How to Prepare for a Behavioral Interview
Congratulations! You have passed the first step in the interview process. Now you’re heading into the next round, 1+ hour interview, and your Recruiter has said to prepare for a “Behavioral Style” interview. How do you go about preparing for a behavioral interview?
First off, the purpose of behavioral interviews is for the interviewer to get to know your thought process and personality at a deeper level. During a behavioral interview, your interviewer will ask you to provide examples of your behavior in past work situations. With this, the interviewer may be able to predict how you will perform in their business and company culture.
The key to a behavioral interview is to provide specific examples to each question asked. Make sure your example is recent, clear and concise. The interviewer may ask follow up questions, so it is important to be honest and leverage true examples from your personal work experience. If you do not have a good example or response to a question, it is okay to respond by saying, “I have not come across that in my professional experience…but here is how I would go about handling that situation if it happened to me…”.
To help you prepare and start thinking about your answers, here are examples of 18 great behavioral interview questions:
1. Tell me about a time when you had to deliver bad news on a project at work, either internally or to a client.
2. You have multiple competing priorities at work. It is 10am, an executive needs a report by noon, your direct supervisor has a meeting scheduled on your calendar from 10-11:30am, and your team member is waiting on a critical work deliverable from you before they may proceed to their portion of the project. What do you do first and why?
3. What was a time when you needed to retrieve important information, but the person you needed to get that information from wasn’t responsive? What did you do?
4. Tell me about a time you made a mistake at work. How would you handle it differently?
5. Tell me about a time when you had a personality conflict at work. How did you handle that?
6. What was a time when you had to make a big pivot on a work project? How did you come to that decision?
7. Tell me about a time when you received great feedback.
8. How do you go about getting the information you need to proceed when you’re at a point of being stuck?
9. Tell me about the first job you ever had, how did you learn and grow?
10. What has been a time of change at work? How did you adjust and adapt?
11. Tell me about a time when you were overwhelmed at work. What did you do?
12. Tell me about a success story at work.
13. What is your best accomplishment to date?
14. Tell me about a time when you had to explain something technically complex to someone outside of your immediate position. How did you handle getting your thoughts across?
15. Tell me about a time when you had to give a presentation. How did it go? How did you prepare?
16. What was a time when you set out to achieve a goal? What was the goal and what was your process?
17. How do you keep yourself organized when you have multiple priorities during the day?
18. Tell me about a time that you failed. What happened?
Best of luck in your upcoming behavioral style interview!
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