As a recent tech graduate, when you think of interviewing, you probably think of yourself as always solving technical coding problems on a whiteboard. Turns out, there’s a lot more to interviewing than your technical skills alone. Behavioral and cultural interviews are essential to hiring the right candidate for a role.
As much as acing technical interviews is a fundamental goal, behavioral interviews are just as critical if you want to stand out among your competition. The ability to highlight your soft skills will make or break you as a potential hire. It allows the hiring team to shed light on soft skills with regard to past experiences, real-life responses, and a glimpse into possible future actions with results in similar situations that a candidate can experience in a given role. Behavioral interview questions typically begin with
Wondering how to prepare for behavioral interviews?
Apply the STAR Method to all answers
The STAR Method helps you create a framework to organize your answers covering all aspects of your previous work experience
Situation - Depending on the type of question, describe a recent challenge and situation that you worked on
Task - The next aspect is to be able to help the interviewers understand what were you required to accomplish. Identify the key objective and issue that you were responsible for accomplishing
Action - Once determined what you needed to accomplish in a particular situation/challenge - how did you go about achieving those goals? Answering questions to what did you - how did you do it and what were the different alternatives that were considered? Describe the action you took or initiated, emphasizing the skills you used to complete the
task
Result - Finally what was the outcome of the actions? Summarize the outcome in business terms, giving detail and quantifying when possible
Preparing for common behavioral interview questions
Here are some guides on how to prepare for common interview questions using the STAR Method