1:1 Coaching
Work directly with me, Austen McDonald, author of Mastering Behavioral Interviews, who has coached hundreds of candidates. Get calibrated feedback, tailored strategies, and the confidence to walk into your next behavioral loop.
View Options1:1 coaching is a personalized, high-touch experience. Here's who gets the most out of it.
Coaching is ideal for builders at the Senior, Staff, Principal, and Manager level — across all disciplines:
We'll work together to prepare specifically for your upcoming loops with strategy, feedback, and mock sessions.
If you're a junior or mid-level, you can often get great results without working 1:1 with me:
These tools cover the fundamentals and can take you a long way in your preparation. If you'd still like to work 1:1, contact me.
1,000+
FAANG behavioral interviews conducted
Hiring Committee Chair
at Meta, making thousands of hiring decisions and setting the bar for behaviorals
Best-Selling Author
of Mastering Behavioral Interviews — I literally wrote the book on behaviorals
Top Companies
Clients landed roles at Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Google, Netflix, and more
Every session is tailored to where you are in your prep. Here are the areas we focus on together.
Surface the right experiences from your career, shape them into stories that demonstrate the signal areas interviewers are evaluating, and build a catalog you can draw from across any question.
Hear directly how your answers land against the bar for your target level — senior, staff, principal — and what specifically needs to change to read as a stronger candidate.
Map your stories and framing to the specific companies and roles you're pursuing, including how different companies weight different signal areas and what their interviewers tend to probe.
Answer questions on your feet the way you will in the actual interview, with follow-up questions calibrated to what a real interviewer would push on.
Get feedback on pacing, structure, and how you're coming across — what you said, but also whether the interviewer would stay engaged through the whole answer.
Identify the signal areas and question types where you're consistently underperforming before the real interview finds them first.
Purchase session credits and schedule at your convenience.
60 minutes • Video call • Recording • Detailed notes
A focused session to review your CARL stories, practice answers to common behavioral questions, and get personalized coaching on your delivery and content.
$450
per session
60 minutes • Video call • Recording • Detailed notes
Commit to a focused prep sprint. Ideal for working through your full story library, running mock sessions, and iterating on delivery before your loop.
$800
$900
$400 per session
60 minutes • Video call • Recording • Detailed notes
Full-cycle preparation from first session through your final loop. The deepest engagement, with room to iterate, refine, and pressure-test everything before interview day.
$1,750+
$2,250
$350 per session
General availability is 9:30 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. Pacific. Detailed availability shared once you create an account and fill out the interest form. Nights and weekends upon request. Contact me for other options.
Contact me at austenmc@thebehavioral.tech for custom packages.
There are many ways to prepare. Here's how coaching fits alongside them.
Most services match you with a random engineer for a one-time session. You get feedback from someone who may have never made a hiring decision, with no system connecting your practice to what interviewers actually evaluate.
I chaired Meta's iOS and Android hiring committees, made thousands of hiring decisions, and personally conducted over 1,000 interviews. That calibration is what you're getting with coaching.
Peer practice gives you reps, and reps matter. The problem is calibration. If your practice partner hasn't hired at the level you're targeting, they're guessing at the bar alongside you.
I've been the one to set that bar, at the hiring committee level, for the roles you're targeting.
AI copilots are genuinely useful for preparation — drilling questions, building story frameworks, getting instant feedback at any hour. You should use one. I even built one for you.
Where they stop is the live simulation. Coaching sessions put
you on the spot in real time, force you to think on your feet,
and expose the gaps that only surface under pressure. You get
follow-up questions calibrated to what a real interviewer
would probe, direct feedback on delivery — pacing, engagement,
whether you're actually connecting with the person across from
you — and the accountability of knowing someone with deep
hiring experience is evaluating every answer.
Preparation and pressure-testing are both part of
the job. Copilots handle the first. Coaching handles the
second.
After purchasing session credits, you can book a time directly from your account dashboard. You'll see available slots on Austen's calendar and pick what works for you.
General availability is between 9:30 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. Pacific, Monday through Friday. Nights and weekends are available upon request — just reach out to coordinate.
Yes. You can reschedule or cancel from your sessions dashboard up to 24 hours before the session. Credits are returned for cancellations.
You pay here on our website via Stripe. All major credit cards are accepted.
All sessions are conducted via Google Meet. A link will be included in your calendar invite and accessible from your session detail page. You'll get a recording, a transcript, and session notes curated by Austen.
Credits do not expire. Use them whenever you're ready.