Navigating the New Grad SWE Job Hunt: Behavioural Interviews

Table of Contents

1. Part 2: The Behavioural Interview
2. Personality Questions
3. Qualification Questions
4. Problem-Solving Questions

Part 2: The Behavioural Interview

Welcome back 👋🏼

Let’s dive right into Part 2: preparing for the behavioural interview round. You’ll face these questions in nearly every stage, from phone screens to bar raisers. In my experience, they pop up all throughout the Canadian new grad interview process. If you're like me and need to practice what you're going to say before you actually say it, I hope this part of the article helps you feel more confident and nail your answers—so you’re not just winging it through trial and error during the interviews.

Let's break down behavioural interviews into the 3 key areas they're assessing:

1. Your personality – Do you fit into the team/company’s engineering culture?
2. Your qualifications – What experience do you have with different frameworks, languages, and tech stacks?
3. Your problem-solving abilities - Given a complex situation, how do you go about solving it?

1 - Personality Questions

Personality questions, regardless of who asks them, are all about getting to know you. They’re interested in learning about your work style, how you handle conflicts, whether you prefer working independently or in groups, and more. Being able to answer behavioural questions using the STAR format is key, and I recommend preparing at least two examples for each type of question.

Here’s a comprehensive list of all the personality-type questions I’ve ever been asked, along with specific advice for some of them:

• Introduce yourself / Tell me a bit about your background.
  • list your educational and work experience
  • explain any achievements that you're proud of and showcase your expertise
  • discuss where you see yourself headed in the future
• Walk me through your resume.
• What is your biggest strength/weakness as it relates to this role (e.g. a technical strength)?
• Describe a time when you had to push or advocate for something in a project. What impact did it have?
  • Pick an example that showcases your leadership skills, and ability to communicate while creating clarity in times of uncertainty

• Why did you choose to pursue software engineering?

  • Try to avoid saying 'money' or 'flexibility to work where you want'. Great candidates stand out when asked this question by giving a memorable story that sets them apart from others.
  • For example, when I was asked this question, I shared that during high school, I played an otome game where the characters used a chatroom app they had built from scratch. This sparked my interest in how software could be developed to meet specific needs, inspiring me to explore how I could do the same.

• Tell me about a time you received negative or constructive feedback and how you responded.

• Give an example of when you took initiative or leadership during a challenging time at work.

• What are you looking for in your next role?

• Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

• Why did you apply for this role/company?

  • This is really asking why they should hire you over other candidates. Be sure to list your technical competencies, as well as anything that stood out about the company/position that enticed you to apply.

• What part of the tech stack do you enjoy the most?

• Describe a time when you had a conflict with a coworker or team, and how you resolved it.

• Explain a difficult bug you fixed in the past 6 months.

  • This question seeks to dive deeper into your problem-solving abilities and how you unblock yourself when stuck. Focus on explaining things like time-blocking, independent investigation, consulting various resources, and pair-programming with other devs.

• Walk me through a project you’re most proud of and why. What challenges did you face? Describe them in technical detail and how you solved them.

  • Be ready to discuss at least 1-2 challenges for each experience and project on your resume.

• How do you handle pressure and tight deadlines? Give an example from work.

• How do you de-stress and relax?

The goal of these questions is to understand your personality, work style, and communication skills. They also help the interviewer assess whether you’re approachable, friendly, and able to clearly articulate your thoughts. If you can keep the conversation engaging, maybe make your interviewer smile or laugh with a good story, you're on the right track. The key is to present yourself as someone who is not only pleasant to work with but also capable of performing well on the team. Be authentic, and have a strong story about why you chose this career and company—it’ll help you stand out, especially when competing against similarly qualified candidates.

Tip: Before my interviews, I always reviewed the job posting I applied to and checked Glassdoor reviews for insights on the interview process. Glassdoor is an invaluable resource, and many people share exact questions they were asked, along with details about the number of interview rounds. Definitely use it to get a feel for the questions you might face.

