Tell me about a time when you ...

Candidate A uses STAR to answer

[Situation] During the recent org, [task] we had to transition services in pagerduty to the new teams. [Action] I made the list of all services, created new teams in pagerduty, and reassigned services to the new teams. [Result] When the new structure became effective, all new teams were assigned the correct services for their oncall.

Candidate B tells a story anchored around them and the expectation of for the role at the new company.

A few months ago, there was a reorg. Reorgs are stressful because of the ambiguity that they create for the people involved. I took the initiative to drive the oncall transition across 6 different teams.

I created a document that list all services with current teams that they currently belong to. In the document, I suggested new team ownership. I used the document to seek alignment across all teams involved. It was challenging because the service ownership was not immediately clear to everyone. In the end, we came to a good solution and I incorporated feedback into the document. I was able to create a clear set of steps and timeline that we agreed on for the transition.

In the end, we were able to transition 32 services across 6 different teams.

Candidate A is offered SDE1 even though they interviewed for SDE2 😭. Meanwhile Candidate B gets the SDE2 role they wanted 💸🎉💸🎉!!!

It's the same story but told differently!

Candidate B was able to highlight aspects of the SDE2 level with this otherwise simple task. They were able to size the problem (32 services across 6 teams), demonstrate ambiguity (reorg and unclear ownership), drive alignment (created a document to get feedback), and demonstrate initiative (they took the lead instead of waiting for someone to ask them).

If you do this consistently during the entire interview loop, you will get the offer you want. If you give potato stories, you'll get potato offers.