Behavioral interviews: What they are and how to prepare

The bottom line about what you should expect from a behavioral interview is that the employer wants to hear some stories about what you’ve done at work. This might sound hard to achieve, but you can produce and deliver these with some preparation and practice.

I’m going to go over exactly what behavioral interviews are, what types of questions they’ll ask in one, and how to answer the questions by creating strong stories.

What is a behavioral interview?

The easy definition of behavioral interviews is that they focus on how the candidate has behaved in past work situations. Traditional interviews ask hypothetical questions like “How would you handle X?” or straightforward questions like “What is your weakness?” while behavioral interviews focus on questions asking about your experience, like “How did you handle X?”. 

Behavioral interview questions often start with something like, "Give me an example of..." or "Can you tell me about a time..." These questions are asking for a story/example as the answer.

Behavioral versus traditional interviews

Behavioral interviews focus on your past behavior and experiences. Companies who use these believe your past behavior shows how you’ll act in the future in similar situations.

The employer writes the job description with certain skills in mind, ones that the candidate must have. In a behavioral interview the interviewer will ask questions about how you’ve handled situations in the past to determine whether you have those skills.

Traditional interviews ask straightforward questions like “How do you show teamwork?” You answer those by giving the process by which you do this. A behavioral interview would ask “How did you show teamwork?”, which you answer by telling a story. We’ll talk more about stories later.

Typical interview - could be either traditional or behavioral

What are behavioral interview questions?

Like I just explained, behavioral interview questions ask candidates to share examples of situations in their past work experience. Each question will target a particular skill, or sometimes a group of skills.

For the traditional interview question I mentioned before, “How do you show teamwork?” the answer can be something like, “I try to show my teammates I listen to them and am always ready to help.” I think of this as your method or process of how you do X.

In a behavioral interview the interviewer would ask the question in a different way, such as, “Tell me about a time you were working on a team and had to work together with a colleague to meet your goal.” This question is asking for a specific example of something you did at work (aka a story). To answer you would talk about how you worked on a particular project and give the details about the project that show you have that teamwork skill.

What questions will they ask me?

We can’t predict the interview questions exactly that you’ll get asked in your interview (unfortunately). I wish we could. But we can make an educated guess. How?

Use the job description

The job description will give you clues about potential questions. If you look at a paragraph from the “Overview” section of this IT Sales Lead Development Representative job description, it will tell you the basic role you’ll be doing:

“You’ll be an important member of the sales organization, qualifying leads, profiling customers, and providing input on which sales campaigns generate the best leads. The objective is to identify and create qualified opportunities for the Education vertical, working in collaboration with your global peers, marketing, account managers and the partner channel.”

Every point in this paragraph could be used as a question. For instance, they could ask you “When have you provided input on sales campaigns” or “What is your experience qualifying leads?”

Look at the Role and Responsibilities section too. This is where you’ll find your biggest clues about what kinds of things the interviewer will be asking.

For instance, this section might say that “You will run teams in an Agile or Scrum environment.” If this is the case, then one of the behavioral questions you might get asked is “Tell me about a time you were in charge of a team that was working in Agile.”

If this section lists “Update and maintain customer information within SalesForce” you may get a behavioral question about when you did this.

Categories of behavioral questions

Another way to predict your interview questions is to think about the job duties (either using what you already know or by looking at the job description) and group the duties into broad categories. Once you have a category of skills that should be part of the job duties, look at the questions under that category and see if any sound like something you might be doing in that job. Here are some ideas of categories with some sample questions:

Customer service questions

If you’ll be working with customers, like candidates in a wide range of roles do, you’ll need to have some stories about that. The customer can be the purchaser of a retail product, a potential client, or an internal or external stakeholder.

1.    Tell me about a time you used customer feedback to drive improvement or innovation. What was the situation and what action did you take?

2.    Give me an example of when you did not meet a client’s expectations. What happened, and how did you attempt to rectify the situation?

3.    When did you deal with an angry client? What actions did you take?

4.    Tell me about a time a customer wanted one thing but you felt they needed something else.

5.    Give me an example of a change you implemented in your current team or organization to meet the needs of your customers. What has been the result?

