Behavioral Interview
Behavioral interviewing is interviewing based on discovering how the interviewee acted in specific employment related situations. The logic is that how the interviewee behaved in the past will predict how he/she will behave in the future, whereby this interviewing technique believes that past performance does predict future performance.
In behavioral interview, an employer has decided what skills are needed in the potential employee and will ask questions to find out if the candidate has those skills. Instead of asking how the candidate would behave, they will ask how did he/she behave. The interviewer will want to know how a candidate handled a situation, instead of what he/she might do in the future. Behavioral interview questions will be more pointed, more probing and more specific.
In order to prepare for a potential behavioral interview, a candidate is advised to refresh his/her memory and consider some special situation he/she has dealt with or projects he/she has worked on. On top of this, review the job description from the job posting or advertisement, in order to get a sense of what skills and behavioral characteristics the employer is seeking.
There are no right or wrong answers for behavioral interviews. The interviewer is simply trying to understand how the candidate behaved in a given situation, to determine if there is a fit between the candidate’s skills and the position the company is seeking to fill. In general, the STAR technique is a good approach to response to behavioral interview questions: describe the Situation one was in or the Task one needed to accomplish; describe the Action he/she took, and the Result.
