Most employers don’t get much practice interviewing potential hires and rely on the historical standby questions that are detailed in every job interview book ever written. However, those managers who are more adept and skilled at interviewing candidates will likely adopt behavioral interviewing to sort out their prospects.

Behavioral interviewing cuts through the banalities of traditional interviewing and requires candidates to provide specific examples of their career skills, accomplishments, and behaviors.

In the traditional job interview, the interviewer peppered the candidate with a series of questions that the well prepared candidate had likely practiced for, including:

• Tell me about yourself. Typically results in a 90 second elevator pitch that may reveal their accomplishments, but not how they were achieved.
• Why should I hire you? The practiced respondent will have a single sentence positioning statement already prepared, but again, their response doesn’t provide any insight into how they work.
• What are your greatest strengths/weaknesses? No job seeker will reveal their actual weaknesses, but will attempt to position their weaknesses as strengths.  You need to dive deeper to determine actual weaknesses and to assess professional strengths.
• How do you deal with difficult co-workers/customers? Most candidates will tell you exactly what you want to hear. They all try to get along with everyone, try to be empathetic and understanding and have never had serious interpersonal issues on the job.

There are hundreds of books available to prompt the job seeker how to answer these questions. We’ve even posted detailed posts and videos to instruct you how to respond to these questions so we know that a practiced job seeker can provide their interviewer with all the right buzzwords and banalities to bluff their way through the interview.

That’s exactly why employers are shifting to behavioral interviewing and asking questions that require the candidates to provide concrete examples from their past and detailed information concerning the professional problems they faced, how they dealt with them, how they worked with others and what precise results were generated.

It’s almost impossible to fake your way through the response to a detailed question like:

This position requires an in-depth understanding of the dominant social media platforms and how they can be successfully leveraged to build relationships with our customers. Can you please describe the social media platforms you’ve used professionally and how you’ve integrated them into your marketing mix to achieve specific objectives?

There’s not much room for B.S. in the answer to a question as detailed as this. And the real strength of this line of questioning is in the follow-up questions that will inevitably arise. What were you thinking? Who else was involved? How did you split up the responsibilities? Each question requires details that can’t be easily faked or prepared beforehand and will generate more insight and honesty than the standard job interview questions.

The types of behavioral interview questions revolve around several themes, including:

• adaptability & flexibility
• ambition & initiative
• analytical thinking
• building relationships
• communication
• decision making
• delegation
• interpersonal skills
• creativity and innovation
• leadership
• planning & organization
• problem solving and conflict resolution
• self-assessment
• strategic planning
• teamwork
• time management

Sample Behavioral Interview Questions

The toughest part of the behavioral interview is that you can’t prepare for any specific questions that might be asked. However, you can prepare to answer questions on broad themes that will likely be explored, including:

• describe a project you worked on in the last year that resulted from your initiative. How did you initiate the project? Who was involved in the decision-making? What was your role during the implementation? What was the outcome?
• What was your biggest failure you’ve experienced? What were the business/personal ramifications? What did you learn?
• What goals have you set for yourself professionally and personally? How often do you review your goals? What do you do when you reach them or fail to reach them?
• Tell me about your creative process. Do you consider yourself a creative person? What inspires you?
• Describe your most frustrating project. Who else did you work with? How did you handle the difficult personalities involved? What lessons did you learn?
• Tell me about your last project. Were you more involved in the strategy or execution? Which one plays more to your strengths?
• How do you develop your subordinates’ skills? How do you assess their skills? Which staff member do you think you had the greatest impact on professionally?
• We’ve all had to work for difficult bosses. Tell me how you worked with your most difficult boss and how that has affected how you work with your own staff.

How to Answer Behavioral Interview Questions

Most guides on behavioral interviewing suggest that you follow the three-step STAR process when responding to a behavioral interview question. The STAR process includes:

1. Explain the Situation or Task you were involved with
2. Detail the Action that you took, and
3. Describe the Result of your action

So, taking one of our earlier questions, let’s see how you would apply the STAR response process to generate your answer:

Can you please describe the social media platforms you’ve used professionally and how you’ve integrated them into your marketing mix to achieve specific objectives?

The executive management of a national staffing company wanted to increase their visibility and desirability among technical job seekers nationwide. Although the company had a long history in the technical staffing industry, their name recognition wasn’t commensurate with their experience and capabilities.

Working with their marketing staff, we created a plan that centered around the creation and development of a WordPress blog as their content hub that fed LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts with constantly updated content.

We monitored the activity on the different platforms, surveyed our technical employees to determine which platforms were most important to them, and adjusted our social media mix to provide the content that was most in demand and generated traffic back to our website so we could capture potential candidates for our technical positions.

In just six months, we generated nearly 200,000 views of our online videos, increased traffic to our corporate website by 400%, captured over 200 new candidates and strengthened our relationships and increased our contacts with our current technical recruits.

The important thing to note is that the only requirement for a strong answer to a behavioral interview question is honesty. There are no right or wrong answers, just answers that are revealing and illuminating. And if you’re prepared for these types of questions, you can separate yourself from all the other candidates who never looked beyond Why should I hire you? as the toughest question they’d face.