Before we discuss this question, let us recap what the Behavioral Interview Round at Facebook is.

1. Behavioral Interview Round is also known as the Jedi Interview round at Facebook.

2. It is about you and your history, your résumé, and your motivation.

3. The purpose of this interview is to assess whether the candidate will thrive in Facebook's peer-to-peer, minimal process, and unstructured engineering organization.

For Software Engineers, the behavioral interview is actually part behavioral and part coding. The coding part is a shorter version of the usual coding interviews and is included to supplement the other two coding interviews to get an additional coding signal.

Tips & Tricks to effectively prepare for Behavioral Interviews

1. Know yourself! Take the time to review your résumé, as the interviewer will almost certainly ask about key events in your work history.

2. Have concrete examples or anecdotes to support each of the questions.

3. Familiarize yourself with Facebook's mission statement and its five core values:

   • Be Bold
   • Focus on Impact
   • Move Fast
   • Be Open
   • Build Social Value

4. Be yourself! Be open and honest about your successes and failures.

5. Be humble and focus on teamwork, leadership, and mentorship qualities.

Now, let us review how to effectively answer the question on Failed Or Made A Mistake in the interview.

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Question: Tell me about a time you failed or made a mistake

Video Explanation with Evaluation Criteria, Response Framework, and Tips & Tricks.

Tell me about a time you failed or made a mistake is one of the most challenging and tricky questions asked by the interviewers.

Don't be afraid of this question. Mistakes and failures are inevitable, and everyone makes them at some point during their job.

Evaluation Criteria

By this question, the interviewer is trying to understand your level of maturity and personal accountability.

They want to see how do you handle the situation when you experience a setback.

They are looking for candidates who:

• Can take ownership of their actions,
• Are self-aware, and
• Strive to improve themselves from the learnings of their past experiences.

Response Framework

1. Our advice to you is to pick a compelling story that can articulate a real honest setback that you have experienced in your current or former job.

2. Describe the situation, the events that occurred, and explain why it was a mistake.

3. Make sure to end your story on a positive note by elaborating to the interviewer what actions you executed and the trade-offs you made to remedy the failure.

4. Explain the learnings you took from the setback and how they helped you to avoid the same mistakes from happening again in the future and to become a better engineer.

Tips & Tricks

1. Always remain calm and professional.
   • Refrain from being negative and avoid blaming your employer, coworkers, or manager.
   • Companies generally do not like to hire people who are always pointing fingers at others.

2. Prepare the response for this question beforehand, as it will be tough to structure your answer on the spot during the interview.

3. Use a compelling story that is honest and believable.

4. Articulate the actions and the post mortem that you did to resolve the issue.

5. Show that you proactively communicated the issue to all the stakeholders once it was identified.

6. Do not sugarcoat your answer with irrelevant details.

   • Focus mainly on the failure, the actions you took, and the learnings which will help you to avoid this in the future.

7. Do not memorize the answer as it should come naturally, and you should sound confident to the interviewer.

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Preparation Material

Learn more about the Evaluation Criteria, Response Framework, and Tips & Tricks to effectively prepare and answer the top questions asked in the Behavioral Interviews at Facebook. Certain special cases are also discussed which are usually faced by the candidates during these interviews.

⬇️ Detailed Written Notes on Top Facebook Behavioral Interview Questions

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Cracking the Facebook Behavioral Interview

If you have not read our first article on Top Facebook Behavioral Interview Questions, we recommend reading it by clicking the below link:

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Cracking the Facebook System Design Interview

In case if you have not read our series on Cracking the Facebook System Design Interview, we recommend reading it by clicking the below link:

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Useful Links

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👩‍💻 Best System Design Interview Course
🚀 Complete SWE Interview Course [💰 Limited Time 10% offer]
🙋‍♀️ Behavioral Interview Guide [💰 Special Discount]
📚 Recommended Interview Preparation Book (on Amazon)

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This article is part of the series on Behavioral Interviews at Facebook. So, follow us to get notified when our next article in this series is published. Thanks for reading!

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Our goal is to create Software Eng Interview tutorials to help you get a job at companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, & Amazon. We will deep-dive into System Design, Coding, & Behavioral interviews.

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