Describe a time you had to ...
The inevitable behavior questions during interviews.
In my career in the tech industry I have been mostly tied to one company. That is not the norm with people in our industry. It is not uncommon to see people move from company to company with only a few years under their belt. The interview process becomes second nature to these type of people.
Since I have been out of the interview game for so long, one of the many shocks to the system was the amount of behavioral style questions. In the past I would brush off or not focus too heavily on the HR style or situational questions and focus on the functional or technical questions. I have come to realize that is short sighted thinking and there is a great importance on being able to communicate and answer these questions to a high degree. There is a lot you can learn from a candidate in their ability to formulate a response.
Yes or no answer is not going to cut it. You have to understand their motivation on asking these types of questions. When you provide short answers it does not help them understand how you may tackle these situations when they come up in the role you are looking to fill. It also gives more insight on how you communicate and what your personality is like.
During my research on helpful interview skills, the STAR technique came up frequently as a way to help interviewees prepare answering these behavioral style questions. It breaks down as the following:
The Method
- Situation: Give context to story. This allows everyone to reset your situation
- Task: What was the goal or challenges? Be clear on what you were trying to achieve and your role.
- Action: What were the steps taken by you? These are actions done by yourself and not someone else on the team or your manager. Make sure to use "I".
- Results: What were the outcomes and results? Explain the impact try to quantify with a metric if applicable.
I recognize this is not a new method and mentioned in other publications and blogs, but I just wanted to share the love as I found the method simple and effective. I have used it during my interviews and have found great success with it. It really helps keep the interviewee calm in answering questions that may be difficult to recall from past experience, but once you have it and can run it through this formula, it helps answer the question.
Examples
These are some example questions that come up often during the interview process. So tell me a time when you had ...
- Greatest accomplishment, positive impact, work simpler
- Challenge
- Conflicts
- Enjoyed
- Leadership
- What would you do differently
- Weakness
- Persuade
- Say No
The weakness question may trip people up sometimes. Just try to be honest and what you types of checks you put in place to mitigate the weakness. For example sometimes I tend to dive deep on technologies, more than necessary, and can spend several days researching without producing anything. In order to mitigate this, I try to create a shared document that I intend to share with colleagues my findings or time-box the research period and have a prototype at the end.
These questions can be obvious at times or be obfuscated with a specific situation at work but can be reduced to a core behavioral question. The important factor is to be able to come prepared with situations you can recall and recognize when you are being asked these types of questions.
Be ready to tell a story and use the STAR method to help frame it.