How to Succeed in A Behavioral Interview

Interviews are stressful situations and stress impacts how well we communicate. Even the most skilled candidates struggle to communicate effectively under pressure within an interview setting.

The best way to mitigate stress in interviews is to practice your pitch during mock interviews. Through doing behavioral interviews on Pramp, you’ll have the chance to sharpen your own personal narrative and gain invaluable insights from evaluating a peer’s answers as the interviewer.

Behavioral interviews, particularly the HR phone screen, tend to be very predictable. Recruiters will ask you to describe your interest in the company, to walk them through your resume, and to elaborate on your current responsibilities and why those experiences make you a fit for the role.

Your goal as an interviewee is to help your interviewer visualize what sort of employee you’ll be at their company and how your previous experiences make you a great fit for the position.

Some general tips on how to prepare:

• Write out your answers. Behavioral interview questions tend to be very predictable, so you should start preparing by writing out sample questions and preparing answers for each one. There are no correct answers in behavioral interviews, but the more you’ve thought about a question, the more intelligently you’ll be able to respond in the future.
• Have specific stories in mind. To ensure you’re presenting yourself in the best way possible, write out bullet points on skills you’ve developed or sharpened in a given position. Afterward, come up with a specific story from each of your previous positions that highlights the skills required for the role you’re applying for.
• Practice, practice, practice. Do a mock interview to get honest feedback on what parts of your narrative were most compelling or how you can be more concise. If you’ve had the chance to practice answering these questions with friends, colleagues, or a Pramp peer, you’ll be able to give a more articulate, concise, and structured answer.
• Take your time. Remember that it’s better to take a few seconds to prepare your answer and say it confidently than to rush an answer to a question. Behavioral interviews are more often about how you communicate than about the actual content of your answers.

“Why Us?”

Start your interview preparation by researching the company you’re interviewing at. In either the HR phone screen or a culture-fit interview, you’ll be asked your reason for applying for the role.

Many candidates give generic answers that could be extended to a number of companies, but interviewers expect more. They want to know that you’ve done your homework and understand what makes their company unique in their domain, the challenges they face, and why you’re interested in them over other opportunities. You want to show your interviewer that you’re excited about their company and the problem they’re tackling.

To prepare, you should read about the company to try to figure out the answers to these questions:

• What does the company do? Why am I interested in this company?
• What challenges do they face in their market/industry? What excites me about working in this industry?
• What differentiates them from their competitors?
• What do their employees say about them on Glassdoor?

This may sound basic, but many candidates come to company interviews without understanding the basic facts of the company they’re interviewing at.

Company Values

Once you understand a bit more about the company’s business, it’s time to learn about what skills and attributes they value in a candidate by analyzing the job description.

Prepare a list of skills that the position requires and then come up with an example that showcases each required skill.

Answering Background Questions

You’ll be expected to speak about the most relevant experiences from your academic, professional, and/or extracurricular experiences. In particular, you should be prepared to talk about your projects both in terms of your biggest professional or personal challenges and achievements. These types of questions are a standard in behavioral interviews as your answers reveal a lot about your professional and interpersonal skills.

You also shouldn’t assume that just because you submitted a resume/application that your interviewer will know everything about you. Your interviewer will likely only have glanced at your application, so don’t be afraid to repeat information, particularly related to the experiences on your resume.

Avoid Qualification Traps

The HR phone interview is used to screen out candidates who are lacking relevant experience or who have poor communication skills. Thus your goal as a candidate is to effectively showcase that you have the necessary skills and experiences to excel in the role. In this interview, you’ll want to speak clearly and confidently, while avoiding qualification traps.

Here are some common behavioral questions with qualification traps:

“Do you have experience with <specific technology>?

Be honest and straightforward about your experience with your interviewer. Don’t embellish your experience with a certain tech stack, particularly because your interviewer is likely to be more knowledgeable about the tech they’re asking about.

That said, rather than giving a response that confirms your lack of experience, you can pivot and give an answer that reflects your strengths. This question is as much about what you know now as it is about how eager you are to learn new things and how quickly and effectively you can do so.

If you’re asked an in-depth question about SQL and don’t know the answer, a valid answer could be: “While I’m not entirely sure, I know that I can search for the answer in <specific> documentation.” Demonstrating that you can learn independently and that you know where to find answers to learn more is an important skill.

You might also emphasize that though you’ve been working with a certain tool or technology recently, you’d be excited to get more exposure to <specific technology> in your next role. You can then use this answer to segue into your professional passions, explaining how you love creating and improving products, adapting to new situations as technology evolves, etc.

“Do you have any professional experience [as the role]?”

If you’re a recent college or bootcamp grad, pay attention to how you frame your experiences to avoid disqualifying yourself. If you haven’t had an internship, you can answer this question by pivoting to speak about your independent projects or extracurricular activities, emphasizing what you accomplished or learned and how those skills are transferable to those required for a given role.

Here, too, you can reframe your answer by demonstrating your ability to learn independently.

Past Projects

In behavioral interviews, you’re likely to be asked to speak about your past projects. These questions are all about what you’ve accomplished and how you did it. These questions are meant to analyze your depth of knowledge and contributions to your previous projects. It also tests your ability to tell a story around a professional experience and to demonstrate the impact your project had on the company.

