Manager and Hiring Committee Chair at Meta and I’ve conducted over 1,000 interviews and coached 200+ candidates. Grab a copy of my best-selling book Mastering Behavioral Interviews to get a complete prep system and learn how to land the roles that really matter.

Also, check out the conversations I’ve had with some amazing tech podcasts:

• How to Nail Big Tech Behavioral Interviews as a Senior Software Engineer with Gregor Ojstersek, breaking down modern behavioral interviews and how they’ve changed with AI and shifting expectations in Big Tech.

• Austen McDonald Reflects on Mastering Behavioral Interviews with the Book Overflow guys where we talk about some of the misconceptions in this post and how subtle Big Tech story telling can really get.

I regularly talk to talented engineers who crushed their coding rounds but failed behavioral interviews. They’re confused and frustrated. “I thought I did well,” they tell me. “The conversation felt natural. The interviewer seemed engaged.”

But they still got rejected because they approached behavioral interviews with the wrong mental model. They believed common misconceptions that undermined their preparation and performance.

Here are the seven most dangerous myths about behavioral interviews and what you should believe instead.

Myth 1: No Prep Required, Just Be Yourself

This isn’t great dating advice and it’s not great interview advice either.

Yes, behavioral interviews are about you and your experiences. But understanding what interviewers actually want and crafting stories that communicate it effectively in a high-pressure setting requires preparation.

Think about it: you wouldn’t walk into a system design interview and just “be your natural problem solver.” You’d study patterns, practice articulating trade-offs, and prepare to demonstrate specific competencies. Behavioral interviews deserve the same rigor.

The reality is that even if you’ve done impressive work, you can still fail the interview if you can’t articulate it well. You might not like living in that world, thinking that good work should just be evident, but that’s not reality. You need to know which stories demonstrate the evidence interviewers are hunting for, how to frame those stories to highlight your impact, and how to deliver them concisely under pressure. And that’s going to help you not just in a behavioral but also in advocating for promotions and talking to your leadership about what you’ve accomplished.

Being authentic matters, but authenticity without preparation is just winging it.

Myth 2: Prep Specific Questions in Advance

You really don’t know what you’ll be asked.

Many candidates waste time memorizing answers to “Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a product manager” or “Describe a project that was behind.” They build a mental spreadsheet mapping specific stories to specific questions.

This approach fails because behavioral questions are incredibly varied.

Better to understand what interviewers are looking for (the underlying signal areas like ownership, scope, and communication) and know how to tell key stories from your career that demonstrate those competencies. With a few exceptions, these are not like coding interviews where questions are often repeated across companies.

A well-chosen story about driving a complex project can provide evidence for ownership, technical depth, collaboration, and handling ambiguity. You don’t need 30 prepared stories—you need 4-5 strong stories you can adapt to different questions.

Myth 3: The STAR Method Is All You Need

Search for behavioral interviews online and you’ll find countless articles about STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result). It’s presented as the silver bullet for behavioral interview success.

STAR is useful—applying it puts you ahead of someone with no prep. A basic story structure helps you avoid rambling and provides a beginning, middle, and end.

But STAR doesn’t tell you which stories to choose, how to position yourself for a top-tier company, what scope signals “senior” versus “mid-level,” or how to adjust your approach for recruiters vs. hiring managers vs. partner interviews.

STAR is table stakes—it’s the minimum structure you need. But thinking it’s sufficient is like thinking you can ace a coding interview just by knowing how to write a for loop.

Myth 4: Behavioral Interviews Are Subjective and Arbitrary

This is the most destructive myth because it stops candidates from preparing at all.

Yes, behavioral interviews feel more subjective than coding interviews. There’s no compiler to verify your answer is correct. You can’t run test cases.

I’m not here to tell you they are objective. But FAANG+ companies have invested heavily in making behavioral evaluations as objective as possible. They train interviewers to look for specific evidence. They use structured rubrics that define what “strong” looks like at each level. They calibrate across interviewers to ensure consistency.

When a hiring team member conducts your behavioral, they’re not asking “Do I like this person?” They’re asking “What evidence have I seen that this candidate can perform at the level we’re hiring for?”

The 8 signals they’re looking for are well-defined, even if they are uniquely framed and curated by a specific company. The mistake most candidates make is not understanding what evidence demonstrates these signals.

