Behavioural Interview Questions, also called Situational, are used as a tool in job interviews to discover how your performance in a previous job may contribute to your future performance in the role being recruited for.
Behavioural Interviewing is becoming increasingly common and is used by many large organisations such as BT, Accenture and many of the large banking organisations.
The basic theory is that past behaviour in work related situations can be used as a predictor of future performance and studies have shown this technique to be about 5 times more accurate than traditional interview questions when selecting new employees.
When using behavioural interviewing techniques the interviewer will ask open-ended interview questions relating to your behaviour in past situations and will try to match these with the pre-set requirements of the role.
These Behaviour Based Interview Questions require you to provide specific examples of what you have done in the past and usually take the form of:
They are designed to gather detailed evidence and you will find that once you have given your answer the interviewer will probe deeper and may pick certain aspects to investigate further.
Be prepared for follow on questions such as:
By delving deeper into the detail of your answer the interviewer knows that it becomes very difficult for you to sustain a fabricated story.
Help with answering Competency and Behavioural interview questions can be found here.
We recommend that you choose answers based on real experiences that you have had. Avoid the temptation to invent a scenario or embellish an existing one.
Your response needs to be relevant and sufficiently detailed. Be specific and tell a story and to help we recommend that you use the following structure:
By Andrew Reed
About the Author
Andrew Reed is an experienced interviewer and has developed successful recruitment strategies for large organisations within the Customer Services, HR and Finance sectors.
Great Blog post. I am going to bookmark and read more often. I love the Blog template
hi andrew! thanks for your post, it was a lovely read on behavioural questions, to be honest they always confuse me! anyway if you have a moment please also check this list i compiled of the 50 most commonly asked interview questions, why they are asked, any hidden motives and exactly how to answer the questions!
50 most common interview questions and answers
good info,thank!
Behavioral and Situational interviews are not the same.
The Behavioral Description Interview
In contrast to a situational interview, which focuses on hypothetical situations, a
behavioral description interview (BDI) focuses on actual work incidents in the
interviewee’s past.
Taken from:Managing Human Resources, 14e, Bohlander/Snell – © 2007 Thomson South-Western