Over the years I’ve evaluated and interviewed dozens if not hundreds of candidates. From resume reviews, initial phone screens, to formalized interviews I have done it all. The one technique I come back to time and time again is the use of behavioral interview questions - and now I hesitate to do it any other way.
In my experience there are two approaches people will take toward interview questions - what I’ll call the hypothetical question, and the behavioral question.
The first type really is just a hypothetical question - “if you were in this scenario what would you do.” I think these are really terrible questions because anyone with a little bit of knowledge can give a good answer to these types of questions. “How would you approach X” - well I’d approach it the exactly correct way! If I were a surgeon I would wash my hands, make perfect incisions, do everything correctly, stitch the patient up, and they’re ready to go. If I were leading a ski trip and someone got buried in an avalanche I would use my beacon, find them, dig them out.
All of these answers sound great, but they’re all hypothetical, theoretical. You can always give a perfect answer because in your mind, in that perfect world, everything will always go the way you expect it to. Furthermore the answer doesn’t tell me whether that surgeon can actually do surgery safely, and I don’t know whether that ski trip leader actually knows how to deal with the urgency and pressure of an avalanche burial.
So if hypothetical questions aren’t any good, what’s the alternative?
Behavioral interview questions!
You’ll recognize these right away:
“Tell me about a time when…”
“Describe a situation where…”
“Share an example off…”
These are sounding like the start of some good interview questions!
What makes these different? The interviewee can’t just fake it with some knowledge. They will need to go into their memory, into situations they’ve already encountered, and provide examples to answer these questions. This tells us as the interviewer that this person has already done this, or has experienced something like it. Now we know they have some experience that connects them to what we are looking for, that they have approached this problem, or something similar, in the past.
When we do this style of questioning we’re looking for some specific things, and sometimes you may need to guide the interviewee through it to get the answers you are looking for, and this is where the STAR framework can come in handy.
STAR stands for:
Situation
Task
Action
Results
Situation is where we ask for the specific example of something they have encountered and had to deal with, and this is where our starters from above (“Tell me about a time…”) come in. We want them to explain the situation and context including where, when, who, and any other relevant details to bring us to where we understand the situation they are describing to us.
The answer might look something like “That’s a great question and I can think of a time last year when I was working with Client X on PROBLEM.”
Task is where we want to learn about what needed to change. What was the challenge, what was the desired outcome they were pursuing? You can learn a lot about how the candidate things about the problem and their objective in how they answer.
Continuing from the previous example they might say “We were trying to accomplish Y by doing Z, but every time we did we got a lot of resistance from the teams and their leadership - we didn’t really expect this because we thought the change was desired by everyone, but when we discovered we were wrong we knew we had to take a different approach.”
Action is where we want to find out what steps they took - what did they actually do? How did they do it? Why did they approach it that way? Sometimes this is the step where you can start to see cracks - they have a situation, they have a task, but can’t clearly articulate what they did or why they did it - that is a red flag! You can probe a bit during their answer as you have questions to really dig into their mindset, thought process, goals, and approach.
This step in the process may look something like “We decided to do a 2 day off-site team building workshop, and we chose this for a number of reasons. Everyone was already planning to be in town and the agenda was incomplete so we viewed it as an opportunity to really turn things around, we noticed that team trust was pretty low and I had successfully used Five Dysfunctions of a Team in the past to overcome these types of issues, and we knew that the VP and Director - who we viewed as most resistant - were big fans of off-sites, so we decided to move forward with it. In the off-site we decided to do activity A, B, and C because […reasons…].”
The last step in the STAR framework are the results. Ultimately results are very important to us because it helps us understand if the candidate can deliver, can get the outcomes they are looking for, and if not or when they struggle how do they view the unsuccessful outcome and how did they deal with it. What we’re looking for is a clear and concise explanation of the benefits and outcome of the situation they chose. We get a lot of information out of this - are they analytical, do they measure results, can they see how their action impacted the end result, what are their values, how do they approach failure, what did they learn, what will they do next - we can get all this any the answers to many more just from how this question is answered.
I don’t always want to hear stories with positive results either! I start to get suspicious when every story ends with a success and everybody cheering since life doesn’t usually work out that way. I really like when I hear from a candidate that the results didn’t go as they expected, they learned the action they chose wasn’t right, and they had to pivot, reset, or reboot their approach to the problem. A story that ends in failure is OK as long as it’s clear they learned something and intend to adjust or tune their approach in the future.
The results portion answer may be something like “Well the off-site had really mixed results and outcomes - the VP and Director loved it, but the team hated it and felt like it took too much of their time away from regular work. We realized too late that we had been talking to leadership about the event and gotten them excited and on board with the idea, but we hadn’t brought the team along on the same journey. It was kind of embarrassing the first day when half the team didn’t show up, and half of those who did resisted the activities. We actually wound up taking a long break earlier than planned and used that chance to talk with the team and get them more engaged in the process, so the rest of the day, and day 2 went a lot better. We still had to change our plan since the timing didn’t work out because of the unexpected breaks, but in the end we were still able to do some team building and based on the survey we sent at the end we still saw psychological safety go up. So it didn’t go perfectly, and we learned a lot that we were able to apply in the future.”
That’s behavioral interviewing in a nutshell, and the STAR behavioral recruitment framework. Like most things it seems easy when you learn about it, but can be difficult to implement and master. Don’t try to blow up your whole interview process to get going with these! Start small with a couple questions, focus the behavior inquiry around key problems you are having in your space, and ask the same questions to every candidate. You’ll learn a lot as you practice and can work on polishing the questions and your approach as you go.
The more I work with behavioral interview questions when I am the interviewer, the more I appreciate them as the interviewee as well. With a bit of practice, and focusing on your specific accomplishments as part of your interview prep, I find it is actually easier to answer behavioral questions with real experience than it is to answer hypothetical questions. With hypothetical questions I will sometimes start to ramble and then have to ask if I answered the question, where when I am answering a behavioral question I find I can make my answers clear, concise, and concrete.
Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or via Email if you’d like to learn more about using or answering behavioral interview questions or are interested in some coaching to help you prepare to interview - either as the interviewer or interviewee.
You can learn more about STAR from Management 3.0:
https://management30.com/practice/star-behavioral-interview-questions/