Mastering your Interviews – Behavioural Questions
As we are now well and truly into the first quarter of this year, we wanted to refresh you with one of the most helpful (and widely-used) interview tools, to ensure that your putting your best foot forward!
Job interviews can be a daunting experience, even if you feel that you are prepared and a good fit for the position. A successful job interview has a lot to do with how confident you are, your body language, and how you answer the questions.
Behavioural competency questions are one of the most important components of interviews, and they are a technique used to analyse your suitability for the role and for the company, based on your past problem-solving decisions and general behvaiours – outside of your experience and skills. The employer will ask you questions based on real life situations that you have been exposed to in your professional environment, and there is a certain way you need to be answering them: The STAR method
For example: “describe a time when you worked with a challenging team member, how did you handle it?”
If you break the question up into four sections you will be able to construct a well thought out and structured answer.
- What was the situation/context of the achievement;
- Describe the task – what were you asked to do?;
- Explain the action you took; and
- Finally, the result/impact of your decisions/behaviour/action. Whether it was a positive achievement, or if it was an area for improvement/development for future courses of action.
If you adopt this model, you are setting yourself up to succeed in your interview when phased with a behavioural question.