You’ll likely be asked:

• Explain a difficult project you recently worked on.
• What is the most difficult problem you’ve faced? How did you solve it?
• Can you give a story about what you should have done differently in a past project?

After researching the position (see Why Us? and Company Values), you’ll have a good sense of what skills and attributes the company cares about. From the list of required skills, consider your top three to five attributes — such as your initiative, leadership, commitment, or problem-solving skills — that set you apart as a candidate and craft a professional narrative that highlights each of those attributes.

To learn how to choose and craft stories that highlight your professional experiences, check out this article by Nick Larsen, Principal Data Engineer at Stack Overflow. Here are the central takeaways:

• Start with the punchline of your story (“I put 5 data sets on a Google Maps interface that allows a team of real estate agents to get real-time reports about new house listings around the world.”) — Your goal is to get your interviewer interested in your work and start thinking about the questions they may have for you.
• Focus on specific insights. Generalizations won’t help your interviewer evaluate your skills. They want to know what you specifically did, rather than what you might do in a comparable situation.
• Talk about what you, not your team, did. When breaking down a complex problem from the workplace, many candidates discuss the work of their team but fail to drill down into their specific role. Speaking about a professional experience where you had a concrete role offers the interviewer much more signal than explaining how your team tackled the problem.
• Quantify your impact. To learn more about how to do so, read “My Personal Formula for a Winning Resume” by Laszlo Bock (former SVP of People Operations at Google) and “How to Quantify Your Resume Bullets” by Lily Zhang (former Career Services Specialist at MIT).
• Vary your professional stories. Offer some diversity in your stories by making sure that they don’t all stem from just one area of your personal or professional experience.

Remember that your goal as a candidate is to show that you can clearly explain a complex problem in addition to talking about the decisions you made, their tradeoffs, and the impact of your actions on the project and its stakeholders.

Once you have several professional stories in mind that exhibit the skills the company you’re applying to is looking for, use the Situation-Task-Action-Result (STAR) method to share your story:

• 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? Focus on your actions, while being humble, and acknowledging the accomplishments of your team. Make sure that your actions highlight 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.

Using the STAR technique helps candidates tell a linear story about their personal impact in their previous role(s). When evaluating these answers, interviewers typically aim to learn whether a candidate is a results-focused team player, who seeks out industry knowledge, has demonstrated influence over their coworkers and pursues new growth opportunities.

It’s important to practice your professional stories, but be careful not to memorize them. It’s good to review your answers before your interview to give you confidence, knowing that you’re prepared.

Highlight your Soft Skills

Today’s companies are looking for employees with both technical aptitude and stellar interpersonal skills — so make sure to talk about these skills too. Great startups want their employees to collaborate effectively with teammates, establish empathy for their users, and potentially develop into leaders one day.

Remember that good communication is not only about what you say, but the way you say it. For in-person interviews, remember to look out for non-verbal cues your interviewer may be giving you. Particularly when you’re giving your professional stories, you want to make sure that your interviewer is following along and looks like they understand and are engaged with what you’re saying.

Be genuine and look positive during the interview. Show that you’re proud of your work, excited about what the company is doing, and that you can confidently communicate about your professional workflows. Behavioral interviews are as much about figuring out whether you’ll be an employee that the team would love to work with as they are about verifying your professional skills.

Engage Your Interviewer

Behavioral interviews are about more than just your ability to show that you have the skills for the job and that you’re a good team member. It’s also about turning your interviewers into your champions, getting someone on the team to fight for you.

But how do you turn your interviewer into someone that will choose you when making the decision between two equally qualified people? Build a real connection with your interviewer.

Personal and professional stories are critical here — when you share any story of self, your interviewer will better understand how you think, which helps them feel like they’re getting to know you.

At the end of a behavioral interview, you’ll be given the opportunity to ask your interviewer a few questions. Be sure to come prepared with some questions you have about the company or your interviewer(s). Not only will these questions offer greater insight into your interviewer(s) and their experience at the company, but it’ll also allow you to connect with them and have a more natural back-and-forth conversation.

It’s no secret that people enjoy speaking about themselves, so demonstrating genuine curiosity about your interviewer’s experience will make you feel more personable and memorable. Don’t ask them anything you can easily find out online. Here are some good examples:

• Can you tell me a bit about your background and what compelled you to join this company?
• What projects have you enjoyed working on most? Why?
• What are the most important projects you’re working on now? How’re you making it happen?
• Who are your mentors at the company? What have you enjoyed most about working with them?
• What opportunities are there for growth and personal development? Have you taken advantage of any of these opportunities?

After posing your questions, the critical next step is to make sure you actually listen to and engage with their answer. It may sound obvious, but many candidates ask their question and then immediately jump into their next question without a second thought or breath, which may make the interviewer feel that the candidate wasn’t actually interested in their answer and was just trying to score points.

When you focus on listening, the conversation will naturally become a two-way exchange. You’ll be able to ask unrehearsed follow-up questions about what they said, which will boost the likelihood of your interviewer connecting with you.

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
• Hack Campus’ Guide to Technical Interviews — A guide on how to tackle technical and behavioral interview questions by HackCampus
• How to Talk About Yourself in an Interview — A guide on how to answer questions about your previous technical projects by Nick Larsen, Principal Data Engineer at Stack Overflow