[Note: the below is from an article I wrote for the Fall 2019 issue of the CSWEP newsletter]
In my four years at Amazon, I’ve given behavioral interviews to over 200 economist applicants.
I only remember two of those interviews.
Given that every company I know of uses behavioral interviews, it’s depressing that so few candidates fail to shine in them. In these interviews, you are asked to provide examples where you demonstrated the core elements that are most important to your long term success[1]. They are a chance to talk about your experience – something you should know well by definition – and frame yourself in the most positive light. There’s no excuse for failing to impress.
Economists are taught that presenting their research is like telling a story. They spend countless hours honing their pitch and their presentation slides to tell that story. But for industry interviews, we’re even more interested in your personal story – we’re evaluating you, not your paper.
A great personal story will make you stand out from the (literally) dozens of other candidates interviewing for the same role. Despite the best efforts of companies and interviewers, hiring is an emotion-driven process. Managers are terrified of the time, financial, and morale cost to their team of making a bad hire. Consequently, to be hired, you need to make at least one of your interviewers tell the manager, “Cindy is one in a thousand; you’d be crazy not to offer her the job.”
There are two main components to telling a great story: choice of subject and narration.
The choice of subject is crucial and also where I see most people go wrong. You must choose a story that shows you being exceptional in some of the following elements:
1. Achieving outcomes – ultimately, you need to show you can succeed and reach a goal.
2. Conflict resolution (high overlap with communication) – if other people don’t agree that your work is great, you accomplish nothing. You need to demonstrate that you can build consensus.
3. Strategy – planning is half the battle; you’ll face tradeoffs while juggling competing priorities.
4. Persistence – getting stuck extends beyond your dissertation. Many problems require tenacity.
5. Creativity – there’s a limit to how hard you can work; you’ll have to work smarter eventually.
6. Learning something new – you have nine to ten years of higher education, but you’ll only use a fraction of what you learned on your job. You’ll need to pick up skills on the fly.
All industry jobs require these. Every behavioral interview question that I’ve asked, been asked, or seen others ask is explicitly or implicitly inquiring into your past performance in these dimensions.
Your goal should be to pick three stories that collectively show you demonstrating these six elements at least once. You want to limit the number of stories that cover all the elements because it’s easier to practice and get comfortable with a smaller number of stories. The corollary is that you need a more powerful, flexible story to answer different types of behavioral questions. Usually, you’ve found a good story candidate if, in the course of that story, you exceptionally demonstrate at least three of the above six elements.
It’s hard to objectively judge how impressive your own story is, but one important test is to ask: what about this story is unusual? That’s a reasonable proxy for exceptional. For example, it’s not unusual for PhD economists to conduct an experiment as part of their dissertation. It is unusual for them to conduct a lab experiment when no one at their school does experimental work and there are no facilities. For the candidate to do this, he had to plan the experiment for months and over the course of two years frequently follow up with the IRB, facilities coordinators, sources of funding, and subjects. To achieve his goal, he had to learn a lot along the way about experiment design, administration, and marketing to recruit subjects. That story hits four of the six elements!
Another example: it’s not unusual to be a TA, get some negative feedback from your students, and make changes. It is unusual to look up who won the department’s best TA award the prior year, sit in on their lectures, and take notes about what they do well. It’s also unusual to schedule an extra section where you have the students go through supplemental homework you designed yourself to give struggling students extra practice. As result, the student had unusual results – in his second year on the job, he was voted the department’s best TA. This story also hits at least four of the six elements.
Even supposing there’s nothing exceptional about your TA, RA, or dissertation work – which I doubt – your hobbies (or former jobs) can provide exceptional stories. When I asked my colleagues for examples of impressive behavioral interview stories, they mentioned PhD candidates who had become Zumba instructors or created national championship bridge teams at their university. Provided it highlights the above elements, a “non-work” story is a great way to stand out from the crowd.
Now that you’ve chosen a strong subject, it’s time to flesh out the details. Who were the different people you were trying to please? How was success defined differently for them than for you? What worked best to convince them to support you? What were some key milestones on the path to success? If you had to sacrifice something to meet a goal, how did you know you’d made the right choice? If you did something creative, how did you verify that it actually worked? If you can, add numbers that give us a sense of magnitude – how many students were you teaching, what was your rating (e.g. 4.75 out of 5), and what percentile was that among other TAs?
Make sure to identify something you could have done better. People want to see greatness, but also humility and the desire to grow. You need to find a meaningful mistake you made (not ‘I worked too hard.’) that isn’t a red flag (not ‘In retrospect, embezzling money to fund my experiment added too much stress to my life.’).
Now that you have a detailed narrative of your three stories, practice telling it out loud. You can find an endless list of practice behavioral questions on the internet; sites like Glassdoor might also reveal pet favorites of different companies. Practice with friends. Better yet, practice with MBA students - who tend to be skilled at behavioral interviews - or with someone at your university’s career center. Ask which story (if any) they find impressive. Ask if they felt a part of the story was a red flag. Pay attention to their follow up questions; this will tell you what’s missing from your story and you can add those details to your next version.
I used the strategies outlined above to get my first (and so far, only) job out of graduate school. My dissertation on labor mobility required working with large, restricted Census Bureau datasets. The experience made me love programming and I knew I wanted to end up in the tech sector. Knowing how much Amazon valued behavioral interviews, I practiced my own story: my proposal defense was disastrous and I had to deliver a new proposal in six weeks. I realized that the main problems were caused by communication, and so I set up series of regular meetings with the committee members to show updated results, get their feedback, and - since I had a very diverse committee - get them to agree with each other on requirements for my thesis. It showed persistence, strategy, conflict resolution, and achieving outcomes. As a bonus, some of the details highlighted my programming and big data expertise.
This story was versatile enough to answer almost every question I faced on the job market, and I used it in the initial rounds with Amazon. In the final round, though, my interviewer – Myriah – asked me about a time I had showed persistence in the face of failure. For reasons I’ll never understand, I told her that in middle school I’d been threatened and joined Tae Kwon Do to protect myself. Unfortunately, I was the smallest person in the dojang, and my classmates inflicted so many bruises on me that I literally couldn’t rest my arms on my school desk. The humiliation was worse than the pain; I lost every fight in my first year. However, I knew if I quit I would be giving into fear, so I stuck with it. Eventually, when I hit my growth spurt, I went unbeaten and became a two time junior national champion.
Three years later, when I was training to become a Bar Raiser, I was assigned to learn from Myriah. We were discussing how often economists screwed up the behavioral interviews, and I could feel my face flush. “I can’t believe I went with that example,” I told her.
She replied, “I still remember your story.”
[1] You can check out Google’s “Project Oxygen” for some research on this.
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