Truity Partners’ Post

Transcript

Hi, I'm Carver Smith and I'm one of the managing partners at Truity Partners and I'm here today to help you ace your behavioral based interviewing interview. So behavioral based interviews have been around for a long time, decades now. And I'm not here to try to convince people that they're effective or ineffective. There's plenty of debate out there about that. But the reality is they are still used or behavioral based interviews are is still used as a tool to help assess talent. So. What can you do about it? Let's start talk about what the whole premise is. For starters, behavioral based interviews is predicated on the idea that past behavior is the best predictor of future success, future ways you're going to handle something. So in theory, the organization has come up with a list of behaviors, very specific ones to find the things that make somebody successful in their organization and they're trying to get you to tell stories about your life that bring out those behaviors or possibly the anti behavior. Obviously the goal is to focus on the behaviors they're looking for and you don't always know what those are, so being prepared for the interview will help you. Provide the level of detail they're looking for to feel confident in you as a candidate. So for starters, they might just pull an example right off your resume, or they maybe give you a very, very targeted question about a situation that's happened in the past. So for example, they might ask you tell me a time when you had to do this, tell me a time when you had to deal with a very difficult internal customer, very common thing for you to probably have had to do. So with that you want to give them as much detail as you can without rambling, without going on too long. So there's several acronyms to help you remember the structure of how to answer one of these questions, the simplest one I've heard is BAR: background, action result. So the background, that's the context of the story. It's the screenplay of your life. If it was the screenplay of your life, it'd be the stage set. What's going on? What were the stressors? Who was there? What were you doing? Was it during month end close? What was your internal customer? My other example dealing with. So you want to spend about a minute on that overview. It's the context. Without that context, the interviewer cannot judge your behavior. So then after you've given them enough context to the story, you shift to the A in bar: The action. What did you do? What did you say? Maybe even what was going through your mind? And that's the back and forth. It might even be what the other person was saying, maybe even the actions you took before the meeting you had. But you want to get very specific. It might have been 9:35 AM last week when you had to deal with a difficult internal customer. That level of detail and that's very specific moment is what you're looking to get to. And give that back and forth and spend about 3:00 to 4:00 minutes in that part of the story. Then you shift to the R. Of course, that's assuming that that the interviewer didn't ask you more questions because a good interviewer will take part of that three to four minutes and stop you and anchor you back in a specific parts of the story and let that happen. That's OK. They heard something in your story that they really want more detail on. You might think it's a real, real frivolous detail, but to them that was guiding them to one of the behaviors maybe that they were looking for. So again, once you get through that, then you have that are the result. That's 30 seconds to wrap it up. Hopefully everything ends with rainbows and sunshine. It doesn't always, but as long as your actions were positive and you kept a positive attitude and tone throughout that whole story, it still can be an effective behavioral based interviewing story and answer. So what are some of the common mishaps of a behavioral based interview? One is the we trap that's falling into saying, well, we did this, we did that. And that's great if you're trying to demonstrate that you're a team player. But at some point in that story, you have to get to the "I" what your role was in that situation. So if you catch yourself saying we, we, we eventually say, well, this was my part of that situation of that story, hopefully that success story. The other thing is generalizing. Oftentimes people start to say just like I just did. Often I do this, typically I do this, usually I did this. And you don't want to talk about what you'll often or typically or usually do. You want to talk about what you specifically did at a point in time. So the generalizing is a very common mistake. And the other thing is going on simply too long. And a fourth one is just getting sucked into the negativity of the question. Oftentimes these situations involve difficult conversations, difficult projects, difficult problems that you overcame. And sometimes when people are telling those stories, especially in the nervousness of an interview, some of that negative energy that maybe came out of that situation comes out as they tell the story. So you don't want to be phony or fake in your story, but you want to stay professional, positive, and just factual about how the stories played out as opposed to getting pulled into that negative situation. And just because they're asking you these questions with these negative undertones doesn't mean the organization has all these bad things happening all the time. They just tend to be the types of stories where your true colors come out when difficult times, you know when times get tough, true colors tend to come to the surface. So if you think about it in those terms and get to that level of detail, you are going to ace that behavioral based interview and get to the level of detail they need to feel confident about themselves, their interview, and ultimately their confidence in you. Good luck.