Question
I had a behavioral interview with a company that I was dying to work for. If you’ve never had one, they can be brutal. They ask questions like:
- Describe a situation in which you were able to use persuasion to successfully convince someone to see things your way.
- Describe a time when you were faced with a stressful situation that demonstrated your coping skills.
- Give me a specific example of a time when you used good judgment and logic in solving a problem.
The Human Resources (HR) woman who interviewed me was an iceberg. She stuck to the script and would not budge from it. So what’s the best way to handle heavily-scripted behavioral interviews?
Nick’s Reply
In my opinion the behavioral interview is just more HR hocus-pocus. Witness your own experience. The interviewer isn’t interested in you, but in the cleverness of your answers. Behavioral interviews are yet another excuse for not knowing how to directly assess whether a job candidate can do the job.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce blithely recommends behavioral interviews: “The goal is to assess a candidate’s potential for future success based on their past behavior.”
Say what?
“Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results”
YieldStreet shames every HR executive that defends behavioral interviews:
“The above regulatory risk warning appears on nearly all investment materials, including prospects about mutual funds, equity investments, and even alternative investments. It is so ubiquitous that even those with only a passing interest in investing are familiar with it. In fact, the phrase also applies to various fields, including finance, sports, and business in general.” [emphasis added]
I’d love for an HR expert to refute that and swear behavioral interviews are different.
HR does not understand engineering, R&D, marketing, or any other function in a company, above a cursory level. No one outside a functional area is really suited to assess a candidate’s ability to do the work. The cleverness of candidates’ answers to canned questions — “behavioral” or otherwise — is not what we’re looking for! How they do the job is. And interviewers who devote their time to thinking up clever ways to indirectly assess ability are wasting a company’s money. The behavioral interview should be a direct assessment of ability to do the work.
Where’s the behavior in a behavioral interview?
The great contradiction, lost on CEOs, stockholders, and others who foot the recruiting bill is that the “behavioral” interview has no behavior in it. It is bereft of behavior. It is all about talk. Tell me about a time… (Gee, should we be having a glass of wine in this interview right about now?) There are books that will teach you how to psych out the behavioral interview — and provide you with loads of “answers.” And that should be no surprise. Any scripted interview can be answered with scripted answers.
Just think about the magnitude of arrogance here. We’ll wire you up for a video call. We’ll show you nothing and no one in the company. We’ll ask you staged questions. We’ll record everything you say. We’ll run it through the A.I. interview analyzer (too bad we can’t get your whole body in there). And somewhere in a lab there’s a goon trying to figure out how to assess you for a job just by drawing a little blood…
Put your own behavior in the behavioral interview
If you want to cope with the behavioral interview, it’s important to think about what any interview should focus on: Behavior that demonstrates you can do the job profitably. (What a concept, eh?)
Here’s my idea of how a manager should conduct a real behavioral interview. Put the candidate in front of the work. Provide a bit of basic instruction, and let the candidate have at it. No, you can’t expect perfect performance. But the manager can observe (the behavior — remember that?), ask questions about the candidate’s performance; answer questions about the work, and discuss what the candidate is doing and thinking.
There is no way for a candidate to fake this. The only book the candidate can read to prepare for such an interview is one about the work: engineering, marketing, jamming the frammitz, or whatever. It can’t be faked. In the end, the manager judges the candidate’s ability to learn the work and to do the work. Coincidentally, this is how a manager evaluates employees — on their performance, not on double-talk.
I call this The Working Interview. Is it a perfect solution? Maybe not, but give me an engineer for an hour, and I’ll teach her how to interview another engineer better than any personnel jockey could with 50 psychologists backing her up.
Have a real interview with a real hiring manager
Okay, okay. So how should you deal with the behavioral interview? The only sensible strategy is to ensure that you’re going to interview with the hiring manager — not surrogates. Few candidates realize that they can insist on interviewing only with the manager. (Why waste your time with anyone else?) Please see How to get to the hiring manager. Politely answer the manager’s questions, and emphasize that you’d like a few minutes during your meeting to demonstrate your plan for doing the job profitably.
How to Say It
“I’m here to do a real behavioral interview. I’m here to show you — not just talk about — how I will do the job. Can we move out to your work area?”
A savvy manager will bail you out of the “interview laboratory” if you offer to do the job during your interview. But it takes brass — and lots of preparation — to ask for the opportunity. But there’s no magic involved.
Have you ever been asked to do a behavioral interview? How did you handle it? Did it help you get the job? If you’re a hiring manager or an HR manager, what’s your take on the behavioral interview? Can it predict the future?