Behavioral interviews are predictive. Companies use them because they work. Your past behavior is the best predictor of your future performance. When you fail a behavioral interview, it’s usually not because the interviewer arbitrarily didn’t like you. It’s because you didn’t provide the evidence they needed to hire you.

Myth 5: You Can Wing It If You’re a Good Storyteller

Some engineers are naturally charismatic. They’re engaging in conversation, tell vivid stories, and connect easily with people. They assume these skills transfer directly to behavioral interviews.

That’s only partially true.

Being a good storyteller in a social context is different from being effective in a behavioral interview. Your college roommate doesn’t care if your story demonstrates appropriate scope for a Staff Engineer role. Your interviewer does.

A compelling story about a technical challenge you overcame might be fascinating, but if it’s a solo project and the interviewer is evaluating collaboration, it won’t help you. An engaging narrative about navigating organizational politics might resonate personally, but if you spend 8 minutes on setup and the interviewer needed to hear three different stories in the time remaining, you’ve failed.

Natural communication skills help, but they’re not a substitute for understanding what evidence to deliver, how to choose stories strategically, and how to structure your responses for an evaluation context.

Myth 6: Recent Grads and Junior Engineers Don’t Need to Prep

This misconception costs new grads and early-career engineers more opportunities than almost anything else.

The logic goes: “I’m applying for junior roles. The bar must be lower. They just want to see I can work on a team and communicate. I should focus my prep on coding.”

Reality check: competition for junior roles is often fiercer than for senior roles. In a tough market, you’re competing against candidates with internships at top companies, strong academic projects, and candidates who prepared for their behavioral interviews.

And while the bar for scope and complexity is lower at junior levels, the behavioral interview is often weighted more heavily than you think. Why? Because companies are making a bet on your trajectory, not just your current skills. They’re asking: “Can this person grow? Do they take ownership? Do they learn from mistakes? Can they collaborate effectively?”

Your interview stories might be smaller in scope—a class project, an internship, a hackathon—but the evidence you need to demonstrate is the same. And because you have less experience to draw from, you need to be even more intentional about choosing and delivering your stories.

Myth 7: The Manager Is Just Looking for Social Fit

Yes, when a hiring team member conducts your behavioral, they want to see if you’ll mesh with the team. Chemistry matters.

But that’s not all—and it’s not even the primary thing. They’re trying to predict how you’ll perform in the role.

Social fit is actually the easier bar to clear. Most qualified candidates can have a pleasant conversation. What separates successful candidates is demonstrating the competencies required for the role: Can you own ambiguous problems? Can you influence without authority? Can you make sound technical decisions under constraints? Can you navigate complexity?

Your interviewer isn’t asking “Would I enjoy having lunch with this person?” They’re asking “Can I trust this person to deliver results on my team?”

This is why “just being yourself” and hoping for good chemistry is insufficient. You need to provide concrete evidence of your capabilities through well-chosen stories that demonstrate the signals the interviewer is evaluating.

What to Do Instead

If these myths sound familiar, you’re not alone. Most candidates believe at least a few of them. The tech industry has trained us to think this way, and quality behavioral interview prep materials are hard to find.

The framework that works:

Decode what interviewers are actually evaluating. Every behavioral question is hunting for specific evidence. Understanding what the interviewer wants changes everything.

Select your stories strategically. Choose 4-5 well-developed stories that demonstrate clear growth and impact. Make deliberate choices about which experiences to share and how to frame them.

Deliver compelling narratives. Structure your responses to set context efficiently, walk through your actions with clarity, quantify results that matter, and demonstrate genuine learning.

This is the Decode-Select-Deliver framework I teach in Mastering Behavioral Interviews. The book walks you through this entire process step-by-step, with real examples at different career levels and advanced techniques for making your stories resonate with FAANG+ interviewers.

Stop preparing for the behavioral interview you think you’re getting. Start preparing for the one you’re actually getting.

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Thanks for reading! If you found this valuable, I’d love to hear from you. Reply with your thoughts, questions, or your own behavioral interview experiences.

P.S. If you’re currently interviewing or planning to soon, grab a copy of Mastering Behavioral Interviews. It includes step-by-step processes you can start using immediately—even an “I’m in a hurry” track for last-minute prep.