Behavioral Interview Preparation

Interview Preparation
#1

Hello Everyone,

Behavioral questions are asked for a variety of reasons. They can be asked either to get to know your personality, to more deeply understand your resume, or just to ease you into an interview. Either way, these questions are important and can be prepared for. Behavioral based interviewing is interviewing based on discovering how the interviewee acted in specific employment-related situations. The logic is that how you behaved in the past will predict how you will behave in the future, i.e., past behavior predicts future performance.

In your interview, when you’re asked about a project, you’ll be able to come up with an appropriate story effortlessly. Study this grid before your interview.

NOTE: If you’re doing a phone interview, you may want to have this grid out in front of you.

Some additional advice:

  1. When asked about your weaknesses, give a real weakness! Answers like “My greatest weakness is that I work too hard / am a perfectionist / etc” tell your interviewer that you’re arrogant and/or won’t admit to your faults. No one wants to work with someone like that. A better answer conveys a real, legitimate weakness but emphasizes how you work to overcome it. For example: “Sometimes, I don’t have a very good attention to detail. While that’s good because it lets me execute quickly, it also means that I sometimes make careless mistakes. Because of that, I make sure to always have someone else double check my work.”
  2. When asked what the most challenging part was, don’t say “I had to learn a lot of new languages and technologies.” This is the “cop out” answer (e.g., you don’t know what else to say). It tells the interviewer that nothing was really that hard.
  3. Remember: you’re not just answering their questions, you’re telling them about yourself! Many people try to just answer the questions. Think more deeply about what each story communicates about you.
  4. If you think you’ll be asked behavioral questions (e.g., “tell me about a challenging interaction with a team member”), you should create a Behavioral Preparation Grid. This is the same as the one above, but the left side contains things like “challenging interaction”, “failure”, “success”, and “influencing people.

Thankyou.

Handling Behavioral Questions
#2

The specific question that are frequently asked in MBA Placements

  • Go over all of the significant current events in the news. Know some general knowledge about India and your state or city (politics, history, latest news etc.)
  • Be familiar with the newspaper you read, some key articles, and the names of the editors you follow.
  • Read academic papers and theories about workex. This is crucial, even if you have workex. (Read some important basics, and if asked, you must have some favourite themes.) Learn about your internships, projects, and other activities.
  • Read about statistics, continuous, differentiable, basic calculus, numerical methods, graphs, basic application based numbers, arithmatic, probability, PnC, and other mathematics topics.
  • Learn about inflation, CPI, WPI, Deflation, GDP, GDP calculation, Budget, and other related topics.
  • Know why you pursued a particular speciality.
  • Decide the industry you want to work in and why. (Names and details of some companies and roles are also included.)
  • Have a fundamental understanding of your hobbies.
  • Carefully review the forms you’ve already submitted; this is crucial. Know all of the possible counter-questions and be prepared.
  • Prepare to tell me a little bit about yourself. (Know what your name means and where it came from.)
  • Make a list of your short-term (5-year) and long-term objectives (10 years)
  • Recognize your own strengths and weaknesses. There are many instances based on real-life scenarios.
#3

In addition to the all above pointers for Behavioral Interviews, you need to focus on 3 main things and prepare as follows:

1. Situations you have been through to quote as example-

  • Identify the key metrics you work around for a task /activity on a day to day basis
  • Prepare situations that are around these key metrics
  • Prepare situations for major categories of traits like Strengths, Weakness, How you handled failure/ stress/ conflicts, result orientation, team work, leadership, ethical dilemma etc.
    *See what the company’s core values are and have those situations even more well prepared

2) Structuring your answer:
*Use the STAR Method as follows to talk about/describe the situation
*S-Situation
*T -Task
*A- Action
*R-Result

3) Honesty & Consistency

  • Stay true and honest to the situations are are talking about and do not make it up
  • You will be asked many follow up questions to test your consistency and that is possible only when you are honest about the situations

The best part about Behavioral interview are that there is no right or wrong answer, YAAAY!

You GOT THIS! :slight_smile: All the best !