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.