How To Answer Simple Questions In The Smart Way 

how to answer behavioral questions in interviews

Imagine you had a room filled with 500 people, And everyone of those 500 people in the room are HR professionals from various companies. Who wanted to hire you.

Yes, i am talking about 500 ideal companies, And you had one chance to answer just one question

“Tell us something about yourself” to get yourself hired.

If you said the right thing, you would get all of them begging you to join their company, Yes all.

If you said the wrong thing, all of them down to the last one would walk away from the room without offering you any job.

What will you say then?

Before you say anything, first thing you need to understand is 

What Is The Purpose Of Behavioral Questions In Interviews?

As human beings we are just a mere collection of our thoughts and ideas. These thoughts and ideas then form the basis of our daily habits and in the end these habits drive our daily life 99% of the time.

And that too on an auto pilot.[Maxwell Maltz “Psycho-cybertactics”].

So then it means that

The whole purpose of behavioral questions is to, get a glimpse of our internal thought processes and mental habits which we have developed over the years.

Role of Behavioral Questions In Candidate Selection

Are you curious to find out that how important role these behavioral questions play in your selection?    

How to answer brain teaser questions in interviews

It is obvious from the graph above that, candidates who are able to give a satisfactory answers to behavioral questions has double the chances of getting hired.

Research shows that sometimes it takes only one bad answer to a question for a candidate rejection

Behavioral Questions & Career Progression

Have you ever wondered that

Why every interviewer is interested in to know about your inner state of mind?

after all what it has to do with your job.

And

 Why do some people proceed very well in their career while others fail?

What Makes The Difference?  

In fact, when you start looking into it, your talent and your intelligence don’t play nearly as big of a role as you might think.

The research studies say that intelligence only accounts for 30% of your achievement — and that’s at the extreme upper end.

What makes a bigger impact than talent or intelligence? Mental toughness.

Research is starting to reveal that your mental toughness — or “grit” as they call it — plays a more important role than anything else for achieving your goals in career, health, business, and life.

That’s good news because you can’t do much about the genes you were born with, but you can do a lot to develop mental toughness.  

And that is the main reason interviewers are interested to know about your mental toughness and personality more then your technical skills.   

How To Answer Behavioral Questions?

Ok

Good until now you have understood the purpose of behavioral questions and how it servers a greater role in your selections and career progression.

Now is the time to learn about how to answer them.

I am not here at this very moment, to tell you one specific answer to this question. I am here to introduce you the power of context and how you will formulate your answer based on it.

Yes your answer to all these behavioral question does not mean anything for the interviewer, there is no right or wrong answer either, they are just meant to get a glimpse of certain aspects of your personality. In order to give a meaningful answer. All you need is understand the context of the question.

So what’s Context?

Yes that is the exact purpose of this article, to tell you about context. But you need to hold on for  a second.

As human beings we are just a mere collection of our thoughts and ideas. These thoughts and ideas then form the basis of our daily habits and in the end these habits drive our daily life 99% of the time. And that too on an auto pilot. This is explained very nicely by Maxwell Maltz in his book “Psycho-cybertactics”.

The whole purpose of these behavioral questions then is, just to get a glimpse of these thoughts and habits you have developed over the years.

So context is merely the purpose of the question. Simply put.

“The expectations in the mind of the interviewer. All he wanted is to verify that if your thoughts , ideas and habits are according to his expectations”

But how we can utilize this context thing? Lets simplify it

Can we simplify the Context?

Lets imagine you have applied for two jobs in two different companies

The first job is as customer support engineer

The second job is as software engineer

Now at your first Job the interviewer asks you this simple question

Q:“How you deal with angry people or how you handle conflict at work?”

Your answer: I mostly stay away from these kind of situations and try to stay quiet.

Now at your second job interviewer asks you same question

Q:“How you deal with angry people or how you handle conflict at work?”

Your Answer:  I mostly stay away from these kind of situations and try to stay quiet.

There is nothing wrong with your answer. But, it is the context of question which makes your answer wrong in one situation

Let us consider the first job which is “customer support engineer”  and the question

Q:“How you deal with angry people or how you handle conflict at work”

CONTEXT in the mind of interviewer:”How this candidate will deal with angry customers who are calling and complaining about service or asking for their money back, or some really frustrated customers who are using foul language to the support engineer for not fixing their problem on time”

Now have a look at you answer

Your Answer:  I mostly stay away from these kind of situations and try to stay quiet.

Interviewer will have a very negative impression of you,as If you just keep quiet in situations where customers are complaining then customers will actually get more mad by thinking no one is listening or understanding their complaints

Now consider the second job “software engineer”

“How you deal with angry people or how you handle conflict at work”

CONTEXT in the mind of interviewer: Can he go along with other developers in the team,in case if there are any conflicts about a solution.

Your Answer:  I mostly stay away from these kind of situations and try to stay quiet.

In this case your answer will be acceptable for the manager.

Now you are thinking, then what should be ideal answer in first job?

The ideal answer:

Your ideal answer for “Customer support engineer” should be something like this.

Q:“How you deal with angry people or how you handle conflict at work?”

Your Answer: “Well in these kind of situations i like to imagine myself in the shoes of the customer, and then always ask myself a question if i was the customer and had the same issue, as he is having then what i would do and what kind of behaviour i would be expecting from the support engineer, then i will always treat them in the way i would have liked for myself”

Super, now remember what was the context in the mind of the interviewer

CONTEXT in the mind of interviewer:”Dealing with angry customers who are calling and complaining about service or asking for their money back, or some really frustrated customers who are using foul language to the support engineer for not fixing their problem on time”

Now you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that interviewer will actually be very very satisfied with your answer Why ?

Simply because your answer is 100% aligned with the context of the question.

Keys to interview success

Remember the only purpose in the mind of the interviewer is to verify that

“If your thoughts, ideas and habits are aligned with the expectations of the job you are applying for”  

And if your answer is more aligned to the context of the questions, It will create a more positive impact on the interviewer.

The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand. Sun Tzu (fourth century BC)

 About The Author

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