Each project arrives with its purpose, milestones and first tasks written out. Here is how the first three read.
Career inventory of projects, incidents and decisions
Most engineers walk into a behavioural round with three stories and then improvise the rest, because they never wrote down what they have actually done. A raw inventory of every project, outage, migration, disagreement and decision from your last few roles gives you far more material than you think, and it is the only honest place to pick stories from.
First tasks
- List every project you shipped or worked on in your current role in twenty minutes
- Add the outages, migrations and disagreements you remember from each past role
- Search old pull requests, design docs and postmortems for forgotten items
- Star the ten items with the clearest stakes, actions and results
Choosing a story structure such as STAR or CARL
Interviewers score behavioural answers against a rubric, and an answer with no shape makes them dig for the action and the result while the clock runs. Picking one structure, such as Situation, Task, Action, Result or Context, Action, Result, Learning, and practising it on a single story gives every later answer the same spine.
First tasks
- Read a short guide to STAR and CARL and pick the one that suits you
- Write the structure's parts and your target time split on a card
- Draft your strongest starred story in that structure
- Time yourself telling it aloud and cut the setting until it fits
Core bank of twelve engineering stories
Twelve well-built stories can answer around fifty common prompts, because most questions are a few themes asked different ways. Writing them in full, each with your actions, a measurable result and what you learned, means you choose an answer in the round instead of composing one.
First tasks
- Pick twelve starred items from your career inventory that cover different themes
- Write two stories a session until all twelve are drafted
- Give each story a short memorable title
- Ask the agent to flag stories where the actions are vague or the result is missing
- Tell each story aloud once and trim anything past two and a half minutes
