At MarketPro as we are sending candidates in for our marketing executive searches be
they marketing candidates, digital, ecommerce, innovation, whatever the case may be and they
go in and interview with our clients, we are seeing the majority of our clients do do behavioral
based interviews.
And behavioral based interviews have been around for a long time.
The best we can tell they started somewhere around the 70’s but organizations are getting
better and more sophisticated about how to utilize them.
So what are behavioral based interviews?
Behavioral based interviews basically says the organization understands what success
looks like for this role.
They understand what types of behaviors will relate to that success and now they are going
to ask you questions about how your past behavior will validate their decision on hiring you.
So as you get into behavior interviews you’re going to know you’re getting asked a behavior
interview question when someone says tell me about a time when or give me a specific
example of.
Those are the two clear giveaways that this is now a behavior al based interview so it
could be give me an example of a time when you had to communicate and give a point across
to a difficult team or give me an example of a time where you had to manage multiple
priorities, multiple conflicting priorities and those are definitely questions you will
get and you’ll get questions like that for motivation, like that for leadership, like
that for cross functional communication and there all very important for you to understand
how to answer.
More importantly you are going to get questions that are specific to the type of role you
are going in for.
So if it’s a brand management role, you may get a questions that says give me an example
of a time when you took over a brand that wasn’t doing well and how you turned it
around or if it’s a digital marketing role tell me about a time when you went into an
organization where digital was fundamentally broken and how you fixed it.
Those are the type of questions that you will be getting as you go into behavioral based
interview.
So as your answering the interview based question, right, you want to make sure that interviewer,
be it the hiring manager, the HR person, a peer or whoever you’re interviewing with
understands the situation that you are talking about.
So you’re answering the question, your sharing a specific situation, so you want to give
an overview of that situation and the challenge you are facing at the time.
Then you want to share how you broke down the problem, what were the things that you
did logically to solve the problem and what was your strategy for approaching it and then
what did you do tactically, what did you do to execute against that solution and most
importantly, what were the results that you drove for the organization that you were working
with and how is the organization better off because you implemented that solution.
One of the other things that is really important about answering behavioral based questions
is that you give a clear and complete answer but that you don’t spend the entire interview
answering one question.
So you want to make sure that your answer is clear but it’s also concise enough that
it gives the interviewer an opportunity to ask more questions.
Then the question is, the most important way that we can help you is how do you prepare
for behavioral based interview, right and there’s actually a lot of bad advice out
there as to how you do this.
The most important thing that you’ve got to be able to do is know yourself and so there’s
a whole other video that we’ve done on how to prepare for interviews that talk about
going through your background and pulling out your key wins, your key successes so I
won’t repeat that here but once you’ve gone through and done that then go through
and do some research on the organization and some research on the position specifically
and come up with some sample behavior based interview questions you think they might ask
you and come up with answers that are based on your background, your experience and your
key wins so that you get comfortable answering those kinds of questions.
And one of the things to be careful of and make sure you don’t do is answer behavioral
based question and start down the path of answering the question when you don’t really
have a solid example to back that up.
So you want to make sure that every question you answer that’s behavior based comes with
a real world example of your success and something that you’ve accomplished.
One of the other things that will come up in behavioral based interviews is they want
to understand how you deal with failure and how you’ve overcome situations where you
haven’t been successful in the past.
So you might be asked a question like give me an example of a time when you failed, give
me an example of a time when you were not successful , tell me about a time when you
have constraints that kept you from moving forward.
In each of those questions the answer is not to say I’ve never failed because most people
in this case won’t believe you.
What they want to know is that you have learned from times that you weren’t successful and
therefore you won’t repeat those mistakes again.
One of the interesting things about behavioral based interviews is that we are seeing them
more and more so I would pretty much be prepared for a behavioral based interview.
Any interview you walk into now that’s senior manager, director, VP, and above level search.