People management questions

If you’re going to be managing a team, these questions should be at the top of your list to prepare for. In my opinion this is the hardest category because there are so many subtopics: management style, hiring, team building, performance management (positive outcome/negative outcome), high performers, diversity, motivation, roadblocks, etc.

1.    What was your biggest mistake in hiring someone?

2.    Describe a time you constructed a team. What factors did you consider?

3.    Tell me about a difficult performance review.

4.    Tell me about a time when you actively coached or mentored somebody. What were your key takeaways? What was the outcome?

5.    It can be difficult to set goals for a team that are challenging but achievable. Tell me about a time when you hit the right balance. How did you approach setting the goals? What was the outcome?

Project management questions

This category can apply to many roles, as it includes questions about goal setting, prioritization, time management, and stakeholder management. Talk about a time you had to organize something complicated: you figured out what to do, juggled several tasks, communicated about it to everyone, and got it done by the deadline.

1.    Give me an example of a time when you didn't think you were going to meet the commitments you promised. How did you identify the risk and communicate it to stakeholders? What was the outcome?

2.    Tell me about a time you had to make a short-term sacrifice to achieve a long- term goal. What was the outcome?

3.    When did you have to leave a task unfinished?

4.    Tell me about a time you had to work on a project with unclear responsibilities.

5.    Tell me about a time you missed a deadline. What happened and what did you learn?

Innovation questions

Many companies – especially in tech – expect their employees to try to improve products and processes. You’re not supposed to do the same thing day after day without analyzing, iterating, and changing. Use your creativity and out-of-the box thinking to save time or money or otherwise make upgrades.

1.    What improvements have you made at your current company?

2.    Tell me about a time you were able to make something simpler for customers. What drove you to implement this change?

3.    Tell me about an out-of-the box idea you had or decision you made that had a big impact on your business.

4.    Tell me about a time you solved a problem.

5.    Describe a challenging problem or situation in which the usual approach was not going to work. Why were you unable to take the usual approach? What alternative approach did you take? Was it successful?

Mistake/failure questions

These questions are extremely popular with interviewers. They are also very hard to create. You should have at least two examples and make sure they are about instances that were significant but not so serious talking about them makes you look incompetent.

1.    Tell me about a time you made a mistake.

2.    Tell me about an error in judgment you made in the last year or two. What was it and what was the impact of it?

3.    Tell me about a time when you made a bad decision and the learning from the experience enabled you to make a good decision later. What did you learn that you were able to apply?

4.    Give me an example of a significant professional failure. What did you learn from this situation?

5.    Tell the story of the last time you had to apologize to someone.

Conflict questions

These questions are asked to assess your ability to handle difficult situations that may arise at work. Conflicts within the org can negatively impact productivity and morale, so you need to show you can navigate and resolve them.

1.    Tell me about a time you disagreed with a colleague. What is the process you used to work it out?

2.    Tell me about a time where someone openly challenged you. How did you handle this feedback?

3.    Describe a situation where you thought you were right, but your peers or supervisor did not agree with you. How did you convince them that you were right? How did you react? What was the outcome?

4.    Tell me about a time that you strongly disagreed with your manager on something you deemed to be very important to the business. What was it about and how did you handle it?

5.    Tell me about a difficult relationship with a stakeholder.

The best way to prepare for your behavioral interview

Behavioral interviews make people nervous; you’re probably nervous too if you’re reading this article. The best way to deal with your anxiety is to prepare so well you’ll be confident no matter what questions they ask you.

Predicting questions: The first prep step is predicting the questions you might get asked, and we just talked about that.

Creating stories: Once you have an idea of potential questions, you should create answers (stories) using the STAR method.

Then practice: answer common interview questions with those stories.

I usually help my clients by reading their stories and giving them written feedback first, and then once their stories are strong enough we do some practice. You don’t have to use an interview coach, but having another person listen to you can be helpful. You can practice with a friend and also record your answers using audio or video and play them back for self-evaluation.

How to create great stories: Use the STAR method

Behavioral questions are also called “story questions.” That’s because the best way to answer a behavioral question is to tell a story.

Humans have been telling stories for a long time so it should be easy, right?

