Google Interview (2 of 3): Googleyness, Example Behavioral Questions and the STAR Method

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- Two most important things in a recruit, behavioral questions and how to prepare (STAR method)

Now of course you have to be exceptional at the one thing that you’re applying for, but besides that, Google has to be very careful whom they hire is also a fit to its culture and teams which they call Googleyness. So like it or not, they must dive deeper into understanding how someone thinks so they can decide if the candidate is their best option here.
The first thing they measure here is cognitive ability, for example, they’ll ask you: Tell me about a tough problem you solved, how did you solve me, walk me through it.
Now, what’s the best way to prepare on these things? The best strategy I know is a two stage process: first, think about the highlight of your career, or something that you’re most proud of if you’re not there yet - think about it in the deepest detail possible - write it down even if it takes you an hour just for that. It is very important to do you best and have it done in a narrative format.
Once you’re done, get a summary - still, in a narrative format - not just some bullet points - and answer the following four questions:
• Describe the situation
• What are the tasks to accomplish
• Then talk about the actions that you took
• Results
This is what’s called to answer the question using the STAR format. The important bit here is to keep things in a narrative structure and to keep in mind Google’s cultural values here, remember the previous section in the video, for example:
• If you coded some website, be sure to highlight speed - 3. Fast is better than slow.
• Then if you worked on a team, be sure to highlight that there was communication going on and that you valued differences of opinion - 4. Democracy on the web works.
• Maybe you were in involved in a commercial project before, in which scenario a good pitch would be to highlight your motivation coming from a sense of higher purpose 6. You can make money without doing evil.
• Also, if you worked on something see if any of these keywords are representative: “passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play and life” 9. You can be serious without a suit.
• And finally, if you worked on some project for someone else (or you had a boss) be sure you mention how you went above and beyond to reach your goal - show customer obsession and thirst for excellence 10. Great just isn’t good enough.
Okay, so I believe these are the main highlights for what’s important when building your story.
Once you have your first story, iterate 4 more time to get to around 5 stories of powerful moments in your career or life in general. One strategy here, when looking for topics for those stories, is to take a look at what are the most commonly asked behavioral questions during the interview, and take it from there - for example, the second story could be about dealing with failure, the third could be about a time when you had to deal with ambiguity, the fourth could be highlighting a time when you had a spark of creativity that contributed to reaching a goal a lot faster.
After you have the stories, the second step in preparing for the cognitive questions is to simply train yourself and answer, let’s say 20 such questions. And when I say answer, try to find more than one answer for each question - after all you have a good amount of information prepare from your main stories. Why multiple answers? Because the point is to impress your interviewer here and it’s possible your interviewer won’t like the first one, so it’s always best to have a backup plan - this one comes from Google itself.
Also, writing them down will help you get them to stick into your memory.
So this was my proposed approach on how to prepare to react to cognitive questions. But I believe this ability may help you throughout the application process, and even when building your resume.
Last but not least, if you remember there were two main things that Google looks for in a recruit - apart from the technical part, first was the cognitive ability and the second was leadership. The preparation for addressing this is embedded in the cognitive part I just talked about - that is to make sure you use Google’s keywords inside your stories.
But one more highlight here in terms of leadership - or at least one more interesting keyword - is emergent leadership. I noticed various Google HR leaders referencing it throughout the years; what does this mean: it’s essentially your ability to step in when there is a problem and step out when they are no longer needed. Would be great if you could also make this stand out in one of your prepared stories.