How are behavioral interviews scored?

Most large companies score this round against a fixed list of named criteria, not an overall impression. Each interviewer is assigned two or three of those criteria before you arrive. They write down what you say, mark it against the criteria they were given, and send a written summary to a hiring meeting. The discussion there is about the evidence in those write-ups, not about who liked you.

Quick Overview

The criteria have names

Companies do not ask an interviewer to judge you overall. They hand them a list.

Amazon publishes sixteen Leadership Principles and scores against them by name. Google looks for what it calls Googleyness and leadership. Other companies use their own values or a competency list. The names differ. The mechanism does not.

This is why a pleasant answer can still score nothing. If the interviewer cannot attach what you said to the criterion they were assigned, they have nothing to write down.

How a single interview is scored

Your interviewer has two or three criteria and about forty minutes. The questions are chosen to produce evidence for those criteria. The follow-up questions are there to test whether the evidence is real.

Afterwards they write a summary organized by criterion, with direct quotes where they can get them. That write-up is the real output of your interview. You are not scored in the room. You are scored later, from notes.

Two things follow from that. Vague answers cost more than they feel like they cost, because nothing in them is quotable. And consistency matters, because four write-ups that disagree get noticed in the meeting.

How the loop adds up

A full loop usually runs four or five interviewers. Their assigned criteria overlap only a little, so between them they cover most of the list.

At Amazon one of them is a Bar Raiser. They come from outside the hiring team, they are trained for the role, and they can block an offer. Their job is to check that you are stronger than the median person already doing that job.

What separates a high score from a low one

Four things, and they are much the same at every company.

A specific example. One real situation, not a general statement about how you usually work.

Your own actions. The interviewer is scoring one person and cannot score a group. Say "we" throughout and nothing attaches to you.

A result with a number. Something changed, and you can say by how much. Most candidates stop one sentence too early.

One sentence of reflection. What you learned, or what you would do differently. It answers the follow-up before it is asked.

The same story scores differently by level

This part surprises people. Take a story about fixing a production incident.

At a mid level, the evidence they want is that you diagnosed it correctly and shipped a fix. At a senior level, the same story needs you to have changed something, so that class of incident stopped happening. At staff level, they listen for whether you changed how other teams work.

The story does not change. What you emphasize does. If you are interviewing one level above your current title, this is the most useful adjustment you can make.

What scores nothing

• A general statement with no incident behind it
• A result that is a feeling rather than a measurement
• Describing a colleague's character instead of their behavior
• Claiming work your team did, which a follow-up question exposes quickly

How to Prepare

Write six or seven stories before anyone asks for them. Each needs a specific situation, your own actions, and a result with a number in it. That is the whole of the preparation, and it is covered in how to prepare for the behavioral interview, which is free to read.

Learn how your company frames the round. How companies frame the behavioral round explains the named criteria, how the write-up is organized, and how level changes what counts. It is also free to read.

Find the category you have no story for. Failure is the most common gap, and it is asked more often than almost anything else. See the hardest behavioral interview questions.

Know what sinks an answer. Most low scores come from a small set of avoidable mistakes: what you should not say in a behavioral interview.

Structure every answer the same way. The STAR method gives the interviewer the context, your responsibility, your actions, and the outcome, in that order. See the five STAR questions worth preparing, each with a sample answer.

For the full treatment, Grokking Modern Behavioral Interview works through 30 real questions with written sample answers and the follow-up each one attracts.