This video covers behavioral interview questions.
I look at the four most common types of questions and tell you how to answer each one.
I’m Jen with The Career Force.
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Behavioral interview questions can cover any topic related to your past experience.
Let’s look at the four most common areas of questions and a few tips on how to best
answer them.
As a reminder you can always use the STAR model to answer interview questions that relate
to past behavior.
I made a video about STAR responses.
I’ll put the link below.
The first common area of behavioral interview questions are around leadership.
While these are really common in managerial interviews, they also happen even if you’re
interviewing for jobs where you’re not going to be managing anyone.
So a sample question here might be, “Tell me about a time you had to make a difficult
decision and how you handled it.”
When you’re answering these questions, think about qualities that make a good leader.
Incorporate these qualities of a good leader throughout your answer.
This helps the interviewer connect with how you yourself could be a good leader.
So you could talk about communication, or how you used good judgement to make a difficult
decision.
Leadership questions often overlap with questions about persuasiveness.
Your ability to influence people is useful in any job and especially so as you move into
higher level positions.
So a question that you might experience in this area is, “Tell me about a time you
motivated a low performing coworker or employee.”
This is a great question because it can be used for any role, whether you were managing
people or you were just working side by side with others.
When you answer persuasiveness questions, talk about what you did to influence a situation.
This isn’t about dragging someone through the mud, it’s about the actions you took
to change the situation.
Focus on how you were able to make it better through your actions.
What questions related to leadership and persuasiveness
have you been asked in past interviews?
Let me know in the comments.
The third most common area is questions about your success at work.
Think about questions like, “Describe a time you had an obstacle that you had to overcome
and what you did to overcome it.”
or “Tell me about a job that you had where you were more successful than you expected.”
The best way to answer these is to think about the new role that you’re interviewing for.
What different tasks and objectives does it have?
Can you connect your past successes to that?
Anything that you can do to help the interviewer understand what you’ll do in your new job
is always a great way to answer the question.
For instance, if one of your tasks in the new job would be streamlining processes, talk
about a time in the past where you made a process more efficient.
The counterpoint to success questions are questions about your failures or weaknesses.
Everybody knows they need to prepare to answer the interview question, “What’s your greatest weakness?"
Behavioral interview questions take this a step further.
They ask you for more specific scenarios that you’ve been in.
So there’s a few things to think about when answering these questions.
First, own your mistakes.
Don’t ever go into this weakness question saying something about how someone else set
you up for failure or how their actions made you not succeed.
The second part is talk about what you learned.
Failure is not bad as long as you’re learning something.
So if you can close out the answer to this question by talking about what you took away
from it, how you would do it different, how you grew as a person, as a candidate, that
will really make you stand out and spin this question into a really positive light instead
of a negative light.
That covers the four main areas of behavioral interview questions.
But there’s certainly many more than that.
If you have a specific question you’d like me to address, leave it in the comments below.
I’d love to make sure that I’m answering the questions that you have and are experiencing
as a candidate.
Keep these tips in mind next time you’re interviewing for a job.
I’ve also created a cheat sheet to the five necessary steps to land your next job.
It walks you through all the most critical steps to making sure your job search is a
success.
You can find the link to get your copy in the description box below.
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I’ll see you in the next video.
Thanks so much for watching.