Another name for this kind of interviewing is 'Competency-based Behavioral Interviewing'. Behavioral interviewing has become the preferred method to know more about a candidate's skills and experience.
Behavioral interviewing involves the interviewer asking you to give specific examples of how you handled during a specific job-related situation/s.
Some call these questions the 'Tell me when...' questions.
The idea behind asking behavioral questions related to a job is to get a better understanding of how you will deal with a similar situation in future. Basically, 'past behavior is an indicator of future performance'.
Examples of behavioral interviewing questions probing a skill:
Programming:'Tell me when you had to go through undocumented code.'
Technical writing: 'Tell me when you had to introduce a new style guide midway through a copy editing project.'
Online marketing: 'Describe a situation when you had to cut down the paid per click advertising budget suddenly.'
Teamwork: 'Give me an example of training team members who had no prior experience of the job.'
Work ethic: 'Tell me when you worked long hours or put in extra effort
Customer service: 'Give me an example of when you had to deal with many angry customers.
Collaboration: 'Describe a situation when your team had work with multiple teams to see the project through.'
Leadership: 'Tell me when you had to convince your team to abandon project midway and start anew.'
How to answer the behavioral questions: The best way to answer is to come prepared with 3-5 sample success examples from past work, and you telling the story in the PAR format (Problem- Action- result). Other formats are STAR and SHARE. (please see above in this section).
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