Once used to assess senior and executive candidates, behavioural interviewing is now used to evaluate candidates at all levels and across a range of industries. In fact, chances are the next job interview you go to will be a behavioural interview, or at least have a very strong behavioural component.
So what is a behavioural interview and how do you ace it? jobpostings asked several career advice experts to brief us on how behavioural interviews work and how best to prepare for them.
“The theory behind the behavioural interview is that the best predictor of future performance is past performance,” says University of Saskatchewan career services officer Nathan Risling. That’s because past behaviours tend to be linked to competencies required for the job, Risling says. “They involve questioning around the skills and qualities that are important in the position and organization.”
Examples of behavioural interview questions include those that begin with 'Tell me about a time' or 'Describe a situation where', explains Barbara Kofman, founder and president of Career Trails, a Toronto-based career consulting company. “They want you to tell a story about a past experience that demonstrates skills related to the qualifications for the job,” she says.
Questions tend to focus on challenges encountered during the course of a project, sometimes alone and sometimes in the context of a team environment, says Carol Karoutas, a career advisor with the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University in Montreal. She refers students preparing for interviews to online behavioural questions links. “There are plenty of sites online where you can get a long list of behavioural type questions to practice with,” says Karoutas, who emphasizes applicants should avoid sounding rehearsed.
“It’s not a quiz, it’s conversational,” agrees Charles Handler, a US-based industrial psychologist and president of Rocket-hire.com, an online screening and assessment firm. “But you should definitely take the time beforehand to think about what kind of questions will be asked and what experiences from your life you can use to answer them.”
Predicting the type of behavioural questions you’ll be asked isn’t that hard, say career experts.
“You can tell what skills your prospective employer requires by reading the job posting carefully,” says Meghan Brodey. “If the list of competencies includes ‘ability to work in a team environment,’ chances are you will be asked a behavioural question about teamwork.”
Delivering a well-organized answer is key to making a good impression, says Risling. He recommends the STAR technique, explaining STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action and Result.
“First, provide a brief overview of the situation you experienced, then outline the specific task or responsibility that you were asked to accomplish, then explain the action to activities you undertook and why and finally, describe the (hopefully) positive result or outcome of your actions. If you are asked about a negative situation, indicate what you learned and/or how you would act differently,” he says.
The engagement of the interviewer is a pretty good indication of whether you’re doing well, says Kofman. “The interviewer will probe if you’re not giving them sufficient information, but they will also probe if they’re interested in what you’re saying. If they say that your answer isn’t exactly what they were looking for you need to do better, but if they ask for further details, you’ve probably got them interested,” she says.
Kofman warns interviewees to be well-prepared with references ready to back your story up. “Some interviewers will ask you to give the name of a person they can contact to confirm the details of their stories,” she says.
As for whether your answers can make or break whether you get hired – they absolutely can.
“A behavioural interview may just be one aspect of your application process, but it will determine whether you get to the next stage of the hiring process,” Kofman says.
And it doesn’t look like that is going to change anytime soon. “If you look at the number of newspaper articles that have been published in the last few years, there’s an indication that behavioural interviews are definitely gaining popularity,” agrees Brodey. “They used to be something only career counselors and HR professionals knew about.” jp