For some reason there is a mistaken belief by job seekers that behavioral job interviewing is a practice that should be feared. In fact QuintCareers.com says that in traditional job interviews candidates can usually get away with telling the interviewer whatever they want to hear while behavioral-based interviews make it much more difficult to “give responses that are untrue.” Is this assuming that job seekers are lying in the job interview in order to get a job?
To set the record straight: behavioral interviews are good for job seekers. Why? Because behavioral-based interviews focus on a candidate’s experiences, actions, knowledge, skills and abilities in order to determine how these relate to current job openings. This is the exact information the interviewer needs in order to understand what work experiences job seekers have that make them suitable for a current opening. By the same token behavioral job interviews offer job seekers the opportunity to actually draw upon their own personal experience – something they alone should be the most familiar with -- to explain why they have the ability to perform the job at hand. It’s a lot easier than trying to make something up on the spur of the moment.
How Candidates Can Use the STAR Formula
There is a practice in behavioral interviewing called the STAR technique. STAR stands for situation, task, action, result. It basically lays out a plan of how job candidates can (and should) respond to behavioral interview questions.
When a behavioral-based interview question is asked, job candidates should pull from their background and experience to identify an appropriate situation which occurred in their career. From this they can then describe what their goal was in dealing with the situation, what action they took and finally, the end result. Here’s an example.
If the interviewer asks the candidate for a time when they had to juggle multiple priorities and what happened, the candidate’s response should include a specific situation such as coordinating the annual sales meeting. From there the job seeker can explain the task (making airline and hotel reservations for 100 while arranging meeting rooms and a guest speaker), share actions taken (using an online travel site and working with the hotel) and ultimately the outcome (being acknowledged by the President of the company with a special teamwork award).
How Candidates Can Prepare for Behavioral-Based Job Interviews
Listen to most recruiting experts and they are likely to say that for job seekers to do well in a job interview they need to practice. And one of the most important aspects of practicing is for candidates to familiarize themselves with their own work history. This means delving into their past to recall the situations, activities, projects and accomplishments that make up their work experience. They may even choose to write these examples down in order to aid in recalling details and to more fully explore what they remember. In fact, taking several past experiences and putting them in the STAR format can aid in preparing job seekers for their next interview. Be sure to put the events together in a story format that’s easy to understand and follow, and include numbers to quantify achievements.
The idea is not so much to memorize responses (as this may come off sounding stiff and rehearsed in the interview), but to refresh the job seeker’s memory. After all, who can remember every detail of every work day under the pressure of a job interview? That’s why capturing the information ahead of time and then using the STAR method to disseminate the details during the job interview is good for job seekers and can benefit them.
Deborah S. Hildebrand - Deborah S. Hildebrand is a freelance writer & HR consultant with 20+ years in human resources & a Bachelor's degree in Business.
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