Behavioral Interview Mistakes That Get You Down-Leveled (or Rejected) - Part 1
You need to ace your technical rounds, but that’s more of a minimum qualification these days. It’s the behavioral rounds that decide whether you get the offer, and at what level.
“I don’t know why I got rejected, the interviews went great.” Heard that one before? Everyone thinks behavioral is the easy part. They're right. But it's also the easiest part to fuck up.
I’ve been on both sides of 200+ interviews at FAANG companies, and and just wrapped up an interview cycle with EM offers from Meta, Netflix, and Airbnb (and bombing without prep at Doordash and Pinterest). Figured I'd write down what I’ve learned while it's fresh.
I don’t know how many parts I’ll end up writing, but this is Part 1: Foundational Mistakes. I’ll cover two killers today:
→ Hiding behind “we”
→ Ending stories without real learning
What else should I cover in future posts? Thinking story construction, signaling seniority, showing growth - but open to suggestions.
The Foundational Mistakes
1. The “we” problem
“We struggled with prioritization across teams.”
“The project faced scope creep issues.”
“Our stakeholders weren’t aligned.”
The Problem
Every time you say “we/our/the team/the project” to explain a challenge or action, the interviewer mentally adds a note: What did this person actually do?
Candidates think they’re being humble, or they’re being a team player. The interviewer thinks they’re either dodging accountability or taking credit without contribution. I’ve seen people lead entire programs and get down-leveled because they couldn’t articulate what they did versus what happened around them.
What to Do Instead
Dodging Accountability
Instead of “we struggled with prioritization” -> “I underestimated the Ads team dependency and deprioritized their integration. It cost us 3 weeks when they changed their API.”
Taking Credit Without Contribution
Instead of “the team decided to use microservices” -> “I pushed for microservices over a monolith because I’d seen two similar projects bog down in deployment conflicts”
When “we” is Fine
“We shipped the feature” is fine for outcomes when you have explained your decisions first. For example: “I chose to cut scope on the admin panel so we could ship the feature on time” - shows your decision.
New here? Start here → Behavioral Interviews
2. Fumbling the landing
“We shipped on time and hit our metrics.”
“The project was successful, customers loved it.”
And then...
...nothing?
Let’s call this... premature... evacuation.
You finished, but nobody’s satisfied.
Every story needs a landing - what you took away, what you’d do differently. That’s the ending.
I use “What did you learn?” as one of my bullshit detectors. When someone describes a hard problem and can’t articulate what they’d do differently now, it’s a red flag. They either don’t learn from experience (alarm!), or they were probably just there when things happened, but weren’t the main character.
Wall Posters vs Learnings
“Proactive Communication Is Important”
“I Learned To Plan Better”
These are wall posters, not learnings. They’re what “you’re supposed” to say, but tell me nothing about how you actually work differently now.
How To Phrase Learnings
Phrase your learning as something I could observe if I watched you work.
“After that production incident, I changed how I do design reviews. Now I have a checklist for common failure modes. I was able to catch a latency issue using this in Q3.”
“I used to think my job was shipping features. That escalation taught me my job is managing risk. I now front load legal/privacy review early in the project. I got pushback from my engineers when I tried to do this recently in Project Banana, but turned out to be the right decision when the legal team objected to using a crawler…”
Notice the structure:
What I believed before (could be implicit)
What happened that challenged it
What I do differently now - specific and observable
Proof it works
If your “learning” doesn’t change a concrete behavior you can point to, you didn’t learn, you just had an experience.
The bottom line
Behavioral interviews are about one thing: do you sound like someone who operates at the level you’re interviewing for?
The two mistakes we discussed in this post make you sound like someone things happened to, not someone who made things happen. That’s how you walk out thinking “that went great” and get the rejection email three days later.