Behavioral Interviews: The Complete Interviewer Guide

Interviewers are typically trained to look for right and wrong answers, but there’s no single correct answer to behavioral questions. For that reason, you want to be able to ask follow up questions throughout the interview to understand how the candidate makes decisions.

The purpose of a behavioral interview is to assess a candidate’s soft skills and their ability to be a great team member at your company. A good candidate will be able to back up their professional and soft skills with concrete examples from their personal or professional experience.

As a Pramp interviewer, you’ll assume the role of a hiring manager and simulate a real behavioral interview for your peer. Consider the following key points to allow for a successful interview:

• Consider the attributes you’re looking for in a potential teammate such as accountability, confidence, positive attitude, clear communication, etc.
• Make sure you have a good enough understanding of the questions you’re about to ask.
• Encourage your peer to verbally communicate their thought process with a structured approach.
• Encourage your peer to take a minute to think before answering a challenging question. A candidate that has had time to think through an answer will be able to articulate it better, making it easier for you to understand their thought process.
• Prompt your peer for details. If the candidate gives a general answer; get them to tell a story that illustrates the attribute you’re looking for.
• Remember that the worst outcome from an interview is to decide that the candidate needs an additional interview before a decision can be made.

Interview Structure

Behavioral interviews, which typically last 15 to 30 minutes, have long been a standard component of the interview process for all types of job seekers hoping to land their dream job.

A behavioral interview is anytime you ask a candidate to speak about themselves in order to learn whether they have the required skills for the role and if they’ll be a good fit for your company.

We suggest covering the following to provide a good experience:

Establish Clear Goals

It’s important to determine what qualities you want your new team member to possess ahead of the interview.

Practicing the role of a behavioral interviewer is critical to improving your own performance as an interviewee. Consider what you’d like to know about a candidate (your peer). What qualities would you look for in a new team member? What about their answers would demonstrate those qualities?

As an interviewer, you may want to know the following about the candidate:

• How well does the candidate communicate with people?
• How well does the candidate deal with challenges and adversity?
• How excited is the candidate about working for this company?
• Would they be a great teammate?

Your goal is to elicit examples of certain skills or competencies without directly asking a candidate if they have them. To surface the answers to some of these questions, you might want to ask what projects they’ve worked on, how their role has evolved over time, and what adverse or unexpected situations they’ve encountered.

When interviewing your Pramp peer, you may be looking for certain qualities such as ambition, curiosity, drive, humility, accountability, initiative, teamwork, communication, mentorship, and/or the ability to learn quickly. To further examine the qualities you may be looking for in your Pramp peer during your interview, check out these two resources (here and here).

Be Open-Minded

It’s important to remain open-minded and challenge your personal biases about candidates during behavioral interviews. Your goal is to build a diverse team with each member bringing a different perspective and skill set to tackle your company’s challenges.

Each candidate will have a different life story and unique professional experiences. Just because a candidate answers a question differently than you expected, it doesn’t mean they’re wrong. In fact, there are no right or wrong answers in behavioral interviews.

Set Expectations

Candidates are often nervous for interviews, so it’s important to try to put them at ease by setting clear expectations for the interview. If a candidate is nervous, or you made them nervous, you may miss your chance to see their true self, leading you to wrongly evaluate them. Your goal is to create an environment that allows your peer to showcase their best self.

Briefly introduce yourself and allow your peer the chance to do the same. Inevitably, there will a power dynamic between you and your peer, but starting the interview with a brief back-and-forth conversation will help put your peer at ease. Take any chance to find common ground with them.

After some brief introductions, let your peer know around how many questions you’ll ask, allowing them to figure out how long they should spend on each question. Let them know that there are no right or wrong answers to your questions.

When your peer is answering your questions, make sure you’re attentively listening to their answers in case you want to add a follow-up question. It’s easy to tell, and can even be distracting for the candidate, if the interviewer is not paying adequate attention.

Situation-Task-Action-Result (STAR) Questions

STAR questions are those that ask candidates to describe a problem they encountered and the actions they took to resolve it; for example: “Please provide a specific example of an adverse situation you encountered at work, the tasks required, the actions you took to complete the task(s), and the result of the project.”