: :
“Knock ’em Dead Job Interview: How to Turn Job Interviews Into Job Offers” by Martin Yate
(he has a whole series, consider the others at your own discretion)
A compilation of typical interview questions, how to answer, and what they are really looking for.
Disclaimer: This is not to contradict Nick, or an attempt to promote the HR system over networking. Sometimes we have to play the game. This book helps.
There is probably a used copy on bookfinder.com
@Gregory: You can contradict me any time, otherwise what would we have to talk about? :-) No one thing works all the time and you know what we say about broken clocks. If something is going to get you over the finish line, I’m all for it. (Just make sure your “tool” isn’t carrying you over the wrong finish line.)
Yates is a prolific career author. It’s worth knowing where employers get their questions and having ideas about how to answer them. I don’t argue with that. But I think taking the hiring manager and the candidate out of the interview altogether is the necessary leap if you really want to stand out. It may sound trite but I think the important distinction is between giving the answer they’re looking for and the answer they need. Yates, across the board, is from the school that seems to believe there’s a “right” answer to an interview question — and that the manager/HR knows what it is.
Not sure about the animosity toward behavioral interviewing. As a hiring manager, my behavioral interviews are identical in every way to Nick’s typical advice, including this week.
Any great method can be performed poorly. (Trumpets aren’t a terrible musical instrument just because my 11 year old needs more practice and mastery.) My critique of the circumstance described by the letter writer is not with behavioral interviewing, which is the method I use to get at the points Nick makes about profitability and doing the job, but the real problem is that someone from HR who doesn’t understand the job you’re applying for is the one doing the behavioral interview. If you had the hiring manager asking you about how you have achieved outcomes in the past that align closely with the outcomes they expect you to achieve in the position, you wouldn’t see any difference between a behavioral interview and the advice Nick gives every single week, including in his column this week.
Behavioral interviewing, when done well (as Nick describes) is actually the antidote to so many problems Nick has illuminated in his important weekly emails and columns. But, like anything, you have to do it right.
@Will: Thanks for a manager’s angle on this. What I think I see in your version of a B.I. is that you and the candidate are talking about the work you need done, e.g., how to achieve your desired outcomes. There’s no way to do that without focusing on the work and how you’ll do it. Meanwhile, asking about how I handled a difficult situation can easily lead to a discussion about fixing a flat tire.
What you make clear is that a decent tool can be used very effectively if it’s in the right hands. I agree.
Your answer to that open ended question is a really good one if you are applying for a position at an auto repair shop. Sometimes I do ask an open ended question during my behavioral interview like that to see if the applicant intelligently steers the answer back to the work at hand. If they don’t, that tells me a lot too. It takes two to tango, and I’m hiring this person to be focused on the value they will create for me. I need to create an environment where that’s easy to do, but they also need to be my partner in keeping the main thing the main thing.
“…see if the applicant intelligently steers the answer back to the work at hand. If they don’t, that tells me a lot too. It takes two to tango, and I’m hiring this person to be focused on the value they will create for me.”
Exactly!
Any candidate without focus is one that is not likely to provide long-term value – very basic hiring 101 stuff here since “mis-hires” can be very expensive.
@Will Goodman 100% agree with you + the behavioral part can also have the hiring manager ask about how would the candidate address a given situation ;-)
Many companies and the federal government use behavioral interviews, including hiring managers. Candidates can gain a significant advantage by preparing and practicing in advance on how to answer these questions.
Create stories around your accomplishments by using the Situation-Task-Action-Results (STAR) or Context-Challenge-Action-Result (CCAR) method. The challenge is YOUR challenge. Actions should be specific and related to the challenge, situation, task, or context you have stated. Results should be quantitative and show value to the organization (not just you). Before the interview, identify which story applies to every duty and requirement in the job announcement for the position you are interviewing for. Practice telling each story in two minutes.
When you interview, figure out which story relates to the question. You can answer “When I faced a similar situation, such as <context<, I faced the challenge of . This is what I did. I succeeded in ”
Behavioral interviews should not scare someone. They can be overcome and showcase how your knowledge, skills, and accomplishments relate to the job you are applying for. This is what many hiring managers and HR are looking for.
“Behavioral interviews should not scare someone. They can be overcome and showcase…”
Agreed.
One can attempt to dictate how HR runs the interview (and get shown the door) or “overcome and showcase” directly relevant to the job at hand by building upon their behavioral questions.
“Before the interview, identify which story applies to every duty and requirement in the job announcement for the position…”
Yes, BEFORE…as in – be prepared.
