From interview questions to behavioral questions.
While the most important interview strategy to remember is to keep your answers positive and honest, being prepared is the first step toward success. The following questions are the most likely to be asked, so ask yourself how to frame your responses to be truthful:
- What would your previous employers want to change about you?
- What do you think management should do to allow you to function more effectively?
- What has prevented you from progressing as fast as you would have liked?
- Tell me about the best and worst boss you’ve ever had? What was his or her management style?
- What have you been doing since you left your last position? Why do you want to leave your current position?
Remember to practice. These questions give the interviewer lots of subtext about who you are and what you are about, so make sure that your answers reflect the perception you want the interviewer to know.
For more interview questions that might come up, you can have a look here on Bhuvana Sundaramoorthys blog: 50 COMMON INTERVIEW Q&A
More savvier interviewers might go deeper with questions that are called “Behavioral questions”. This interviewing technique was developed in the 80’s by industrial psychologist Dr. Tom Janz and has been growing in popularity ever since. The idea behind behavioral interviews is putting the interviewee in a position that might arise at the job they are applying for and seeing how they react and how they would solve it. Usually these are not the easiest of questions so it is absolutely essential that you prepare for at least a few behavioral questions just to get the hang of it and not freeze up when asked.
There are a few pretty good lists of behavioral questions out there but the longest list we could find was on the Emurse blog: Complete List of Behavioral Interview Questions.
As you can see, most of these questions could be very difficult to answer, especially if you have not prepared or lack the experience necessary to answer them. In such situations think of a technique called STAR:
1. The Situation/ Task you were in
2. Action that you took
3. Result of that action (no negative results, please. Unless you can say you learned something from them)
Meaning that when asked a behavioral question, you do not have to have a sentence ready for the answer, on the contrary. Employers are looking to find out how you think and what kind of reasoning is behind your thinking. So you can play your answer out as short (really short) story that follows STAR.
“Well, the last time this happened, I was working at X and I noticed that our team’s Z was going down (ST). So I decided to try a new Y (A) and as a result over the next 2 months we increased our Z 20%! (R)”
Remember that the important thing is to play a few of these out in your head or even write them down. So the more you practice the easier it gets and pretty soon you will be defaulting to STAR whenever you encounter a behavioral questions. And also, if you cannot think of any situation or task at work, you can just as easily talk about something important that happened at school or at home. As long as you can show that you are good at handling problems, there is no wrong answer.
For more interview tips, including what the biggest interview mistakes are, how to phone interview and typical interview questions (and answer recommendations) click here and get our interview eBook which is a 20 page expose on how-to interview.
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