I bombed technicals for months before I clocked that I was losing on the behavioral round.
I was so fixated on data structures that I treated the "tell me about a time" questions as filler. Then a recruiter was decent enough to tell me my technical scores were fine — I was just coming across as someone who couldn't tell a straight story about their own work. So I sat down and wrote six real STAR stories and rehearsed them out loud until they stopped sounding rehearsed. The next two loops went completely differently.
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AnonymousAnon More common than people admit. The behavioral round is often where otherwise-strong candidates quietly get filtered, because everyone over-preps LeetCode and under-preps their own stories. Glad you caught it — writing out 6-8 STAR stories once fixed this for me almost overnight.
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AnonymousAnon Same story here. I recorded myself answering on my phone once and it was painful, ninety seconds of rambling with no point. Tightening every answer to a clear result at the end changed my hit rate more than any LeetCode session.
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AnonymousAnon The number of strong engineers who tank the behavioral because they think it's the soft part is wild. STAR feels corny right up until you realize the interviewer is literally ticking those boxes on a rubric.