How a Croatian Security Engineer Prepped for Google's Behavioral Interviews

The Gap Between Knowing and Explaining

Interviewers are not grading your accent. They need to follow your reasoning in English. She was a security engineer in Croatia. Day-to-day work used AWS. The team often spoke Russian, so live English was not daily practice. The next interviews were at Google, in English. She had already been through an earlier interview round. In behavioral rounds, her stories ran long or lost the result, and she paused to find words in English.

Before and After

What We Practised

Practice matched the round she actually had to speak: behavioral interview stories for Google. After each mock, she got notes on the same answer — where she paused, which words were vague, and where the structure broke.

• She built reusable work stories with a clear structure: situation, task, action, and result.
• She practised answering follow-up questions on the same story instead of switching to a new example.
• She replaced vague verbs with precise language (decided, shipped, measured).
• She practised saying the result early so the interviewer could follow the point.

Useful references along the way: STAR interview framework, Pronouncing numbers and metrics.

The Turning Point

The useful change followed an earlier interview round. She stopped treating English as optional polish. The next mocks used the same format that had failed. Answers got a fixed order so follow-up questions did not break the story.

What Other Engineers Can Learn

• Treat a failed round as information. Practise that exact format out loud again.
• Write five to eight work stories from real projects. Practise follow-up questions on the same stories.
• Say the result in the first twenty seconds, then explain the action.
• Use first person for decisions: I decided, I measured, I pushed back.
• Keep answers short. A clear point beats a long timeline.

After the Coaching

She built stronger interview English after earlier unsuccessful rounds. She could tell a clearer story after an earlier interview round. Readiness — not a promised offer — was the goal.

Why Behavioral Interviews Are Difficult in English

A behavioral round asks you to remember an experience, pick the relevant details, structure a story, and still sound natural — all in a second language. You are choosing tenses, names, and numbers while the interviewer asks follow-ups. STAR is useful because it is a spoken order, not a script. Without that order, strong work disappears into a long, unfinished story.

Preparing for a similar path? Read How an American Security Engineer Built English Fluency for Google.

Where She Started

She prepared for English-language interviews as a security engineer. The stack was AWS. Written English was stronger than speaking against the clock.