Candidates using the STAR Method will answer situational questions in the following format:

• Situation: Describe the event, problem, or challenge you encountered. This must describe a specific situation, not your whole professional experience.
• Task: Describe the task you had ownership over within the situation. What goal were you working toward? Be sure to keep it specific and highlight the challenges you faced.
• Action: What did you (not your team) decide to do? What steps did you take to address the situation? Be careful not to spend too much time describing the actions your team took and instead focus on your individual contributions. Make sure that your action highlights the characteristics the company is seeking, such as initiative, teamwork, leadership, perseverance, etc.
• Result: Describe what happened as a result of your actions; and if possible, back up your success with hard numbers. This is also an opportunity for you to be a bit introspective and speak about what you learned or might’ve done differently.

The STAR method helps candidates describe their professional experiences in a structured format. As the interviewer, you can lean on this method by asking follow-up questions until you feel that you fully understand the problem, the action(s) they took to respond to the problem, the result of their action(s), and any reflections about what they learned from the experience.

When evaluating the candidate’s answers, your focus should be on the actions they took. For example, did the candidate demonstrate assertiveness? Confidence? Strong decision-making and problem-solving skills? Your perception of the actions they took is more important than the end result of the situation.

From these questions, you’ll want to understand the candidate’s ability to tell a story about how they’ve impacted businesses in the past, giving you a sense of how they’ll impact your business in the future.

Past Projects

Asking candidates about their past professional projects is a common behavioral question. The candidate should tell a linear story about their personal impact in their previous role(s). When evaluating their answers, you should listen for answers that signal that the candidate has the attributes you’re looking for in a teammate. For example, you may be looking for a results-focused team player, who seeks out industry knowledge, has demonstrated influence over their coworkers, and pursues new personal growth opportunities.

These questions are all about what the candidate has done and how they accomplished it. Take the following:

What is the most difficult problem you’ve faced (Situation/Task)? What was your approach & how did you solve it (Action)? What did that experience teach you (Result)?

To evaluate candidate answers, you should consider:

• Situation: Did the candidate get you interested in their problem? Were they able to break down a complicated challenge in words you could understand?
• Task: Is it clear what task the candidate (vs their team) was responsible for?
• Action: Why did the candidate choose one approach over another? What were the tradeoffs? What was the result of that choice? How did the candidate convince others that their approach was the best one? How resourceful was the candidate at figuring out who to ask or where to find knowledge that may’ve been outside their domain of expertise?
• Result: Is it clear what impact the candidate made? Was the candidate able to quantify their impact?

Whether the candidate uses this specific methodology or not to answer this type of question isn’t important. That said, in order to get a good signal about the candidate, you should aim to get the candidate to explain a complex problem, the decisions they made, the tradeoffs of different decisions, and the impact their actions had on the project and its stakeholders.

Evaluation

After the interview, it’s important to promptly write down your evaluation while it’s still fresh in your mind. Given that behavioral interviews have multiple questions, do your best to write down notes throughout the interview about their answers in order to provide your Pramp peer detailed feedback about their performance following the interview.

Writing down how well a candidate answered each question in isolation can be helpful in order to prevent biasing yourself as an interviewer if the candidate answered some questions exceptionally well, while other answers were uninspiring.

Interviewer Self-Checklist

• Were you aware of any biases you had that might impact your assessment?
• Were there any behaviors from your peer that made you uncomfortable?
• Was the candidate overly nervous despite your best efforts to keep them calm? What parts of your assessment were affected most by the candidate’s nervousness?
• Did you do anything that you feel may have adversely affected the dynamic of the interview or the candidate’s performance?
• Do you have a good sense of the candidate’s collaboration and problem-solving skills based on their answers to your questions during the interview?
• Were they able to justify their decisions, or did you feel that they were just guessing the whole time?
• What would you have wanted to dig deeper into if you had more time with the candidate?

Additional Resources

• Structured Interviews Ebook — An ebook by Workable on how to construct structured interviews and succeed as an interviewer
• Tips for Improving your Skills as an Interviewer — An article with 15 tips for improving your skills as an interviewer

Additional Resources

• Database of Behavioral Interview Questions — Practice behavioral interview questions with Exponent’s database of recently asked questions, including full video answers.
• What Is the STAR Method? How to Use It in Interviews — A guide on the STAR Method, one of the most effective frameworks for answering behavioral interview questions.
• How to Answer Amazon’s Behavioral Interview Questions (Guide) — A guide on answering behavioral interview questions at Amazon and how to align answers with the company’s hugely important Leadership Principles.
• The Secret to Answering Behavioral Interviews — A guide on how to prepare answers to behavioral questions by Lori Bumgarner, a career coach at paNash