Well, there’s a specific way you need to tell stories in a job interview.

The STAR method is a structured approach to answering behavioral interview questions (don’t use it for basic questions or case study questions). The acronym stands for:

S – Situation: The context. Describe the situation you faced and the background. The who/what/when/where/why.

T – Task: What did you need to accomplish in this situation?

A – Action: How did you solve the problem? What was involved in the execution?

R – Results: Was it resolved? What was the outcome you achieved? How did you measure success for this project? Quantify to understand volume, size, scale. You can give both absolute numbers and relative percentage. Where was the impact?

Sample Answer

Let’s look at a sample answer to give you an idea of how to create a good story. This is an “innovation” question, even though it doesn’t use that word. Any time they’re asking you about out-of-the-box thinking, creativity, something “new,” or innovation, that’s an innovation question.

Question: “When did you use your creativity to solve a problem for a customer?”

Answer given by a Project Engineer.

S: When I was a Project Engineer on the Process Optimization Team at X, an engineering consulting firm, one of my clients was a Fortune 500 company with an existing powertrain plant. We needed a way to deliver commodities to the assembly line efficiently but without adding more team members.

T: It was my responsibility to find a solution for this problem that drove functional excellence but improved the bottom line.

A: We were installing a single pick point system to present two commodities in the golden zone area of the operator. These systems don’t have a good density line side, because the parts are so bulky the system only holds about 20-25 minutes worth of material and the cart only holds about 8-10 minutes worth. These systems would have required a dedicated driver to load them. We could have added extra team members but I wanted to save labor costs. I thought of delivering the commodities hands-free with Automatic Guided Carts. The AGC idea added some complexity to the overall system, but was more efficient than increasing heads. I specified the equipment requirements for the AGC, and worked with all suppliers to make sure the products were integrated.

R: The system has been installed and works well. We’re able to keep the line going with no wait time and didn’t have to add extra team members.

2 most common follow up questions

You may get asked follow up questions after your initial answer. This doesn’t mean your answer was bad; it’s just a standard part of interviews.

Follow ups may be about any part of your story they didn’t understand or want more information on – the beginning (situation), middle (action), or end (results).

They may ask for more information because you didn’t give enough detail or they may pick one of the things you said and challenge it, like a statement, decision, or thought process.

Consider these follow up questions another part of the interview and prepare for them. It shouldn’t be hard to answer the follow up questions if the story you’re using was about a real scenario (don’t make up stories) and you can remember it well (this is where preparation is key).

The 2 most common follow ups are:

1.   What would you have done differently?

2.   What did you learn from this?

I usually advise my clients to think of answers to these 2 as part of their story prep. You don’t need to say it until they ask, but you’ll have it ready just in case.

5 Tips for your behavioral interview prep

Key things to remember from this post:

1.    Your strengths: If you’re sitting there staring at a blank page trying (and failing) to come up with stories you can use, do it another way. Plan your core messages, also known as strengths or key selling points, first. Make a list of 5-10 of your strengths. What are you best at? What were your most outstanding professional achievements? Look at the article I just linked to for some samples. Once you have some of your strengths, go back through your resume and think of times when you did something that illustrates one of the strengths and make it a story.

2.    Create your stories based on the job description: Whether you start by looking at the job description for the skills they require and then think of stories to cover them, or plan your strengths first, you should create 15-30 different stories. You won’t use all of these during a one-hour interview, but if you have a series of interviews for one job you shouldn’t repeat your stories since they’ll be taking notes.

3.    If you don’t like the STAR method: Answers to the behavioral interview questions want a story as the answer. Once you think of the story, use STAR to say it clearly and concisely. If you hate STAR, use the PAR method instead (it’s the same thing but easier).

4.    Make your results section strong (aka data-filled): The results is the key section in the story. It’s where you can show them how you helped your company save money, or make a process faster, or helped a customer with a problem. Adding data to the results is the best way to impress your interviewer.

5.    Make a cheat sheet to practice with: You should definitely use notes during your interview. It won’t create a bad impression; it will make you look prepared. If you write out a long doc to work on your stories, try condensing it to something that’s just a page or two that you can look through quickly as they ask you a question.