Posted Feb 24, 2023
Preparing yourself to answer behavioural questions
Preparing yourself for an interview involves being ready to answer questions relating to your skills and job experience alongside qualifications you may have. However, to add to that, what is also important is to be prepped for behavioural interview questions.
These questions are aimed at analysing what you have done or would do in certain situations or scenarios, this gives the hiring manager an insight to your attributes, experience and capabilities.
Examples of behavioural interview questions:
Behavioural interview questions sound a little something like this:
- ‘’Give me an example of a time where…’’
- ‘’Describe a time when…’’
- ‘’What would you do if…’’
- ‘’How would you handle a situation where…’’
Some behavioural questions may require you to put yourself in hypothetical scenarios and utilise your imagination to come up with an answer. In cases like these, you need to be able to think on your feet. But what can make answering such questions easier? Let’s take a look below:
Developing your stories
In the past, you may have experienced similar situations to the hypothetical question being asked by the interviewer. As such, what you can do is utilise what you’ve learnt through these experiences and compose a short story in under a minute on how you have tackled similar issues at your previous workplace (ensuring that the issue is relevant to the question being asked)
Sample behavioural interview questions:
Communication
- Describe a situation where you successfully motivated someone else.
- Tell me about a time when written communication skills made a difference.
- Describe a time where you had to fire someone in the workplace
- Tell me about a time where you had to give one of your employees constructive criticism
Achievements
- Tell me about your greatest professional achievement.
- Tell me about a successful project you took over that lead to your professional development
Leadership
- Give an example of a time when you had to prioritize multiple projects.
- What supporting skills do you reckon are vital for a leader
- How do you manage conflict within your team
Analysis
- Tell me about a time when your critical-thinking skills came in handy.
- Tell me about a time when you used data and analysed information to solve a problem.
- Describe an analytics experiment that you designed. How were you able to measure success?
Teamwork
- Give me an example of a situation where you had to work with someone you weren’t necessarily getting along with
- Describe a time you had to gather input from employees outside your team.