For anyone not willing to do this, don’t even waste your time appling since it is very rare for a candidate to be graced with the opportunity to skip over (“pass go”) HR and interview directly with the hiring manager given the millions of jobs out there in which the manager literally doesn’t care and/or thinks that HR is somehow screening properly – LOL!
I live in Cincinnati, so the dream company is Procter & Gamble. After many attempts to land an interview there, I finally did, and they sent me a bunch of literature to prepare for my interview, including a list of potential questions I could prepare answers to before I went to the interview. However there was one question on there that I knew I couldn’t answer because I didn’t have real life experience to directly answer it, nor did I have experience that I could have massaged to make it fit the question they were asking. Of course this question was asked to me in the interview, and I answered honestly that I did not have the relevant experience to answer this question, which at the end of the interview, one of the interviewers told me on the way out that is was a bad way to answer the question, in other words I should have made something up.
As I recall the interview wasn’t for a specific job, it was because P&G had just opened a new center and was looking for candidates to fill those roles. Not that it mattered because in my experience, behavioral interview questions almost never are specific to the role to which I was applying. For example, I never got a question like “Tell me about a time when you created a large dataset” for a job where I was supposed to be creating large datasets. They were always about some type of adversity and how I handled it. And the STAR method is constraining. I don’t know about other people, but I do not naturally structure my answers to questions to fit a certain format, I usually answer as my memory of whatever situation returns.
I recently finished watching the NFL draft, and I recalled after reading this article a speech I once gave to a bunch of HR people about replacing job fairs with scouting combines, some type of opportunity for job seekers to show they can do the job you are hiring for. The type of job interview Nick suggests would fit in with my general idea. The only part he leaves out, that I believed on my own, and then saw other career coaches online write, was paying applicants for their time doing interviews where they are showing they can do the job.
This is disappointing that P&G who seems to have set the standard as far as scientifically identifying candidates in a way that avoids racism, still uses a method of conducting job interviews that does not appear to have evolved in the same way as finding job candidates has.
@Robert: Yours is a perfect example of how an employer will conduct a job interview not to assess a candidate’s ability to do the job, but to assess whether the candidate is willing to leave their acumen at the door and jump through hoops for the entertainment of the employer. HR is so out of it that it will proclaim in ads that it wants people that “think out of the box,” then it will criticize applicants for… thinking and behaving out of the box! (“…at the end of the interview, one of the interviewers told me on the way out that is was a bad way to answer the question, in other words I should have made something up.” Gimme a break!)
I agree with you about scouting. Once upon a time, that’s actually what recruiting WAS! Now it’s about doom scrolling through LinkedIn or some ATS system. Real recruiters and real headhunters still scout! There’s just not many of them. The rest are locked into an over-automated database jungle that is embellished with useless interview methods.
There’s an excellent example of scouting by venture capitalist Gilman Louie in this article:
https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/11884/recruit-competitive-advantage
No behavioral interview required!
The problem with these questions at least for me is that the most vivid examples are far back in my work career and aren’t on the resume. As an experienced manager, I maneuvered to avoid crises routinely, using anticipation and looking head to keep the paths smooth so they didn’t happen.
I don’t think that as an answer would be acceptable. And going too far back is something you don’t want to do.
That being said, these behavioral questions have little to do with the job and indicate the mindset of the company–nothing but trouble.
‘these behavioral questions have little to do with the job and indicate the mindset of the company–nothing but trouble.’
So true! When I was last on the job market, I was down to 2 employers—one high-profile tech company and one high-profile consumer brand.
The tech company gave me a 5 hour behavioral interview and a 1 hour aptitude test with someone who demonstrated a poor understanding of what they were assessing; as someone who was well acquainted with the problems that this part of this company had thanks to years of informal joint venture work, I was shocked by the level of disinterest they showed *in their own challenges*. I left the process exhausted and embarrassed—on their behalf.
The consumer brand introduced me to the people who became my team, stakeholders, had multiple long, deep, ad-hoc discussions about the industry and business problems they needed to address, and invited me to do problem solving with them. When I cancelled an interview last minute due to flu, they called me 2 days later to inquire after my health. The hiring manager gave me his phone number and encouraged me to call or text with questions any time weeks before we got to the offer stage. I was delighted to accept the offer and I haven’t looked back.
@Melissa: Careful — that consumer brand company’s approach could put thousands of sanctimonious “career experts” and HR jockeys out of business!
