Behavioral interviews are becoming the new standard for job interviews.
Find out what they are and why interviewers are switching to this technique.
Stick around and I’ll give you my top three tips to acing your next behavioral interview.
Hi, I’m Jen with the Career Force.
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Let’s take a look at what behavioral interviews are.
They’re a style of interviewing that focuses on your past experience.
Employers believe this is a great predictor of how you’ll perform in the future.
A sample behavioral interview question might look like
tell me about a time you resolved
conflict in your team.
Notice this isn’t really even a question, but it’s a statement that requires a response.
That’s really normal for behavioral interview questions.
They’ll start out with things like, “Tell me about a time” or “Give me an example”.
Because employers believe that your past performance is the best indicator of future success, more
and more they’re using this style of question during interviews.
You might be wondering why an employer wouldn’t just ask
"What would you do to resolve conflict within your team?"
The main reason is the answer you give is probably not going to be super genuine.
You can come up with anything on the spot about what you might do.
It’s completely different when you have to talk about what you did do in a past situation.
Have you been asked behavioral interview questions before?
Comment below to let me know.
I’m curious whether you found them more difficult or easier than a resume based interview.
Let’s look at a few tips to answering behavioral interview questions.
Here’s my first tip.
There’s a few key things that the interviewer wants to hear in any response.
They want to know about the situation, the task or objective you had, the action you
took, and the result.
This is most commonly known as the STAR model.
And even though there’s four parts to it, it should be pretty quick to answer (think
about 1-3 minutes).
A longer answer is usually not a better answer.
A 10 minute answer usually tells the employer that you’re not very comfortable talking
about the situation, and maybe you’re even making it up.
So keep it concise (think 1-3 minutes), and cover each of these pieces so the interviewer
fully understands what happened.
Here’s the second tip.
How do you know if you’re in a behavioral interview?
It really doesn’t matter.
Anytime you get asked questions about your past experience you can use the same STAR model.
So if the interviewer asks you, “What would you do to handle conflict in your team?” you
can still use the model.
Start out by saying, “Actually that’s something I’ve experienced before”.
Then go into your star model response to describe
the situation, task, action, and result for the interviewer.
Lastly, what happens when you get asked about a situation that you haven’t encountered before?
That’s normal.
It’s going to come up in any interview that you run into.
Sometimes there’s going to be something that you’re just not prepared to answer.
However in these cases you can still connect to using the same skills in other situations.
So if you’re asked, “Tell me about a time you handled conflict in your team.” and you
haven’t, but you’ve helped resolve conflict with another department, then talk about that.
Start out by being clear that you don’t have that specific experience.
This lets the interviewer know that you do understand that your answer is not directly
related to their question, but it also gives you the opportunity to talk about the skills
that you do have.
So you could say, “I don't have specific experience with that scenario, but I have
helped resolve conflict with another department.
Then again use the STAR response technique to explain and elaborate on that other department
conflict that you dealt with.
Now you know what to expect in a behavioral interview
and my top three tips for making it a success.
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Thanks for watching.
Check back in the next video where I’ll talk more about the STAR interview response technique.