How To Answer Behavioral Interview Questions

my name is Jeff h-type and I have over 10 years of recruiting experience including 5 years at Google in this video we are going to cover how to

answer any behavioral interview question what I really want to focus on today is let's just do a deep dive I'm gonna give you the high level steps and then the

high level keys to success and then we will do a deeper dive into each one of those concepts if you like my content please like if you have any comments

please comment below and if you like my overall content please subscribe the 8 steps are restate the question present options when it's a very generic

behavioral question then you're gonna go into star's situation task action results and then follow that up with

learnings and follow-up questions so those are the 8 steps you're gonna take the only difference would be if the results are super impactful you save the company tons of money tons of time you

had a huge process implementation you'll start with the result and then you'll reiterate it again when you get to the results section so it technically can be eight or nine steps we'll talk a little

bit more about that later on then let's flip over there are nine keys to success too so one dynamic example

just make sure the example is super dynamic to position-specific whenever possible 3 you're always trying to chop down so you're trying to take something

broad especially if it's a generic question and narrow it the fourth item is continually implement what's being asked in the question 5 I need an

appropriate level of detail don't make me guess 6 change negative words to positive words 7 identify themes 8

prepare practice and time yourself and 9 framing when you don't have the ideal example we'll get a little bit more into that one as well so let's flip back to

the steps so item 1 restate this is a topic I've covered and I'll throw an info card up there to attach to that video but restating really helps your brain

start to organize and clarify the data and it also allows for your interviewer to potentially narrow your focus so the pro tip here is just change the wording

a little bit in your favor when the interviewer asks you a question if you have a narrower path for them so specifically let's focus and work off the question tell me about a difficult

situation I might restate this question knowing I have a really good example with an internal colleague and so I might restate so Jane you're asking me about a challenging situation with a

colleague if Jane does not correct you boom you've narrowed your focus if Jane does correct you to say it can be any example of a difficult situation that's

a great great segue into item 2 where you're gonna present options and so if we stay focused on this tell me about a difficult situation this is a super generic behavioral interview question

that could take a number of different directions when you get these types of questions it's just really necessary to ask your interviewer what direction they

want you to take so do you want this to be a project or a program I worked on do you want this to be a difficult situation with an internal employee with

an external employee do you want me to focus more on the business side or the technical side do you want me to focus on a stakeholder relationship a

relationship with somebody higher up etc right and yes this is a lot of questions to ask but your interviewer in their

head might have been thinking external business relationship and you mention those items and then boom you're headed down their direction and again we're taking something like this and we're

really narrowing it down we really need to pause on this item we don't know what our interviewer wants to hear so we have to ask them and right we got to go back

to these two key steps right if we don't get an answer from our interviewer we have to just make sure we're using our most dynamic example and if our most dynamic example is position specific

even better item three let's dive right into the situation my top two pieces of advice for the situation and this comes when

working with clients is brevity is super important the story will come out in the actions so your situation should be fifteen to thirty seconds tops thirty

seconds is probably too much and then detail and so that's getting back to one of our critical key items which is just help me visualize it so I have greater

connectivity to the answer and the example so for example let's go back to the question that we started with I would say hey Jane the difficult

situation was with our vendor they stopped paying for their services and we needed to work to get the payment up to date before continuing to work with them okay

nine seconds for that example let's go and provide a little bit better example that's about 15 seconds long Jane the difficult situation was with our laptop

manufacturing vendor in Korea for the first time in ten years they stopped paying for their advertising services and we needed to secure two million in

back payments in order to not cancel all of their global ad campaigns these six additional seconds gave me so much more

clarity and that level of detail now I'm thinking about okay Wow a difficult situation is made even more difficult when the client is overseas in the

facility seeing the manufacturer laptops I know there are a long-standing customer so I know we've had a long-standing relationship the amount owed is significant and obviously if

they can't pay its gonna significantly impact a major client so these visuals just have me way way more invested and

