How to get Software Engineering offers from top-tech companies in Australia — Part 2: Non-technical interviews
Other articles in the series:
Part 1 — Interview Format, Online Presence, Recruiter Screen
Part 2 — Non-technical interviews (you are here)
Part 3 — Technical Interviews — Algorithms and Data Structures
Part 4 — Technical Interviews — System Design (coming soon!)
Part 5 — Negotiating (coming soon!)
Interviewing at tech companies can feel a lot like solving rubik’s cubes while hula hooping on a skateboard. On one hand, it’s a niche talent that you can use to impress your friends. On the other hand, it’s a skill that obliquely demonstrates your competencies as a software engineer.
Unfortunately, employers don’t have an easy job evaluating your skills as a software engineer. Fortunately for you, learning how to interview well is a skill that can be developed, and you can leverage interview prep to increase your skills, your job prospects, your salary, and your lifestyle.
This article series is the distillation of 4 months of intensive interview preparation, covering several books on non-technical and technical interviews, several courses on system design, books on negotiating offers, many hours gathering advice from software engineers already working at these companies, as well as insights gleaned going through the interview processes itself.
The goal of this series is to help get you offers at the top tech companies in Australia. I’ll point you to the best resources I’ve found and their most crucial parts that will help you maximise your offers as well as optimise your prep time.
My hope is that this series makes it easy for you to prepare, perform and profit from your interviewing experience. I’d say good luck, but you won’t need it after you create your own luck through preparation.
Here’s how you can get Software Engineering offers from top tech companies in Australia.
In this article, I’ll go over how to prepare for the non-technical interviews at top tech companies.
For the entirety of your interview process, I would recommend the book Cracking the Coding Interview (this is an affiliate link, just fyi). This book contains more information than you need for the non-technical interviews.
I’ll endeavour to point you to the most important parts of the book so you can optimise your prep time.
Non-technical Interviews overview
From Part 1 you would have understood the interview format, polished your online presence, and prepared for the recruiter screen.
Next, you’ll want to prepare for the non-technical interviews. Doing this before you apply to open roles will ensure that you have the non-technical answers prepared and sitting in the back of your head. Non-technical interviews are a memory game. Establish your answers now, and then you’ll be able to do a refresher before the actual interview.
There are 3 types of non-technical interviews that you will encounter when applying to top tech companies. Behavioural, Values, and Leadership interviews. These interviews can be explicitly separated like they are at Atlassian, or combined, like they were at Canva.
- The Behavioural interview is a general test of your soft skills and evaluating if you fit the company culture.
- The Values interview is an explicit test from Atlassian that tests your fit with their specific company values.
- The Leadership interview is a separate test, or worked into the behavioural interview in Canva’s case, that evaluates your leadership ability.
Preparing for each type of behavioural interview will mean you’ll hit the ground running during the actual interviews.
To help you with preparing for these non-technical interviews, I’ve produced an Interview Preparation Template that you can clone and fill in the blanks. It contains the exact prompts I prepared for (some of them were the exact ones Atlassian and Canva would later ask me!), in a format that allows you to systematically prepare, and give yourself the best chance to perform on and profit from your interviews, available here.
Non-technical Interview — Behavioural
For the Behavioural interview, you’ll want to have a good handle on your previous work experience, and be able to talk about it in ways that show your competencies.
This will be tested during the behavioural interviews, where they ask questions like: “Tell us about a time you had a disagreement with a co-worker”, or “Tell us about a time where you had multiple responsibilities to manage”. Their main goal with behavioural interviews are to understand what you’re like to work with, how you handle challenges, and how you’ll fit into the company culture.
Answering this questions systematically can be the difference between being progressed in the interview process or being rejected. A system to answer these questions will ensure your answers are concise and comprehensible, and give the best chance of displaying the positive signals you’re intending.
The NSTAR framework
NSTAR is a systematic way of displaying these signals. It stands for Nugget, Situation, Task, Action, and Result.
The Nugget is a brief summary of the story to give your interviewer an overview of what you’re about to tell them. The Situation is an explanation of the situation in which the story takes place. The Task is your role within the story, what were your objectives, what was your responsibility at the time? The Action is what you did in this situation, and the Result is the ultimate outcome of the story.
Using this format allows you to present your answers clearly and concisely, such that you’re able to signal to your interviewer the positive qualities and competencies that you demonstrated in this story.
Here’s an example, which came up in both interviews with Canva and Atlassian:
“Tell us about a time where you had a disagreement with a co-worker, and how you handled it”
Nugget: Great! I’ll tell you about a time where I received push-back from a code review
Situation: I was reviewing a pull request for new functionality in the product. I saw that there were negative performance implications of the change, and suggested an alternative solution. My coworker responsible for the changes pushed back, citing that there were no other viable options.
Task: I was a senior engineer on the team, and my responsibility here was to ensure code quality, performance, and to help the team members learn.
Action: I knew that this person was new to backend development, and rather than strong arming them, or having a back and forth in pull request comments, I invited them to a meeting. In that meeting I sought to understand their perspective, and when they felt that I had a good understanding of the problems they were facing, I suggested we investigate some solutions together. We went over a few other options I had in mind, and settled on one that wouldn’t have the same performance implications. We spent a bit of time getting the ball rolling together, and when it seemed like they were feeling more confident, I asked if they wanted to take over and finish up the implementation.
