How to answer behavioral interview Questions?
Behavioral interview questions can be some of the most challenging to tackle. They often catch you off guard, disrupting the flow of an otherwise flawless interview where you’ve been confidently acing technical questions. Entering an interview without preparing for these questions is a risky gamble, but one you can easily avoid with a structured and reliable approach.
Why do recruiters ask behavioral questions?
Recruiters ask these tricky behavioral questions to gain a deeper insight into your personality and understand how you handled difficult situations in the past. With these questions, they want to gauge your following skills:
- Soft Skills: How well you exhibited communication, leadership as well as team collaboration skills.
- Evaluate the cultural fit: Ensuring a good cultural fit is getting more and more significant these days. Every organisation wants to ensure that you are aligned with the organisation’s working values.
- Understand your work ethics: Recruiters want to understand your ethics and core values. With these questions, they can see what drives you and how you react to unexpected situations.
How to answer behavioral questions using STAR method?
One of the best frameworks to answer these behavioural questions is the STAR method.
- Situation: Describe the situation you were in which matches the context of the question. Help recruiters imagine how this situation is a good example of that situation where they can evaluate the behavioral question.
- Task: Explain what were your tasks during that situations. In this you can explain what was the expected role you had to play. It is critical to paint a picture where these tasks are relevant and understandable by the recruiter.
- Action: Explain what steps you took to solve the problem in the situation and perform your tasks.
- Results: Showcase what were the results of your actions. Results don’t need to be always positive as they show that you are a humble person who accepts failure gracefully and learn from them.
Don't do this while answering behavioral questions.
Usually, there is no wrong answer for the behavioral questions, however, there can definitely be certain red flags which you should totally avoid.
- Don’t speak negatively about ex-colleagues: One of the most common mistakes which applicants make is to describe overly negative situations of their last workspace or talk negatively about previous colleagues. This is a sure-shot way to create a bad impression of yourself and achieve nothing.
- Don’t be too vague: Be more specific about the situations and make the interviewer empathise with you. You cannot communicate your strengths and weaknesses if you are too vague. So instead of saying you “I negotiate efficiently with difficult stakeholders to find win win situation” give a concrete example of the situation.
- Don’t lie: Lying is one of the most hurtful things you can do in an interview. Experienced interviewers can tell easily when the applicants are lying. It will hurt you a lot not just in the short term but also in the long run.
- Being too positive about yourself: Yes you heard me right. Being too positive about everything can demonstrate that you are too delusional. Sometimes it’s good to accept and even highlight your failures and show your humility and willingness to improve in future.
- Not using structure: It is important to articulate your thoughts in a structured way for better communication. Be prepared with STAR framework to communicate efficiently.
Conclusion
Mastering behavioral questions is all about preparation, structure, and authenticity. By using a proven framework like the STAR method and backing your answers with real-life examples, you can confidently showcase your skills, experiences, and ability to manage difficult situations. Remember, these questions are an opportunity to tell your story, highlight your strengths, and create a great connection with the interviewer as a person. All the best for your job search journey.