I have a question for you. Does the behavioral interview question cause just a little bit of
anxiety with you. My name is Bill Benoist. I'm a certified professional career coach here in
Silicon Valley. And if you answer yes to this question, you're not alone. One of the biggest
reasons that individuals will seek out career coaching is to help them prepare for the interview
and what worries them the most is the behavioral interview questions. And you know what? This is
completely normal. I want you to understand that. Take a look at the statistics from the Bureau of
Labor Statistics. The average tenure in a position today is right around 4.1 years. If you're over
the age of 55, which is right there in the mid to late career, 55 to 64, you're closer to 10 years.
And if you're between the ages of 25 to 34, it's just a little bit over two and a half years.
The bottom line is we do not interview that often and it's completely natural
to feel anxious about this specifically about how do you prepare for a behavioral interview
question? I mean, there must be thousands of them out there and there is, but there is a way
to prepare to get prepared for these. And that is through developing star stories
or source stories. So if you were working with a career coach, I don't care whether it's in
Palm beach, Florida, or Austin, Texas, or San Jose, California career coaches will know
about star stories in source source. If you're working with a career transition company,
they should know it as well. I've come across a few people in HR at that are aware of source
stories and stars stories, but I haven't really come across any recruiters with the exception of
Amazon recruiters. Amazon recruiters are pretty good with these stories as well.
They want to help that client land with, with Amazon. So they're going to give
them some coaching. So what is a star? What is a soar? Well, let's take it one letter
at a time. The essence star is this situation. The T is going to be the tasks that you have, or
it's just the responsibility that you're assigned with the a is an action that you took in the are,
was the result from that action. And then a source. It's almost exactly the same thing,
but instead of a task or responsibility, you have an obstacle that you faced the S situation,
the O the obstacle, the a, the action, the are the result. Let me give you an example of a
source story that I have developed. And then I'm going to explain to you how I've developed this,
and then I'm going to explain to you why I developed it and how it would work for me.
So starting with my source story in itself, when I left my position as a vice
president of information services, my income took an immediate hit. So I needed to bring
my income up fairly quickly. And one of the first things I did was start facilitating meetup events.
Now I did not have a large office that I could do this at I'm working from my home office.
So I started to do the meetup events at local coffee shops, you know,
your Starbucks and your Pete's coffee out there. The only problem with this is that I
could only get about 10 people in at, and that was max of about 10 people. And cause there
just wasn't any room. So I would always have a waiting list of individuals that wanted to come
to these meetup events. And I would do the meetup events on, you know, maybe 45 minutes
to an hour on the weakness question or maximizing your LinkedIn profile applicant tracking systems.
You know, I would have a specific subject there and I always had a lot of interest, but I could
only get eight or 10 people into the coffee shop. So it might take a couple of events before I would
really start making any significant sales. It would usually be maybe one cell at a time. So
this wasn't working for me and I began doing some research on what other successful coaches
were doing. Life coaches, business coaches, health and wellness coaches.
And what I found was that they were using webinars. So I started doing some research
and I started researching on Google Hangouts and WebEx and zoom. And I finally settled on
webinar jam now, webinars gem, boy, that was a powerful, powerful platform out there,
but it was also something that was very easy to learn. And within just a couple of weeks,
I was facilitating my first live online webinar and I had 75 individuals.
I had marketed the webinar that I was doing on Facebook using Facebook ads. And I had
about 75 people on there and I made I think, five sales. So how did I develop this specific source
story? Well, it's the same principle as what I encourage my clients to do. And it's really
a two-step process and they have to do both. So the first item is to simply go bullet point by
bullet point by bullet point down the resume and for every bullet point. And I hope by now
you have your resume as accomplishment statements and not reading like a job description out there.
But what I want you to do is I want you to have a specific story behind each one. So I know
I've said this in previous videos, but the typical recruiter is only going to spend about six seconds
on the resume, scanning it, not reading it, separating it from the no pile to the yes pile.
But now when they get on the phone with you, they're going to do a deeper dive on that
resume. And I want you to be prepared because what they may be doing is they may ask you specific
questions. Like I see on your resume here, that you talk about facilitating workshops and online
webinars. Can you tell me a little bit more about this? So how did I develop this specific source
story? Well, I created it for my resume when I am working with clients on one-to-one clients.
I talk about developing 15 to 20 source stories through a two-step process.
The first process is going bullet point by bullet point down the resume and making sure
that they have a story it's either a star story or a of story behind that, that there was a
situation that they can talk about a task or an obstacle that they faced in action that they took.
And the result of that, this is going bullet point by bullet point down the resume. So for example,
in what I just gave you, if somebody was to ask me the question, you know, bill, I see that
you facilitated workshops in online webinars. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
I'm able to use that last story as an example. Now that's the first process just going simply
bullet point by bullet point down the resume. So here's the second process that I want you to do.
And again, you need to do both of these processes. I want you to just take 30 to 45 minutes and sit
down and begin to think deeply. Think about significant events that have occurred over
the last five to 10 years in your employment. I can just about guarantee you that for every
one of those significant events, there is going to be a source story or a star story involved.
And you know what? These are going to be the kind of events that are going to come up
that are going to be able to answer questions like this. So bill, can you name a time when you lost
a significant client? Why did that happen? So bill, if we wanted to enter a new market,
what strategy would you use to, oh, our company reached that goal. These are the behavioral type
of questions that are not going to be on your resume. That if you just sit back and think about
significant events that have occurred during the last five or 10 years,
I can guarantee you just about guarantee you that you're going to have a story
that will cover multiple, not just one, but multiple questions out there that can come at you.
And there's something else. There's another little added benefit here that I have found from talking
with so many of my clients that have taken this approach and that is they've gotten into
an interview and they were asked to be Hayesville interview question, and they did not have a source
story or a star story prepared, but they were able to come up with one on the fly very easily.
And that's the other thing about walking into the interview and feeling confident.
And that's what it's all about. Preparation is key. So my advice is to create 15 to 20
star stories or sort of stories. And when I say create them, I'm not talking about
writing a college essay, just simple bullet points is sufficient one or two sentences.
So do you have a sentence or two for the S for the O for the, a, for the R X, you know,
et cetera, just type out that one or two sentences there. And then this is important. I think,
print out these stories and put them in a folder. So if you have a telephone interview at 10 o'clock
tomorrow morning at about nine 30, get out that folder and start reviewing these stories
because it's just going to get you prepared and help you feel a lot more competent out there.
If you are going in for an interview in person arrive about 20 minutes early,
sit in the parking lot and start reviewing your stories. So you're prepared going in for the
interview. So in conclusion, preparation is key. I just can't stress. This enough
preparation is key. If you want to be ahead of the competition out there and make it
significant impression with that hiring manager, then do the work in the beginning.
You won't regret it. So I hope you found this video informative and useful if you
haven't already done. So make sure that you subscribe to this channel,
hit the bell notification as a do upload tips and strategies like this every Tuesday. And I'd hate
for you to miss anything. Thanks for stopping by. And I look forward to seeing you next.