Result: They was grateful for the help, and in the end learned more about performance in backend systems.
Note the signals that this story displays. Empathy, Patience, Mentoring. I won’t toot my own horn further, the point is to understand that the NSTAR method is a great format for answering behavioural questions, and it’s important to be aware of the signals your story is conveying.
It’s a good idea to look at the common behavioural questions, and create a bank of several common questions and your NSTAR’d answers. This will help you recall these quickly during the behavioural interview.
A list of common behavioural questions is included in my Tech Interview Preparation Guide. This guide includes every step I personally took to get offers from the top tech companies in Australia, available here.
Applying the advice from the “Behavioural Questions” section of Cracking the Coding Interview will help here as well.
Non-technical Interview — Values
Atlassian in particular has a separate phase called the Values interview. This interview seeks to understand how you fit in with their specific company values.
- Be the change you seek
- Play as a team
- Don’t f*** the customer
- Open company no bullshit
- Build with heart and balance
For each value, they’ve crafted specific prompts that you can use to find examples from your previous work experience. For example, for Play as a team, they might ask: “How do you work with other people?”, or “How have you helped make a team/individual more successful if they weren’t performing well?”
While this interview is an explicitly separate interview in the Atlassian hiring process, it is more subtly worked into Canva’s. In Canva’s interview, their behavioural interview may include explicit references to their company values.
With any company you apply to you should endeavour to read and consider how aligned you feel with their values, and be ready to give examples from your work experience.
For this interview, grab the company’s values from their site, and put together a set of experiences from your work history that exemplifies their values, or a blurb on your understanding or application of these values. The NSTAR format can help here as well.
The behavioural interview prompts that I was given from my recruiter are available in a fill-in-the-blanks format, as well as a template for answering any company’s values interviews are available in the Interview Prep template here. It also includes guides on the recommended material to cover for all other sections of the interview process. The template includes step-by-step and fill in the blank exercises so you can ensure you’ve covered every aspect of the non-technical interviews.
Non-technical Interview — Leadership Interview
Canva and Atlassian both have a similar leadership interview. At Atlassian it’s called the Management interview, whereas at Canva it’s called the Strategy, Communication, & Leadership interview. This interview is similar to the behavioural interview format, except that the questions are focused specifically on projects where you had a leadership role.
Canva will ask you questions that demonstrate your strategy, communication and leadership skills, whereas Atlassian will cover a wider range of leadership attributes.
The leadership topics that Atlassian enquired about were:
- Projects that had a measurable impact, lessons learned, felt stretched
- Your ability to drive outcomes across the software development lifecycle
- How you apply lessons learnt on the job and share them
- Your ability to manage conflict across various situations
- How you take initiative, lead and inspire in your role
For each topic there are specific topics that you’ll want to hit to ensure you’re meeting the criteria for your role. For example, for the topic “How you take initiative, lead and inspire in your role”, they encouraged me to consider experiences that showed:
- Leading in innovative or established ways, at an appropriate scale for the role
- Bringing team members and stakeholders along on the journey of projects and continuous improvement
- Impact on your team or teams around you approach to continuous improvement communication skills are all key themes.
- how you collaborate with your teams and get a deeper sense of your passions and ambitions to ensure the role is in fact the right one for you
Each of these topics, with the specific attributes they’re looking for, are included in my Interview Prep Template, available here. Inside you’ll find these exact prompts I was given from my recruiter, with all the attributes as checkboxes to ensure you’re hitting the attributes they’re evaluating you on.
Conclusion
Preparing for the non-technical interviews is as simple as sitting down with the questions and prompts, and thinking about specific situations you encountered in your work history. From there, it’s important to write these stories down in a clear format (like NSTAR). Once you’ve done that, it’ll be much easier to recall them during the actual non-technical interviews.
Even if you haven’t prepared for the exact prompt you’re asking, often the same stories can apply across many different prompts. As well, your memory will already be jogged about the challenges and achievements of your work history, so it will be more easy to improvise on the spot if need be.
In my Interview Prep Template, I’ve listed a selection of prompts from the Behavioural, Values, and Leadership interviews for you in a fill-in-the-blank format. This makes it easy to fill in, refresh, and recall later.
Additionally, you get the information on how to polish your online presence and handle the recruiter screen (from Part 1), as well as in depth suggestions on the technical interviews, and how to use Cracking The Coding interview the most effectively. It also includes suggestions, examples, and a template for the System Design interview, to be discussed in Part 3. The full template is available now, here.
Once you’ve finished setting up your online presence and prepared for your recruiter screen (from Part 1), and prepared for your non-technical interviews, you’re ready to begin prepping for your technical interviews.
See you in the next article!
Next article:
Part 3 — Technical Interviews — Algorithms and Data Structures
Other articles in this series:
Part 1 — Format, Online Presence, Recruiter Screen
Part 4 — Technical Interviews — System Design (coming soon!)
Part 5 — Negotiating (coming soon!)