If you are preparing for a job interview, there’s a type of question you should know how to answer: behavioral questions. Keep reading to learn what behavioral questions are and how to handle them during a job interview.
What Are Behavioral Interview Questions?
As the name suggests, behavioral questions focus on the behavior of a prospective employee.
The purpose of behavioral questions is to understand how you react and solve problems in a real-life setting.
Coupled with your professional and academic background, behavioral interview questions give recruiters and employers a clearer picture of your skills, abilities, and character traits.
Some Examples of Behavioral Questions
Below is a list of common behavioral questions. Read them carefully and try to formulate truthful answers. If you are preparing for an interview, chances are good that you will have to deal with at least one of the questions on this list.
- Tell me about a time you worked under pressure.
- Tell me about a time you disagreed with a coworker.
- Tell me about a time you disagreed with a supervisor.
- Provide an example of a goal you reached and explain what it took to achieve it.
- Tell me about a time you solved a difficult situation with a client.
- Tell me about your greatest professional accomplishment.
- Tell me about the toughest decision you’ve had to make at work.
How to Answer Behavioral Interview Questions?
There are many behavioral interview questions, and some of them may catch you off-guard by design. Luckily, there is a method to answer behavioral questions. It’s called the STAR method:
- Situation. Provide context for your behavior. For example, if the other person asks “When was the last time you disagreed with a supervisor?” you could say, “It happened last year when we got really busy during the holidays.”
- Task. Describe your role in the situation you described in the previous step. So, using the same example, you could say, “I had to make sure that all orders were wrapped with holiday paper.”
- Action. Describe what happened and how you handled the situation. “My supervisor wanted my team to wrap the boxes faster, but I explained that we were already working as fast as we could.”
- Result. Explain what happened after you took action. For example: “My supervisor understood that we were working as fast as possible, so he asked people from other departments to help us with the wrapping.”
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