Being Prepared for a Behavorial Interview

Many hiring managers operate on the assumption that how you behaved in the past is a good indicator of how you might behave in the future. As a result, hundreds of companies use behavioral interviews to find the best employees. Because behavioral interviews feature a lot of open-ended questions, you need to spend an adequate amount of time preparing for your interview session.

The most important thing you can do to prepare for behavioral interviews is create a list of past experiences you can use to answer open-ended questions. Committing the details to memory can help you avoid awkward pauses during your job interview. Before jotting down your experiences, think of the skills required for the job you want. Then come up with experiences to match those skills. If conflict resolution is one of the skills on your list, be prepared to tell the hiring manager about the time you successfully mediated a conflict between two of your colleagues.

While you are thinking about all of your skills, try to refresh your memory on some of the projects you completed while working for past employers. If you have a work portfolio, look through it to see if there is anything you should take with you to your job interview. Taking portfolio pieces is especially helpful if you are applying for a job involving writing, drafting or design. If you do not want to take any completed projects with you, try to memorize some basic details about each project.

Open-ended questions are used to encourage candidates to provide detailed answers during behavioral interviews. If an interviewer asks an open-ended question, you cannot get away with one-word answers, so you need to phrase your answer in a way that gives the interviewer a lot of information. Be prepared to give the interviewer information about a situation you handled in the past. Explain what task you needed to complete, outline the actions you took and summarize the result of your actions.

Unless the hiring manager tells you ahead of time, there is no way to know if the interviewer asks basic questions or uses behavioral interviewing techniques. As a result, it is important to prepare for a traditional interview as well. Traditional interviews usually focus on your strengths and weaknesses, job-related skills and the challenges you faced at your last job. Preparing for both types of interviews helps ensure you make a good impression even if the hiring manager uses an interview technique you did not expect.

Behavioral interviews help hiring managers determine if you have the skills and experience needed to tackle the challenges of a specific job. If you expect a hiring manager to ask behavior-based interview questions, take time to review your work portfolio and recall some of the experiences you had in the workforce. Also, prepare for a traditional interview in case the hiring manager you meet is not a fan of behavioral interviews.

Photo courtesy of Studio Tdes at Flickr.com