Mastering the Behavioral Interview
A job interview can be a power move. You need to approach it with the right mindset: if you ask behavioral interview questions, you can actually learn valuable information about the dynamics of your prospective workplace and set yourself up to thrive in your new role.
Here’s how it works.
Behavioral Interview Questions for Candidates: Flipping the Script
The opportunity: “Do you have any questions?” the hiring manager asks.
We all swing and miss at that one. And we are squandering an opportunity. We always know it’s coming, but we never use it for the chance to investigate that it is.
Sometimes we do prepare and write down a few questions we found on the internet. That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? Maybe grab a few generic questions — ”Can you tell me about the team?” “What does it take to succeed in this role?” “I have no personality and you don’t either, so here’s what I found on Google.” It’s so pro forma that you won’t even remember the answer. In the end, you miss the chance to actually learn something.
Here’s your chance to rethink the opportunity.
Questions like that start with a good intention, but they’re too generic. They’re canned questions, so they get canned answers.
Example:
Q: “Can you tell me about how you see the team growing over the next year?”
A: “Oh, yes. The team is taking on many high impact projects and I anticipate will need to grow to be able to ship them on time.”
Good answer?
No.
Bullshit answer.
It’s a non-answer. Not because the interviewer is trying to deceive you. They just can’t predict the future. The team might grow. It might not. But they don’t want to sound ignorant.
Another:
Q: “What does it take to succeed in this role?”
A: “A strong sense of ownership, and collaboration with your peers.”
Straight from a can, and it doesn’t tell you anything real about the team. It’s easy to repeat values, but harder to live by them, and even harder to express how you live by them in the artificial setting of an interview.
So what you need to do is re-evaluate the opportunity.
What do you really want to know?
That’s the mindset shift that moves you towards behavioral interview strategies. From the interviewer’s perspective, the “Do you have any questions?” stage is both devious and boring. On one hand, it might reveal a stand-out candidate with a truly incisive question. More often, though, it’s just part of the script — you’re supposed to ask it, so they do.
As a little bit of research suggests, some of the generic questions might be good questions to ask. It’s impressive to ask a question that demonstrated you did your research.
That being said, this “do you have any questions” point in the interview is an opened door. It’s an unintended consequence of what has become the expected pattern of interviewing: hiring managers are opening a door for you to ask about stuff that will have a genuine impact on your day-to-day happiness at the job.
That’s the mindset shift. Job interviews almost always include that opened door. And if they don’t actually ask you if you have any questions, they’re almost always happy to answer if you say, “I have a few questions of my own, if that’s okay?”
Before your next job interview, ask yourself:
What do I want from my next job?
Do I want to get promoted?
Do I want greater scope and responsibility?
Do I want a vibrant, collaborative team?
Do I want to work on interesting things?
What do I actually like in a job?
Note that you can rarely get all of the above, so the real question is, what’s most important to you? Ask questions about that.
Going the Behavioral Route
I would posit that every single candidate question asked can be asked better via behavioral methods. Here are some examples:
Traditional question: “What does it take to succeed in this role?”
What you really want to know: “Can I get promoted under this manager?”
Behavioral version: “Can you tell me about the last person you promoted?”
Traditional question: “Can you tell me about the team culture?”
What you really want to know: “Are there difficult, negative people on the team I’m going to have to work with?”
Behavioral version: “Can you tell me about the last disagreement the team had?”
Traditional question (for the hiring manager): “Can you tell me what you value in a direct report?”
What you really want to know: “Is this person a micromanager?”
Behavioral version: “Can you tell me about the last disagreement you had with one of your direct reports?” or “Can you tell me about the last time you had to get hands-on on a project?”
See? Three layers to every question, really.
Every generic, BS-oriented question (first layer) what you’re really trying to find out (second layer) and phrasing it as a situation can be turned into a behavioral question (third layer).
The algorithm is: write down the first layer, think about the second layer (what it actually means for you), and then you actually say the third layer out loud.
Just remember, a discussion of this sort will likely require more than three minutes at the end of the interview typically allotted to these sorts of questions. That’s fine. The interviewer might run out of time answering, but it will be a more productive discussion nonetheless.
Important: Avoid Negativity
As the interviewee, you need to remember to ask in positive ways. Interviewers can ask you negative questions — they need to have a good feel for both your strengths and your limitations (more on that in another blog). You need to keep your angle positive, though.
Examples
Don’t: Tell me about the last time you had to fire someone.
Do: Tell me about the time you did something to uplevel the team.
Don’t: Tell me about the last time a team’s project went horribly wrong.
Do: Tell me about the team’s last great success.
Since your opportunity comes at the end of the interview, it gives you an interesting extra tool: the final impression. If you leave your interviewer with a strong positive final impression, that only works to your favor. You get to craft the call to action, in a sense.
Make them feel good about talking to you.
Evaluating the Response
While this approach to candidate questions can yield high-amplitude, off-the-beaten-track answers, keep in mind that these are still interview questions. A lot of these are the sort of questions my friend Eugene asks when he interviews candidates for management positions. More on Eugene later.
Remember, though, that your interviewer isn’t approaching the discussion as if they’re being interviewed. Their responses might not be very tight. For example, if you ask for a disagreement your hiring manager had with their direct report and the hiring manager in question flails, that could be because they never disagree with their direct reports or, more likely, that they’re unprepared for the question.
The real rubric for gauging questions like this is whether the interviewer is willing to engage with the question, or merely brushes it aside without attempting to provide a thoughtful answer. The latter case is a red flag. If they’re unwilling to engage with you as a candidate, there’s no reason to think they’d be more willing to give you the time of day on the job. If this pattern repeats across multiple interviews, run!
Example
Question: “Can you tell me about the last time you promoted someone?”
Answer: “Oh, we promote people all the time!”
See what I mean?
Conclusion
Behavioral questions transform an interview experience. They’re a major power move, providing deeper insights into a potential workplace. Your questions are just as important as your answers. By preparing thoughtful, situation-based questions, you can ensure that you not only impress your interviewer but also gather the information you need to make much better career decisions. The next time you’re in the hot seat, flip the script with confidence, and make your interview a two-way street. They opened the door — you get to walk through it.
