Behavioral

Many jobs require a motivated self-starter that will seek out tasks and ensure they are on the right track. Employers are not looking for someone that gets confused and does not look for help. Many questions will focus on your own personal responsibility and how you handled issues that arose while you were working alone.

Companies do not want to hire someone that is always right. They want to hire someone that makes mistakes and learns from these mistakes. Questions about mistakes or errors in judgment are common. Come up with a few mistakes you can discuss if requested. Always make sure that you are able to follow up with what you learned from the experience and how it has affected your current decision making strategies.

behavioral questions that explore the key competencies of:

★ Teamwork

★ Leadership

★ Negotiation skills

Questions about managing others are not limited to management jobs. Businesses want to see examples of leadership in their employees. There are a variety of behavioral interview questions that are designed to see how well you handle a leadership role. The best way to answer this is to highlight why you delegated each task to its recipient. "I focused on the staff member's strength. I delegated the tougher IT tasks to Todd because he was more experienced. Jeff had an eye for accuracy, so I had him run data check. I handled the overall QA since I had the most experience with the details of the project."

This question is common for customer service, sales, marketing, management and IT jobs. Provide specific, job related examples. Did you create any documents? Did you practice its presentation? Did you run it by another employee? Remember to discuss all of the methods you used to simplify the information.

Sometimes you will have an answer that does not reflect well on your candidacy. It may be a good idea to feign amnesia and act as though you have not had the experience before. It may also be useful to tell the interviewer what you would have done differently. An answer for a difficult question may be "Well, at the time I did this, but soon after I realized that the ideal way to handle it would be that." Minimize the negatives and put more focus on how you would have handled the situation. Good answers will show the employer that you are willing to learn from your mistakes.

Behavioral interviewing or competency based interviewing explores workplace competencies that are required for successful job performance.

If the job requires a person to be able to analyze and find solutions to problems the interviewer will ask the candidate to provide an example of when they previously displayed that behavior.