Behavioral interview tips
The purpose of Behavioral Interview is to evaluate your past experience and determine on basis of such evaluation how well you can cope with future situations. This kind of interview is much more effective in determining a candidate’s future performance than traditional method. As a result, this method is becoming more and more popular with interviewers.
The questions in a Behavioral Interview may be standard or designed specifically for each job; nevertheless, there are some common tips that you should follow in either cases to be able to answer these questions successfully:
1. Have you prepared carefully before a Behavioral Interview. Read the job description carefully and your profile as well. Identify which qualifications, abilities or skills of yours should be most suitable to the job.
2. Prepare a list of questions that may be asked in a Behavioral Interview after considering job description. Also, prepare answers to such questions.
3. The interviewer may want to know about your behavior in certain situations (guess which situations it may be) or your past experience in working which may influence on the performance of current job. Emphasize on your abilities or skills which help you resolve problems in the past or help improve your performance.
4. Be coherent in your stories. Begin with a brief introduction to the problem. Then, talk about your action, and the result of your action. Finally, summarize your approach and solution.
5. The interviewer may wish to debate on certain problems during your working experience. It is because he or she is seeking your abilities to perform the duties for which they are recruiting. He or she wants to know how you take over a new challenge and how you can resolve new problems.
6. If you are applying for the first time, and certainly you don’t have much working experience to talk about, you may demonstrate your problems at university or some college projects or events you participated in. Don’t be too nervous if you don’t have much working experience. The Interviewer simply wants to know your behavior under certain circumstances only.
7. Answer as sincerely as possible. Don’t lie as if you are discovered, it shall be very a very bad situation.
8. There may be some argumentative questions. And to deal with them, firstly, you have to stay calm and think of them carefully. Make your points clearly and confidently. Don’t be much worried about lose. The point here is that you are confident with your approaches.
9. The interviewer doesn’t expect you can handle every situation. If he or she raises one which you were unable to resolve, explain its result and why you couldn’t deal with it. Tell him or her which you have learn from such failure.
10. Remembering everything at moment of the interviewer asking the questions is nearly impossible. So, the most important tip is that you have get yourself prepared carefully before the Behavioral Interview.