Behavioral interview question, part 2

The behavioral interview question is a nifty stratagem employed by interviewers to better understand how different candidates would react to specific workplace situations. It’s frequently a linchpin to the interview, serving as the watershed moment for whether or not a person will be hired.

That’s what happened in my office more than a decade ago when I was interviewing for an office manager at our small business. When I asked a particular candidate to explain a mistake she had made and how she had handled it, she described a copy job she had run on incorrect paper. Since she was working for a corporate-style in-house copy center, her department would be “charged” for the wrong copies, creating a negative impact on their quarterly budget. In a bid to get two wins out of a potential loss, she ran the correct order and presented both jobs to the internal customer – who surprised her by “purchasing” them both. Thus, she avoided a cost to her center while doubling the income from the order. Not incidentally, she also kept her customer happy.

She and I continued the interview but I wasn’t actually listening. I had moved on mentally to offering her the job, based on the behavioral question she had just answered. It may seem obvious why I was impressed, since she described a highly successful customer interaction. But that wasn’t why her story connected with me.

When I give this example in workshops, it’s interesting to see if participants can understand why I offered this candidate the job – and enjoyed a successful relationship with her until she moved out of state five years later. It often takes several guesses before someone re-reads the handout and realizes what had struck me immediately: At no stage in the story does this candidate mention her boss. She recognized the mistake herself, acted to clean it up and created an outcome that met the goals of her department, all without involving her supervisor.

Whether it was instinct or an educated guess, my soon-to-be-office manager struck a highly personal chord for me: She made it clear that she could – and would – work on her own with little or no direction, and that she would take the leap required to make decisions.

But how did she know that I would prefer a lowmaintenance worker? Here’s a secret: Every supervisor wants a lowmaintenance worker. The difference is in the definition. For me, that’s someone I don’t have to track very closely. But for another supervisor, low-maintenance could mean someone who reports daily and thoroughly, freeing the manager from making inquiries on the status of each project.

And this, of course, is why behavioral interview questions can be so daunting for candidates. Anyone can tell a story; it takes more work to be strategic while doing it.

In last week’s column, I gave examples of good and not-so-good answers to a few common behavioral questions. To wrap up our tutorial, here are five guidelines to help craft good answers to these questions, which often start with “Tell me about a time…” or “Give me an example…”

No. 1. Dig up some good work stories. Everyone has them, regardless of the work they do. So think back to times your idea was adopted successfully, or when you created a good customer from a complaint, or saved a project that was over budget. Six stories will give you a variety to choose from in the interview.

No. 2. Build each story using a logical structure, such as STAR (situation, task, action result). This framework ensures you’re providing the essential elements needed for someone else to understand how your actions saved the day.

No. 3. Identify five or six questions each story could answer. For example, my office manager used her story to describe handling a mistake. But it would have worked for questions about making or saving money, for handling awkward customer situations, for taking initiative, etc.

No. 4. Practice writing and speaking your stories. The idea is to be so familiar with each story that you can easily use it for any of the five or six interview questions you’ve anticipated it could answer.

No. 5. Decide how much you want the job.

If you only want to work in a certain way, then your story-crafting only needs to demonstrate your strengths. But if you’re open to working with multiple management styles, then it’s worth the effort to adjust your stories on the fly to fit someone’s sweet spot.

Not that this is always easy to do – but if you have enough clues to work with, and if you know your stories well, you’ll be able to emphasize things that appeal to the manager you’re hoping to impress.