Behavioral interviewing is hot these days and every job seeker should be fluent in handling this type of interview. A behavioral interview is based on the interviewer attempting to discover how the job candidate has acted in past jobs in various employment scenarios that likely, reflect the situations in the job at hand. Whereas a traditional interview would likely include the question: Please tell us your strengths and weaknesses, the behavioral interview seeks to understand from specific experiences that reveal your strengths and weaknesses and how you deal with them.
The underlying rationale is that past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior and will yield insights that will help the interviewer determine how the candidate might fit into the company culture.
Examples of behavioral interview questions a marketer might be asked are:
- Provide an example of a marketing campaign that didn’t perform as expected and how you handled it.
- Give an example of an occasion when you used logic to solve a problem.
- Give an example of a marketing goal you achieved and describe how you reached it.
- Describe a decision you made that wasn’t popular and how you handled implementing that decision.
- Describe a situation where your schedule was interrupted. Give an example of how your schedule was interrupted and how you handled it.
- Give an example of a difficult situation you had with a co-worker and how you handled it.
- Share an example of how you worked effectively under strong pressure to deliver on an extremely tight deadline.
- Describe a situation where you persuaded someone to do something they didn’t want to do.
As always, the best thing you can do is be prepared and practice. Our content partner, Boxwood, provides job candidates with expert advice for handling behavioral interviews from Alan DeBack in the below video.
