Episode
How to Master Behavioral Interviews 🎤 — with Austen McDonald
- Podcast
- Refactoring Podcast
- Published
- Feb 20, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3310
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/refactoring-podcast-6754878/episodes/how-to-master-behavioral-interviews-with-austen-mcdonald/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/refactoring-podcast-6754878/how-to-master-behavioral-interviews-with-austen-mcdonald.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
Today's guest is Austen McDonald , former hiring committee chair at Meta, and author of the book, "Mastering Behavioral Interviews." Austen, in his career, conducted more than 1,000 interviews and coached more than 200 engineers, and is here today to tell us everything about why behavioral interviews are more important than ever and how to run them right, as a candidate and as a recruiter. (00:00) Preview (01:02) Introduction (01:37) Austen' interest in behavioral interviews (06:25) Sponsor break (07:31) Behavioral interviews as a senior or a junior engineer (09:55) The question behind a question: signal areas (13:09) Fails in behavioral interviews (16:38) Decode, select, deliver (17:15) The eight areas (19:02) How company culture reflects in hiring (21:59) Assessing company's culture as a candidate (23:49) The big three questions (29:26) Preparing for the big three questions (37:37) Deliver a story (40:28) Good preparation process (43:15) Do not lie (46:14) Recruiter side: biases (51:42) Candidate experience with AI: value questions — Today’s sponsor is Intent by Augment. Intent is a developer workspace built for orchestrating agents: it starts with the living spec that updates as agents make progress, so every task stays aligned with no manual coordination. Try it for yourself at https://www.augmentcode.com/product/intent — You can also find this at: • 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm • 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw • 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305 — For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]