As an interviewer, the challenge is to ask the kinds of questions that lead an interviewee to reveal just how they performed in certain situations so you can project that behavior into the proposed job. This kind of interview goes well past checking out previous job experience and actual job skills. Instead, it focuses on trying to foretell a candidate’s performance. How would they act in various scenarios? They may intellectually understand what it means to be a “team player,” for instance, but when push comes to shove, will they actually behave in a cooperative, collaborative way?
Interviewing skills training can help interviewers learn how to probe for a candidate’s underlying motivation and attitude. Any savvy job seeker can provide satisfactory answers to standard questions. But until interviewers know how to dig beneath the surface answers, they are only getting rehearsed replies that come out of a book.
The first step in behavioral interviewing is to identify the critical competencies needed for the specific job and organizational culture you are hiring for. Once those are listed, there will be questions that are designed to zero in on whether or not the job seeker has displayed those specific behavioral competencies in their previous positions.
Here are examples of questions that require careful consideration by job candidates and are likely to show their true past behavior. You will note that the questions typically begin with phrases such as “describe a time when,” “give me an example of,” or “in your last job how did you handle a situation when.”
• Describe a time when you had to use your verbal skills to get across an important point.
• Give me an example of when you had to go “above and beyond” to get the job done.
• In your last job, how did you handle a situation when others on your team resisted working toward the team goal?
• Talk about a situation when you had to change direction in order to respond to the needs of others on your team?
• Describe (and give specifics) how you prioritize the way you spend your time.
• Give an example of how you resolved a conflict between you and a team member.
• How, specifically, do you try to achieve a work-life balance that suits you?
• Describe a time when your supervisor was unhappy with your work and how you resolved the problem. What did you learn as a result?
