Companies have increasingly adopted behavioral interviewing techniques as a key technique in screening candidates. What is a behavioral interview? Basically, it's an interview designed to elicit information that will tell the interviewer how you will perform on the job. The principle behind the technique is the belief that the best indicator of future behavior is past behavior. The technique involves asking a series of questions designed to get the candidate to talk about how he or she handled certain situations in the past. For example, if a company has a high-stress environment, the interviewer might ask a candidate to talk about whether she has ever been in a stressful situation in the past. If she says yes, the interviewer would proceed with a line of questions about what she had done in the situation, how it made her feel, how others had responded to her actions, how she relieved the stress of the situation, and so on.

Typically, the interviewer will have determined three or four behavioral characteristics that would be most important for on-the-job success and will have written out a definition of each such characteristic. Examples:

• Good listening: The ability to listen empathetically to a client's problems, asking appropriate questions and paraphrasing the responses.
• Written communication: The ability to capture, in a succinct manner, the most important issues to be resolved, the recommended action plan, and the desired outcomes.
• Project management: Taking responsibility for organizing tasks, reaching agreement on individual responsibilities and goals, monitoring progress, resolving problems, and reporting on status.

In a behavioral interview, you will be provided with such definitions of desirable characteristics and asked for examples of situations in which you have exhibited those characteristics. Sometimes, after you have provided one example, you will be asked for another, just to test the depth of your experience.

One of the supposed benefits of this technique for employers is that candidates cannot prepare for these questions in advance. However, you can help yourself by anticipating the types of questions you might receive and dredging your memory for examples of past behavior. You may be able to guess at some of the questions by analyzing the job requirements beforehand. Behavioral interviewing is a challenge, but preparation will help. You may feel that you didn't have perfect answers to each question, yet still be seen as much better suited than the other candidates who didn't anticipate behavioral questions. As one swimmer said to the other upon the sighting a shark: "Fortunately, I don't have to swim faster than the shark. I only have to swim faster than you."

Source: The Net