Mastering the behavioral interview question

It’s been a while since I’ve tackled the infamous behavioral interview question, although readers ask about this topic fairly often. These are the questions based on the idea that how you’ve acted under certain circumstances in a past job is how you’ll act under the same circumstances in a new job.

The questions themselves can seem innocent, but they manage to leave the average job candidate feeling frozen and bug-eyed like a deer in the headlights.

Here are just a few of these tricky fellows:

“Tell us about a conflict you’ve been in with your boss and how you handled it.”

“Give us an example of a difficult customer and how you served him or her.”

“When have you made money for your department?”

“What’s your most notable work achievement?”

If those don’t sound tricky to you, you’d better keep reading. Part of the issue with these questions is how innocuous they sound, until you’re knee deep in a story that you wish you’d never started. For example, here’s a bad answer to the question about conflict with a boss:

“When my boss announced a new process for handling invoices, she didn’t realize the extra steps could actually increase errors. It was also causing stress for some team members because of the extra workload. When I brought this up to her, she decided to continue with the process anyway, which created some issues…”

I’m not even going to finish that answer because you already see the problem: This candidate is digging a hole by saying her boss initiated a process without understanding its impact, and she’s making the hole deeper by getting lost in hesaid-she-said detail. How does that sound to the boss interviewing her from across the table?

When it comes to behavioral questions about bosses, or conflict in general, I actually recommend not answering the question. Here’s how that might look:

“For the most part, I don’t tend to get into conflicts with my bosses. For one thing, I recognize that they have more information than I do, and the final responsibility for decisions; I see it as my job to support their decisions. That said, I also see it as my job to discuss any issues I might see with decisions they’re making. I wouldn’t call this conflict, though. It’s more of a reporting session where I tell them what’s happening and provide input on unintended consequences that I might have a better perspective to see. But once I’ve done that, I’m going to support whatever plan they decide to go with.”

Although the question about managing a difficult customer isn’t quite as risky, it still takes finesse. For example, starting with any kind of definitive pronouncement can put you on shaky ground:

“I believe that good customer service starts with the customer. If a customer is being difficult, they may be taking time that I could be using to serve two or three more profitable customers. For example, a woman called and…”

Uh-oh. This is a case where a much gentler little story would be a better choice. Whatever happened to “At first I thought she was just being difficult but after listening a little longer I realized she had lost her husband recently and wasn’t tracking all the details very well…” This kind of I-listened-more-and-learnedmore story is like a good pair of shoes that goes with anything. It gets a point across but doesn’t risk alienating anyone to do it.

Just in case you’re wondering how one could mess up “When have you made money for your department?” here’s an example: “Ours wasn’t the kind of department where we could make money for the company.” Yikes. Even if this answer is true, it’s also very un-strategic. You should assume the interviewers have a reason for asking, and “I don’t do that” is hardly the answer they wanted. Here’s a better option:

“Although our department wasn’t customer-facing, so I couldn’t sell products or services, I was often in the position of supporting other departments. I saw it as my mission to streamline our interactions so they could have the materials and information they needed to serve customers in a timely way. I often heard that my work in the background helped them close deals or offer higher levels of service on the contracts.”

Luckily, the last question on the list, “What’s your most notable work achievement?” is nearly foolproof. But not entirely – this one goes south fast when you can’t think of any achievements.