How to prepare for a behavioral/soft skills interview?
A behavioral interview is an important part of the job process. In this article, we will go through what to expect in a behavioral interview and how to prepare for it. In the end, we provide a cheat sheet on preparing and tackling behavioral interviews.
A behavioral interview assesses the candidate’s ability to interact, survive and grow in an organization. Most of the companies are looking for prospective candidates that can not only be good at technical expertise but also be a good match to the company culture, operate well within a team, manage a team, and are able to take a stand with decisions when needed. Most of the time, a candidate who does not perform well in the behavioral interview despite how well he or she performed in the technical rounds, is not able to move forward with the application process.
Most candidates perform really well in the technical interviews. Coding, machine learning, data science, system design, case studies, all seem really familiar to them and well within their comfort zone. Behavioral interviews, however, require them to sit down and prepare for it. There are no correct or wrong answers and the interview is just looking for your organized thought and if you are able to demonstrate certain traits that might be really important for the company.
We will divide this article into three parts. In the first part, we will look thoroughly at how to prepare for the behavioral interview. We will then see how to approach and answer a behavioral question during the interview. Finally, the last part of the article contains some helpful resources on the topic.
Part 1: Preparing for the behavioral interview
Preparing for a behavioral interview does not take as much time as the technical ones. On average 3–4 days with 1–2 hours each day should be sufficient for getting comfortable with the interview process, example questions, and personalized stories.
But how to go about preparing for such an interview? Where to start? What questions to cover? This can be overwhelming. The process gets much simpler and organized by following the 5 steps below.
Step 1: [1–2 hours] Gather and understand the keywords
The first thing that needs to be done is to research for topics on which the interview will ask questions. Behavioral questions can have a wide range of topics. The most commonly asked questions are about
- Leadership
- Teamwork
- Problem-solving
- Decision making
- Communication
- Inter-personal skills
- Conflict resolution
- Negotiation skills
- Creativity
- Personal strength and weakness
- Mentorship
- Taking a stand
- Working with a deadline
Look for questions over the internet that were asked in a behavioral interview and familiarize yourself with the topics and note them down. This should take about 1–2 hours.
Step 2: [3–4 hours] Collect your stories
Once you are familiar with the common keywords and have noted them down, you need to find stories from your personal life that reflects those topics highlighting your personalized skills. What I found useful was to note down all the organizations I have been a part of in the past such as academics, jobs, internships, societies, and clubs. Then for each such instance, I tried to recall events where I had to apply my skills for an underlying problem. These stories need not be professional and can be from personal life as well. If you are having trouble recalling events from your life, look at the topics from Step 1 and try to remember events that explain those specific topics.
Step 3: [0.5 hours] Assign keywords to your stories
Now once you have gathered stories from your personal life, carefully go through them and assign keywords. The same story can have multiple tags/keywords associated with them. Assigning keywords to them will help you answer the question better during the interview.
Step 4: [0.5 hours] Create a summary table
I like to keep a summary table that I can go through before every behavioral interview. This personalized table keeps track of my personal stories and their associated keywords. This helps me revise for my behavioral interview. An example of such a table can be seen below.
The blurred-out text is the identifier to my stories.
Step 5: [2–3 hours] Explain the stories in the STAR format
The most important part of answering a behavioral question is its organization and structure. The answer to every behavioral question must follow the STAR format. Use the following four-step process to answer the question. We will use the following example and try to apply the STAR format to it.
Example Question: “Tell us about a time when you had to convince senior executives”
1. Situation:
When beginning to answer a behavioral question, explain the situation and provide the necessary context to your story
Example: “I worked as an intern in XYZ company in the summer of 2019. The project details provided to me was elaborative. After some initial brainstorming, and research I realized that the project approach can be modified to make it more efficient in terms of the underlying KPIs. I decided to talk to my manager about it.”
2. Task:
Once you have gone through the situation, explain the task and your responsibility in the situation.
Example: “I had an hour-long call with my manager and explained him in detail the proposed approach and how it could improve the KPIs. I was able to convince him. He asked me if I will be able to present my proposed approach for approval in front of the higher executives. I agreed to it. I was working out of the ABC(city) office and the executives need to fly in from XYZ(city) office.”
3. Action:
The next step is to walk through the set of actions you took to address the issue at hand
Example: “I did a quick background check on the executives to know better about their area of expertise so that I can convince them accordingly. I prepared an elaborative 15 slide presentation starting with explaining their approach, moving onto my proposed approach, and finally comparing them on preliminary results.”
4. Results:
Finally, state the outcome of the actions you took and how they affected the problem at hand
Example: “After some active discussion, we were able to establish that the proposed approach was better than the initial one. The executives proposed a few small changes to my approach and really appreciated my stand. At the end of my internship, I was selected among the 3 out of 68 interns who got to meet the senior vice president of the company over lunch.”
Using the STAR format, you will able to organize your answer effectively.
A summary of the 5-step process of preparing the behavioral interview can be found below.
Part2: Answering a behavioral question
Behavioral questions usually are open-ended. They can cover a very wide range and it’s not possible to prepare for every question that can be asked. What helps, however, is to relate the question to commonly asked questions that you have prepared for and answer accordingly. The following 5-step process will help you answer a behavioral question during an interview.
We will use the following example
Example Question: “Tell us about a time when you had to convince senior executives”
1. Understand
The first thing to do when you are presented with a behavioral question is to listen to it carefully and understand it. A good practice is to re-iterate the question in your own words and ask the interviewer if this is what he or she meant. If there is any confusion, clarify it by asking follow-up questions. Once you have understood the question, ask yourself the same question in simpler words
Example: Ok, so they want me to share a story where I was able to convince my seniors. Maybe they had something in mind, and I had a better approach and I tried to convince them.
2. Extract
The next step is to extract useful keywords from the question that will help you shortlist your stories.
Example: [Convincing], [Creative], [Leadership]
3. Map
Once you have your keywords, shortlist all the stories in your summary table that fall under those keywords
Example: Story1, Story3, Story6
4. Select
From the shortlisted stories, pick the one that best describes the question and has not been used so far in the interview.
Example: Story3
5. Apply
Apply the STAR method to the shortlisted story
Example: Step 5 from the previous section
These steps have been summarized in the cheat sheets below.
Part 3: Useful resources
Some of the most commonly asked behavioral questions and sample answers can be seen in the link below
- https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/interviewing/most-common-behavioral-interview-questions-and-answers
- https://www.thebalancecareers.com/top-behavioral-interview-questions-2059618
- https://www.themartec.com/insidelook/behavioral-interview-questions
Summary:
Behavioral interviews can be tricky at times. In this article, we went through an organized and easy-to-follow process for preparing and answering a behavioral question.
If this article was helpful to you, feel free to clap, share and respond to it. If you want to learn more about Machine Learning and Data Science, follow me @Aqeel Anwar or connect with me on LinkedIn.
