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Meta People Management Interviews Explained by a Former Meta Interviewer

By Hello Interview Coach

Feb 15, 2024

The People Management interview at Meta is a 45-minute session where the interviewers will look at your past behaviors, actions, and decisions when managing a team. The goal is to understand your approach and frameworks to supporting people.

What to Expect

The People Management interviews assume that the best predictor of future performance is past performance, and that asking you about how you actually handled people management situations is the best way to evaluate how you will handle such situations at Meta. If this sounds similar to the Behavioral interview, that's because both interviews use the same interviewing techniques. As such, some of the tips for Behavioral Interviews will apply here as well.

Multiple Questions: Expect the interviewer to go broad across all of the different aspects of people management. People Management is a career as expansive as software engineering, so expect many questions.
Deep Dives: The interviewer wants to know that you share examples of situations that you really lived through, and to evaluate the boundaries of your expertise. Expect follow up questions that require specific and concrete examples.
Scope: The interviewer is interested in understanding the scope of the challenges that you faced. For example, what was the size of the organization that you led, and what was the seniority profile of the team?

The questions will generally follow one of two formulas:

"Tell me about a time when …"
"Tell me about your approach to …"

While the second question seems to deviate from the principle of evaluating past performance, the follow-up questions will dig into concrete examples of how you implemented your approach.

Here are a couple of example questions and answers to let you know what to expect. Do note that you should expect several follow-up questions from the interviewer to verify that you are sharing an experience that you actually lived through, and to confirm or disconfirm the perceived signal that is coming out of the initial answers.

Question:

"Tell me about a time when someone did not meet your expectations."

Good answer:

"Sure. In a 1:1 meeting with one of the senior engineers on the team, I asked them what they thought about working with each of the other engineers on their pod. The senior IC told me that one of the mid-level engineers, let's call them Alfred, was acting a bit strange. They couldn't point a finger at anything specific. I followed up with Alfred to check-in on how they were doing. They basically said that an engineer from another team that they were working with was getting on their nerves. I dug for more details, and then coached Alfred on how they can work through this challenge. Here is what I did specifically …"

The manager showed that they leverage 1:1s as a mechanism to gauge individual and team health. Based on a murky signal that something may be off, they went off to investigate without any presumptions, arriving at the root cause of a real performance issue. Finally, the manager did not attempt to resolve the conflict themselves, but used it as a coaching opportunity, so that Alfred can solve similar issues in the future.

Bad answer:

"Sure. In a 1:1 meeting with one of the senior engineers, I learned that one of the engineers that they led wasn't delivering for a couple of weeks. I trust the word of my senior engineers, so I immediately drafted a performance improvement plan for that low performer, let's call them Alfred. I shared the plan with Alfred in our next 1:1, and told them that if they didn't start delivering, they won't be able to stay on the team. Over the course of 5 months, I tried everything, but Alfred just wouldn't change, so I started the process to let them go.

The manager first learned about the performance issue after it was already apparent to a member of the team for a couple of weeks. They did no further due-diligence and swooped in with a solution to the wrong problem. Finally, they let the whole process carry on for a long period of time, which likely had a negative impact on the rest of the team members.

Question:

"What was your biggest mistake as a manager?"

Good Answer:

"Yeah. When my team grew to 15 engineers, I needed another manager to help me scale, and I converted one of the Staff engineers on the team to a Manager position. I did a very poor job throughout this process, so I'd like to share what happened, what I learned from it, and how it helped me convert two other engineers into managers. I basically approached the highest performer on the team, which was my first mistake, and convinced them that switching to management would be great for their career, which was another mistake. It took some work to convince them, but I was totally swamped with work, and they eventually agreed to the transition. I quickly moved 5 engineers to their team, and had regular meetings to coach them on the process. The engineers did great, but the new manager hated their job and eventually found a technical role in another company and left. My main take away was to drill in on people's motivations and strengths, and make sure that management was the right fit for them. In fact, a while back I worked with one of my Staff engineers and helped them figure out that management was not for them."

While there's obviously more to the story, this example shows a mistake that is level-appropriate for an M1. This means that this is not a mistake that a junior or mid-level engineer would have experienced, and a situation that we would expect an M2 to handle well. It also shows concrete learnings and implementation, in a way that helped the candidate grow in their career and become a better manager.

Bad Answer:

"Yeah. This one time we had an intern on the team who didn't do a great job. No one on the team besides their assigned mentor really knew what they were doing, and their mentor left the team mid-way so I took over. I was really swamped with work, so I barely had any time to meet with the intern. They eventually were very frustrated and I was later told that we couldn't hire any other interns from their school for quite a while. In retrospect I should have found another engineer on the team to be their mentor, but at the time all of the engineers on the team were working on other areas and didn't really have any context on what the intern was working on."

The first problem here is scope. Was this a challenge that could only have been solved by an engineering manager? The second problem here is the lack of actual growth. The learning is not really actionable, and there is not example of attempting to use the learning in a future scenario. Finally, there is no extrapolation, or generalization, of learnings from this specific situation to broader situations.

Evaluation Criteria

The interviewer will assess your answers across four main dimensions, which are broken into multiple criteria as well. As discussed, these dimensions are good predictors of success as a People Manager at Meta.

Performance Management
- Your history of dealing with underperformance in individuals and teams (for senior managers).
- Your history of dealing with high performance in individuals and teams (for senior managers).
Growth and Mentorship
- Examples of how you supported the growth of engineers at various levels of seniority.
- You approach to identifying potential managers and supporting the transition from individual-contributor (IC) to manager.
- What tools you set-up and how you use them to grow your team members and team. Think 1:1s, surveys, etc.
Recruiting
- How you identify the needs of the organization, and what you do to close these gaps.
- Your history of hiring candidates to your organization across the entire hiring funnel.
Cross-Functional and Collaboration
- How you approached various conflict situations, and how you helped resolve them.
- Examples of how you approached conflicts as opportunities for growth.
- Your ability to switch to a leadership style without authority to influence partners.

Getting Prepared

Preparing for an Engineering Manager position at Meta may seem daunting, but with a structured approach it is certainly doable. Do not neglect the technical preparation – checkout System Design In A Hurry to get up to speed with all things System Design. To prepare for your people management interview, identify and write down at least two examples for each scenario that highlight the scope of your work. Practice structuring your answers using a framework like STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) or SBI (Situation, Behavior, Impact).

Here are two tips to help you super-charge your preparation work. When you think about the 'S' for "Situation," add "Scope" to the acronym. That is, for each scenario that you prepare, consider how is show-cases the scope for a Manager or a Senior Manager. What, specifically, was challenging in the situation? Next, when you think about the Result or Impact, add Growth to the mix. What did you learn from each situation? How did you leverage this learning in the future? Did you observe any repeating patterns and set-up your own framework? Did you extrapolate the learnings to a broader context?

Lastly, once you're ready, there is no better way than to practice via mock interviews with people who have sat on the other side of the table. At Hello Interview, we have Meta Senior Hiring Managers and Staff Engineers on staff to conduct expert mock interviews that will help you pinpoint exactly how you need to improve to land the job. Book a mock interview to get started.

About The Author

The author is a current Hello Interview coach. As a manager at Meta, he mostly interviews candidates for Staff (IC6) and Manager (M1, M2) positions. Since then, he has supported managers in interviewing and ramping up at major tech companies.

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Meta People Management Interviews Explained by a Former Meta Interviewer

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