Guide to Prepare for Behavioral
Interview Questions
This guide is intended to assist you in preparing for behavioral-based interview questions. As
part of the interview, Cubic utilizes a behavioral-based interviewing style for assessing
candidates. We feel this style is effective to help us identify key competencies of candidates. In
addition, this technique may help you learn what competencies are valued by Cubic.
1. What questions will be asked in interview?
During the interview, some of the questions you will be asked will focus on situations you have
encountered in the past. When developing your answers, there are four pieces of information
to include in each of your work examples. This is described as the STAR method:
• Situation
• Task faced
• Actions taken
• Results or changes caused by the action
2. How is this approach different from traditional interviewing?
Traditional interviewing techniques tend to focus on general concepts. Behavioral interview
questions are more structured and focus on examples of how you have performed in previous
work-related situations.
3. What can I do to prepare for this interview?
Practice sharing examples in the STAR format.
The next time you are telling someone about an experience you had or what happened on your
favorite TV show, tell the story by sharing the four parts of a STAR: describe the Situation and
Task faced, tell what Actions were taken, and describe the Results.
Consider challenging, difficult and rewarding experiences in your past work history. Write them
down using the STAR technique.
4. What is an example of a behavioral interview question and response?
The following is a sample candidate response that effectively includes all elements of a
behavioral example:
Question Can you tell me about a time you led a complex, cross-functional
engineering project that faced significant technical or stakeholder
challenges. How did you guide your team through it, and what was the
outcome?
Situation/Task At my previous company, we were tasked with delivering a scalable,
cloud-based infrastructure to support the launch of a new global product
line. The timeline was aggressive—six months from design to
deployment—and it involved teams across software, hardware, and
cybersecurity, plus external vendors. I was responsible for coordinating
these teams, aligning technical goals, and ensuring we met security and
regulatory standards across multiple regions.
Action I established weekly cross-functional syncs and implemented an agile
systems engineering approach to align deliverables across teams. When
our cloud provider’s latency didn’t meet SLAs in a specific region, I led a
joint technical session to resolve the issue through caching optimizations.
I also kept executives aligned with biweekly briefings focused on business
impact and risk.
Result We launched the infrastructure seven weeks ahead of our contractual go-
live date with 99.98% uptime in the first three months. The project was
later recognized internally as a model for global collaboration, and our
systems engineering playbook from this effort was adopted across the
division.
5. Keep these tips in mind:
During the interview, it is expected that you will need some time to think back to specific
experiences. Don’t feel pressured to answer the question quickly or feel uncomfortable asking
the interviewer to repeat the question.
If you are unable to think of a specific experience in the past, let the interviewer know that you
may need to come back to that question or that you haven’t had that situation happen to you.
Be sure to provide experiences so the interviewer can assess your skills accurately.
There may be questions included in your interview that seek experiences that didn’t work out
the way you intended. This information gives the interviewer a balanced, realistic picture of
your background and shows how you have learned from experiences.
