Behavioral Interview Framing

Question

Can I strengthen my interview narrative by sharing that my work on a project got my tech lead promoted during the review cycle due to my high quality delivery without handholding?

For context if I were to ballpark my company’s title inflation I think this tech leads promotion was the equivalent of a faang mid level to senior. For quote he said “I will continue to oversee day to day dev work like I was doing due to lagging promo” which seems to be team level mentoring.

This would be one of the results in the STAR format story on top of the business impact that it delivered when I do a FAANG re-interview.

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

You can throw it out there, but it's admittedly a bit weird. Usually you talk about getting more junior folks than you promoted, not the other way around. That's one of the things I talked about in my Robinhood behavioral actually (growing a ton of people all the way to high-performing Meta E5).

I'm sure your great delivery helped your tech lead's promotion case, but the following are also likely true:

There were other engineers doing great work that fed into their promotion case
You were able to do great work due to some amount of guidance and mentorship from the tech lead you've gotten over the past several months/years (if not, they're probably not a good tech lead of you to be honest...)

What I will say is that I wouldn't use it as a focal point. In the "R" part of STAR, you can probably throw it in there relatively casually, mentioning that the project went very well, everybody got praise/good performance review ratings, and your tech lead even got promoted. I think drawing a hard line between your great performance and their promo is stretching it. Just my 2 cents.

Behavioral Interview Framing

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