I had this with a healthcare provider in the Bronx–performed by a psychologist flowing from Minneapolis to NYC (at great expense). He put me through the classic stress interview for two hours, complete with overheated room, asking me all sorts of illegal and prurient personal questions which I pushed back on, and then sitting me in front of a computer answering an MMPI, Myers-Briggs, and DISC. Except this was for a senior marketing job that I really needed, positioning their services in senior and underserved markets, and had nothing to do with how I would approach the job! I walked out in the middle of the computer assessment, shell shocked. I’m the sister of a psychiatrist and also friends with people who’ve interviewed for DHS, FBI etc. and it was similar. I seriously thought about contacting the Department of Health and the Department of Labor in NY after this but did not. It turned out later that the CEO of the company was eventually charged with Medicaid fraud as well as many in top management.
Never sit still for a behavioral interview. Always move back to the job. If they grill you, there’s something else that’s up and it’s 99% bad. You don’t want to work there.
Flying, not flowing.
Many years ago when I was in the USAF, my coworkers getting out would talk about interviewing at various places for Nortel equipment jobs (back before the internet). One coworker told me he was bombarded with tech questions about how to navigate the menu systems to do what needed to be done. After a bit of frustration, he told the interviewer, “Look, put in front of the terminal, you login, and watch what I can do.”
The company cancelled all other planned interviews and hired him on the spot!
This goes to show how interview-focus we’ve always been — even years ago. Yet, a frustrated candidate took control of the meeting and was hired by showing what he could do. Prior to this he never interviewed for a civilian job. No one brainwashed him to stick to the script, so he followed his instincts.
“candidate took control of the meeting and was hired”
Bingo!
I followed a similar route with great results – hired on the spot.
“Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results”
Well, get used to the real world where “money makes it go ’round” as they say.
How many companies (including non-profits) can exist without cash flow?
How many candidates get hired without proof of past experience/performance?
Risk is inherent in both companies and candidates – find ways to mitigate it as needed or “die on the vine.” Without a productive past, assessment of risk leans toward the “don’t call us, we’ll call you” black hole.
So…
In the same spirit that dictates common sense investing (unless you magically thrive in bankruptcy) so it is with being able to competently show an employer that you can handle softball questions related to your persuasion savvy, ability to handle stress (which is everywhere), and that you can execute “…good judgment and logic in solving a problem.”
Get over it – HR is not going away…and I’m certainly not a fan of HR in general.
Getting information BEFORE the interview will give you some control DURING the interview by turning the “behavioral interview” in your favor no matter what HR’s script may be. I’ve seen a few HR “robots” non-verbal appreciation for candidates that are savvy enough to briefly “go off script” and let some “sunshine” in on an otherwise “inflexible” process – you have to have guts to do this…in a professional manner.
After all, it was once said “To change your prophecy about interviewing, change your behavior”
I just wanted to drop you a quick note after reading your latest column about behavioral interviews. I couldn’t agree more with your point — the cleverness of a candidate’s canned answer isn’t what we should be hiring for!
Funny enough, I recently experienced exactly the kind of interview process you described. After a few online interviews for a role (which I thought went well), the hiring manager asked me to complete a case study. I’ll admit — at first, I was a little taken aback. I’m 56 and have held senior leadership roles, so being asked to “do homework” wasn’t what I expected.
But pretty quickly, I realized it was a great opportunity to show that I could actually do the work. I spent a couple of days on the case study, turned it in, and shortly after, I was invited to an onsite interview with the broader management team.
During that visit, they asked me to complete another (shorter) case study on the spot. The hiring manager reviewed the scenario with me, gave me 20 minutes to think through it, and then asked me to walk him through my response. After that, he even asked me to handwrite my final answer — old-school style! Honestly, it was a much better (and more real) way to demonstrate my skills — far better than rattling off polished answers to hypothetical questions.
Thanks again for shining a light on this. Hopefully more companies will realize that the best way to know if someone can do the job… is to actually let them do the job.
I really hope that the case study was hypothetical, and after all that you got the job. I’ve been asked to create and present marketing plans on their problem, product, or one cleverly disguised as hypothetical (it turned out to be their new product), and it’s ALWAYS free work. (Marketers aren’t worth much anymore in management’s view, especially now with AI, fools that they are.) They accumulate all the ‘finalists” documents/presentations even if you try to protect the document, cherry pick it, have AI rewrite it, and then never hire anyone claiming lack of budget…or put the job out again downscaling the position since they have the plan. From that, and being asked to reorganize departments (!), I never do free work. Discuss approaches, yes. Theorize a bit, sure. But until you are in the inside and talking to real people, you never know the truth.