Behavioral Interview Questions

Behavioral Interview Questions refer to interview questions that are meant to make the candidates give examples of some specific behaviors, experiences, and skills from their past that would demonstrate their readiness for a particular job or role. In contrast to having hypothetical or theoretical questions, in behavioral interviewing we deal with concrete situations that the candidate has experienced and how they reacted to those scenarios. The principle of behavioral interviewing is that the past actions can be used to predict the future performance of the candidates, and therefore, the interviewer can assess their ability, problem-solving skills, and interpersonal qualities in real world situations.

Example of Behavioral Interview Questions

An example of a behavioral interview question is: "Could you please share with me an incident of yours where you had to deal with a challenging colleague or customer?" The question challenges the applicant to give a real-life example from their own experiences and to explain what they did to the problem. Another example could be: "Give an example of a situation when you had to come up with an answer under tremendous pressure and viewed tight deadlines." To these kinds of questions, candidates explain the strategies they used, such as the challenges they encountered, the solutions they came up with, and the results achieved. Through behavioral interview questions, employers can evaluate candidates' skill sets, problem-solving abilities and interpersonal skills based on real-life situations rather than general impressions or imagined cases.