that's a great segue into item four tasks the real goal for this item is just for the interviewer to understand

what was your specific role because the situation is highlighting a challenge right but you want to be talking about what your specific role was so again going back to the

example I had two major objectives obtain this back payment and figure out if making payments moving forward was gonna be a challenge this is really

generic but it identifies in your specific role the task should be one to two sentences tops and you get through it and you move right into item five the

actions this is where you should spend at least half of your answer more likely two-thirds of your answer this is really

your bread and butter and in reality the actions will tell the story and I think that this is a big misconception because people go into these answers and they think they have to give all this

background but the background will come out if your actions are clearly defined and so within actions it's really important that their chronological

really don't be jumping around from item to item because I don't have a lot of connectivity to your example it's personal to you so make sure again the actions are chronological and then

they're clearly defined so have three or four or five clearly defined actions and then lastly just make sure that each

action has follow-up items along with it and so for example let's go back to our manufacturing vendor so Jane the first action I took was I needed to get to

historical contact so like what had happened with past billing what had happened with recent communications and could I connect with any recent or former points of contact internally to

find out a little bit more information action - I really needed to touch base with the point of contact at our manufacturer her name was jiwoo and with

jiwoo the first thing I needed to do was I wanted to get her on video so we got together on video I did create a Google presentation for her so she could see

the clear agenda the clear questions I had etc I asked a ton of questions in there and then we left that meeting with a specific five point action plan for

moving forward the next action I took was then we needed to create the next and so I executed on all those actions I connected with multiple stakeholders

this was internally and externally a jiwoo's organization and then we created a systemized approach for back payment and a plan for future payments of course

I'd go into a little bit more detail but I want to keep it high level for this video but you can see each action had a few bullets associated with it and that's a great segue into item 6 which

is our results don't ever downplay the importance of results if you don't tell me very specifically what the ultimate result was then the whole answer is a waste of

time we really want to get to these great results and that can be happy client kudos money saved time saved just an

amazing success story process improvements etc tell me why the results are fantastic and if it's an ongoing

project tell me the results to date and why those are fantastic and so again we'll go back to this scenario and so

Jane the first result was we were able to receive the entire back payment within two weeks based on my initial conversation with Witte whoo

then secondly we were able to create a better process around getting payments third obviously maintaining a relationship with one of our biggest

clients was critical and lastly one of the biggest results was a process improvement we realized there was a missing process within our tools I got great kudos from our client and it

actually yielded a promotion for me because it was so impactful for our organization so one critical item to mention with results is again if the results are as fantastic as they were in

this situation you might present options then instead of starting with the situation you start with the results Jane I want to provide an example of a challenging situation we had where

really I was able to get two million dollars back for the company in a two-week span of time and implement some great new processes the situation was so sometimes when the results are so

fantastic you want to draw your interviewer in especially when there's numbers tied to them numbers always kind of get people perked up and excited item

7 learnings and applications of learnings so it's really important that you get to this step and because some interviewers are so familiar with the

star method I want you to Segway right from results into learnings so literally without pausing just get right into it because companies hire continual

learners period and that's across the board for any company you just always have to be talking about what you learned and then again if you can talk about how you apply that learning even

better and so for this scenario we might say hey I learned the importance of presenting data and then the second piece I really learned was if we dig

deeper into our systems like do we have the tools in place have we created the process to look at our tools to make sure that they're ideal and that

documentation actually has helped our HR systems recently so I've been able to apply that documentation from this example to help the organization in another area which was absolutely

amazing for everyone item 8 follow-up questions this seems to be an incredibly difficult

step for my clients but follow-up questions keep you talking about something you know a lot about these examples happen to you so it's really really easy to focus on these follow-up

questions and so there's really four great outcomes questions are a clear end to your answer they do help you be more brief because then you know you're specifically gonna ask follow-up

questions on the items that you might not have been able to drill down enough into um they allow you again to talk a little bit longer about what you know

