4 Behavioral Interview Tips and Key Questions for Hiring Managers
What Is a Behavioral Interview?
A behavioral interview is a hiring method that focuses on how a candidate handled real situations in past jobs. Instead of guessing how someone might act, you’re looking at how they’ve already responded in work settings, giving you a clearer picture of how they’ll likely perform.
By asking about specific experiences, hiring teams can get a better sense of a candidate’s problem-solving skills, communication style, and how they show up under pressure.
Why is Behavioral Interview Important?
Behavioral interviews are vital for evaluating a candidate’s soft skills and fit with the company culture. Instead of just looking at technical know-how, these interviews explore how candidates approached and resolved past challenges.
This gives hiring managers a real understanding of a person’s problem-solving, communication style, and values; key factors for ensuring a successful hire and long-term fit.
When finding the right candidates for your company, pre-employment assessments, like conducting a behavioral interview and other tests, make recruitment more manageable and effective. They reduce the chances of hiring mistakes, saving you time and resources in the long run.
One example of a pre-employment assessment is behavioral interviews. A behavioral interview simplifies evaluating applicants by analyzing their personalities to determine whether they fit the job and company culture. As a result, you lower your risk of getting a bad hire.
It pays to understand what behavioral interviewing is and identify questions you can ask to improve your recruitment process.
What Is Behavioral Interviewing?
Behavioral interviewing encourages candidates to provide specific examples of when they used a particular skill or behavior. Take this question, for example:
Recall a time when a colleague was deliberately unproductive. How did you handle the issue?
It shows the candidate’s sense of accountability and responsibility or approaches to handling similar problems as an employee of your company.
You can also mix in situational questions, like asking how they’d respond to a challenge they might face in your workplace. Together, these types of questions help you see both past behavior and future thinking, an ideal combo when hiring.
4 Behavioral Interview Tips
Adding behavioral interviews into your recruitment processes is important to improve the quality of new hires. Here are some behavioral interviewing tips to help you maximize them.
1. Ask questions based on the job
Don’t wing it. Tie each question to the role’s day-to-day demands. Hiring for customer service? Ask how they’ve handled upset customers or tricky calls. Their answers give you insight into how they think on their feet and whether their style fits your team.
2. Use a mix of situational and behavioral
Use a combination of situational and behavioral interviewing tips to gain a comprehensive understanding of each candidate’s knowledge and skills:
- Situational questions ask how the candidate would react to hypothetical situations.
- Behavioral questions inquire about how the applicant dealt with issues in their previous jobs.
Combining different question types produces a well-rounded assessment of applicants’ critical thinking, adaptability, and other relevant skills, ensuring you’re conducting a behavioral interview that thoroughly evaluates their capabilities.
3. Ask follow-up questions
Candidates may at times give vague or incomplete responses, so be prepared to ask follow-up questions. This step prevents misunderstandings and allows you to dive deeper into their values and decisions. More importantly, additional unexpected questions test how applicants perform under stress.
However, avoid excessive questioning that might make the interview feel like an interrogation. Be an active listener and probe for further details, but keep your follow-up questions relevant.
4. Schedule debrief meetings with other interviewers
Debrief with other interviewers following each interview to gather evaluations and form a single decision, such as whether to advance the candidate to the next recruitment stage. Creating a space to share perspectives and observations minimizes individual biases in the hiring team, while forming a more comprehensive assessment to guide the final hiring decision.
5 Behavioral Interview Questions You Need to Ask
The following questions assess a candidate’s skills, behaviors, and decision-making abilities in various work-related scenarios.
- Describe the most significant failure you’ve experienced in your previous job. What led to that situation, and how did you resolve it?
- How did you manage colleagues who were challenging to work with?
- What did you do when your manager made a decision that, in your opinion, is ill-advised?
- Talk about when you had multiple competing deadlines and how you managed them.
- Describe a project or initiative you led. What was your role, and how did you organize and motivate your team to achieve the desired outcome?
Pick the Right Candidates with EmployTest
Behavioral interviews are a reliable way to spot how a person might work with your team. They give you real examples of their strengths, judgment, and personality, key pieces of the hiring puzzle.
EmployTest can help you with behavioral interviewing. We offer many different pre-employment assessment tests to help you determine suitable candidates for your organization’s growth.
Sound promising? Check out our free sample employment test to see how it would work for you!