Great Behavioral-Event Interview Questions

The most common search that leads to our website is for Interview Questions.  Whether this is precipitated by prospective candidates whom employers have asked to complete the Behavioral Insight^® or by employers themselves is more difficult to determine.  Behavioral-event interview questions ask the candidate about prior successes or learning resulting from an experience in past jobs.  There are many sources for these types of questions.  TalentFirst offers such a system, including training for your staff in interview skills, called the Structured Selection Process.

My perspective is that if you only hire once or twice per year, it is difficult to retain your skills in behavioral-event interviewing without a bit more structure around the process.  Providing your hiring managers with a staged Interview Guide, including potential drill-down questions to ensure that interviewers fully explore responses, can ensure a bit more consistency within the process.  The issue here, however, is that you will need to provide sufficient questions from which the manager might choose to meet the particular requirements of an interview or the particular job opening.

The principle behind behavioral-event interviewing is that past success is the best predictor of future success.  By exploring what an individual has accomplished in past roles, a better understanding of the individual's full potentials can be confirmed.  Therefore, the format of a good behavioral-event question is:

• "Tell me about a time....." "Describe a situation in which..." "Give an example of..." These are the beginning of the question, or the conditions/situations about which you wish the candidate to describe his or her prior experiences.
• The candidate will respond by describing the details around the situation or activity from their prior experience.  This example should be work-related and relevant to the particular situation asked about in the question.  As the interviewer, you need to ensure that the candidate covers all three aspects in his or her answer:

1.      the situation or circumstances

2.      what the individual (I did (not we), or I should have, or I think)

3.      the outcome or result that was achieved

If the candidate omits part of the response, the job of the interviewer is to ask additional questions to ensure that all three parts of the answer have been given.

If you are the candidate, be sure that you fully describe all three parts (situation, action, and results) within your response.  This is most assuredly not a place to make things up, candidate, since a savvy interviewer will return to any responses you give where your answers appeared to be disjointed, questionable, or unrealistic.  You will hear the question again, phrased in a different way, regarding an additional situation to confirm that you have actually accomplished something within your prior roles.

So, for the reason you are reading this discussion, here are some effective behavioral-event interview questions you might like to use if you are an interviewer or, if you are a candidate, you might like to think about:

• Tell me about the best manager you ever had.  What specifically did this manager do to help you to maximize your full potentials?  What results were you able to achieve?
  (This question is really about what type of supervision you need to do your best work and are we willing to give you that much support.)
• Tell me about a time when you were faced with a disagreement with a coworker.  How did you handle the situation?  What was the outcome?  What would you do differently if you were faced with this situation again?
  (This question is really about whether you can manage your own conflicts with others or whether you will run to your manager every time some disagreement arises.)
• Give me an example of a time when you were unable to convince a prospect to buy your solution.  What objections did you uncover?  How did you handle these?
  (This question is really about whether you can “sell” and whether you have the confidence to admit that sometimes we make mistakes.)
• Tell me about a time when you served in a leadership role.  What were some of the issues you faced in working with your team?  What results did you achieve?
  (This question is really about your ability to organize a group and to drive the group's action, even if you have never served in a manager or leader role.)
• Tell me about a time when you bent the rules to accomplish your goal.  What was the outcome?  Would you do the same thing again if faced with a similar situation?
  (This question is really about whether you see rules as absolutes or as general guidelines and whether this style fits in with the organizational preference.)

These are just a few of the behavioral-event interview questions included within the TalentFirst Structured Interview Process.  If you are an employer, contact TalentFirst and we will happy to discuss this process with you and to develop a customized Interview Guide for your organization.  If you are a candidate, sorry, you'll need to visit your local bookstore and purchase a good resource guide, like Competency-Based Interviews: Mastering the Tough New Interview Style and Give Them the Answers That Will Win You the Job (Kessler).