and they might help identify themes that your interviewer is interested in we'll talk about this a little more in a second but if your interviewer is always asking yeah tell me more about the

technical you are probably gonna want to really focus on more technical examples and that theme will pop up and it will help you have better success so for example with these follow-up questions

you'd want to ask maybe if they wanted to hear a little bit more about the digging you did on the historical context piece they might want to know a little bit more about your initial

meeting with jiwoo they might want you to provide a little bit more on how you found and identified the challenges within the tools or is there anything else you can cover but don't go to that

last generic question really specificity and the questions is super important so now let's quickly flip over to the 9 keys because these eight or nine steps

you're gonna take depending on how you implement the results are important but you need these follow-up keys to make sure that you're doing everything right we touched on all of them so let's go

through them briefly item 1 dynamic example no matter what just use your best example period even if it's not

position specific dynamic examples are dynamic I can tell you the example I used in one of my one of my GCA questions at Google had nothing to do with being a recruiter but it was just

the best example I had and it ended up yielding a positive result now of course item 2 position specific whenever possible yes like if you know

the role is totally customer-facing right you're gonna be spending 80 90 percent of your time chatting with external customers your examples the more they can be external facing and

customer facing the better item 3 taking a broad topic and narrowing it down this is just about presenting options and I think it is about making it position

specific those are two really great ways you can narrow it down the more narrow you just want to take any of these very high-level generic concepts and push them in a little bit it's gonna be

helped you just be laser-focused with your interviewer continual implementation of what's being asked so I didn't say enough of this as I went through that difficult situation example

you really need to reiterate that word again you're probably going to change that word from difficult to challenging right because you want it to sound really positive but

you want to keep reiterating that you're answering the question throughout this is really important so your interviewer feels connectivity that you're really

answering the question item five appropriate level of detail I don't want you to add a ton of extra words but I

just want you to add a little bit more detail so I can visualize it and connect with that so one of the big ones is sitting in a conference room help me

understand like who's in the conference room are you whiteboarding or using a presentation like how long were you in there those simple details they go from

me just kind of thinking about it to putting me in the room and so I really love that example people talk about meeting with other stakeholders external clients but I never get this level of

detail a couple of extra pieces really give me great connectivity item six changing negative words into positive words so in this one you just change the

word difficult to challenging challenging has a more positive connotation and it just up takes the person they don't even know why but use

of positive words is critical item 7 identifying themes again if you can really really figure out what your interviewer likes to talk about and it

might be people it might be technology it might be processed identify that from your follow-up questions and then implement it that can be so impactful because then you're actually asking less

questions and you're really narrowing down on what seems to be a strong interest for your interviewer item 8 prepare practice in time yourself so I'm going to throw a Google Doc down in the

description use that to help you get organized but you have to prepare you have to practice these examples and you have to time them because you might find that you're giving these really really

long-winded examples and you just want to chop down on your time but writing them down and saying them out loud or practicing them with another person is what success really looks like the last piece that we

didn't talk about is framing that's item 9 and so with framing it just means if you didn't ever have a difficult situation but you had this challenging process improvement that you needed to

make you would say hey Jane I have this challenging process improvement that I needed to make that's really top of mind for me and has great connectivity to the role do you mind if I provide that

example so you've acknowledged to Jane hey it's a little bit different from what you're asking but it gets at the core of what Jane might want to hear because you just don't have the perfect

example now difficult situation obviously you probably would but there's gonna be other scenarios where you just don't have an ideal match so just

another thing to keep in mind Wow as I kind of put this video together it just kept getting longer and longer but I work with a lot of clients and these

items if you can put all this together it's a lot of pieces but if you put all these pieces together you will crush this component and for most companies

this is more than 50% of the questions this might make up 60 70 80 percent of the questions so it's really important that you take the time and focus on

these items I really hope this helps if you like my content please like if you have any comments please comment below and if you like my overall content please subscribe thank you so much