2 - Qualification Questions

The second type of interview questions you’ll encounter dive deeper into your technical background and previous experiences. Since I had three software engineering internships and one full-stack project on my resume, I was often asked to explain what I did in each role, which part of the tech stack I’m most comfortable with, and some of the challenges I faced in those positions.

These questions require thorough preparation, so my advice is to sit down and think through how you’d expand on each bullet point in your resume. Ask yourself the following for every experience, project, or club you’ve listed:

• Can I give a high-level overview of my responsibilities and the impact of my work?
• What challenges did I face, and how did I overcome them?
• Can I explain the technologies and frameworks I used, and why I chose them?
• Did I improve any processes? If not, is there anything I would improve now?
  • You should always have something to say regarding what you can improve, from processes to documentation to architecture etc. The important thing is that you've reflected and thought about how to make your work more efficient, which is a positive signal to interviewers.

Try to prepare answers for these types of questions, focusing on the technical details to highlight your skills and expertise:

• What tech stack did you use and why?
• What projects did you work on (in school and at previous jobs)?
• What was the most challenging situation in your previous role, and how did you solve it?
• Have you ever creatively solved a problem or challenge? How did you approach it?
• How did you resolve a disagreement with a coworker or classmate? (This could be about code style, architecture decisions, or a PR that got held up due to comments.)

Make sure you fully understand the technologies you’ve listed on your resume. While my resume suggests that most of my experience is in frontend development, my personal interest is in backend engineering, so I made sure I could speak confidently about both areas. For backend topics, I brought up concepts like SQL vs. NoSQL databases, REST vs. GraphQL APIs, sharding, scalability (horizontal vs. vertical), and CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) when discussing my design decisions for personal projects. On the frontend side, I made sure I could explain concepts like state and props, dependency injection, lazy loading, debouncing, and asynchronous JavaScript—especially when talking about my past work with frameworks like React.js, Vue.js, and Angular.js.

It’s important to be well-versed in both the areas you’ve worked in and the areas you want to move into. That way, if an engineer or hiring manager asks you about a particular technology or concept, you’re not caught off guard.

3 - Problem-Solving Questions

In addition to personality and qualification questions, you’ll likely encounter problem-solving or technical questions where interviewers assess your ability to think on your feet. These questions might not always be a formal coding challenge; sometimes, they’ll involve discussing how you’d approach a technical problem verbally, walking the interviewer through your thought process.

I encountered quite a few of these types of questions, and it really helps to be comfortable with high-level concepts, including some system design topics. Here are a few examples of the kinds of verbal technical questions you might face:

• How would you optimize the performance of the frontend for an application that’s experiencing slow load times?
• Can you explain the difference between synchronous and asynchronous programming, and when you would use each?
• What is the event loop?
• What’s your approach to debugging a large codebase when you’re unfamiliar with the code?
• Would you choose to design a REST API or GraphQL API for an application like Twitter, and why? Walk me through the basic endpoints you’d create.
• What kind of database (NoSQL, SQL, document) would you choose to store X and why?

In these questions, the focus is on how you break down a problem, consider trade-offs, and arrive at a solution. The interviewers aren’t necessarily looking for a perfect solution but rather your ability to communicate your thought process clearly, collaborate on ideas, and show that you can handle real-world technical challenges.

Tips for tackling problem-solving questions:

• Think out loud: Let the interviewer in on your thought process, even if you’re not 100% sure of the answer right away. This helps show how you approach challenges.
• Consider trade-offs: Be ready to discuss the pros and cons of different solutions. For example, if you’re asked about scaling an application, you might talk about database sharding vs. vertical scaling, or the trade-offs between performance and cost.
• Don’t panic if you don’t know something: If you’re not familiar with a specific concept or technology, be honest about it, but try to relate it to something you do know. You can also talk about how you’d go about researching and solving the problem. I’ve had moments where I didn’t have all the specifics, but I drew parallels to similar knowledge I had, and the interviewers were fine with that.
• Ask clarifying questions: Don’t be afraid to ask for more information if the problem is vague. Asking good questions shows that you’re thinking critically about the problem.