Standard Behavioral Job Interview Questions

Standard Behavioral Job Interview Questions
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Technical knowledge alone may not be sufficient to get you through a job interview; the interviewers judge you on a range of criterion variables. In addition to the regular questions the interviewers may pose up some behavioral job interview questions to get a glimpse of the various aspects of your personality, nature and attitude.

Not being prepared about such behavioral interview questions can compromise your chances of getting a new job. So, here we have a list of some of the standard behavioral questions asked during job interviews.

List of Behavioral Job Interview Questions

The sample behavioral questions for job interviews, which we have here, are used by interviewers to interrogate various behavioral aspects such as – teamwork, leadership, planning ability, organizing skills, ambition, decision making and problem solving skills.

  • Talk about a stressful situation you’ve been through and how did you cope with it?

  • Describe an occasion where you had to adjust to a working style that you were not comfortable with but still managed to achieve your objectives?

  • Talk about one of your weaknesses that has created difficulties for you on your previous job and what have you done to overcome that weakness?

  • What is one essential personality trait required to be successful at the job you’re applying for and why?

  • Describe some occasion when one of your colleagues criticized your work publicly – how did you respond?

  • Have you ever failed to meet deadlines in your past job, what were the repercussions and how did you explain the delay to your superiors?

  • If your team members don’t agree to a logical and viable solution proposed by you, how will you try to convince them?

  • If you’re faced with a situation where you must adhere to a policy that you don’t appreciate in your personal life – how would you act or react in such a situation?

  • What is the one thing or decision about your career which you would like to change, if given a chance, and why?

  • How would you help your team to achieve its goals if the team is divided within?

  • Talk about some situation in your career when you had much more work to accomplish than the available resources permitted, what was your strategic approach and how did you steer through the situation?

  • If you were penalized by your supervisor for someone else’s faults, how would you resolve this issue?

  • Talk about some task or project in which you failed. What were the contributing factors for this failure and where do you think you went wrong?

  • Has there been a situation in which an important decision was to be taken but your supervisor was missing – how did you handle the situation?

  • If your team members are not willing to cooperate with each other and there are constant conflicts, how will you try to get them working together?

  • If you’re stuck with a team member who doesn’t complete his share of work, which results in a drop in the overall performance of the team, how will you address this problem?

  • How would you get people to work as per your plan if they disagree with your ideas?

  • Has there been a situation where you and your team exceeded the expectations? What was your strategy and what were the most favorable factors that helped you in delivering such great results?

  • Talk about some problem where you went out of the way to find a unique solution? What was the solution and how effective was it?

  • Has there been some instance where you had to make a decision which made you unpopular amongst your colleagues? How did you get them to comply with your decision and what did you do to overcome their resentment?

  • What is the one factor or trait that gives you an edge over the other applicants who are being interviewed for this job vacancy?

  • What are your career objectives and what is your plan to achieve these objectives? Also, where do you see yourself five or ten years down the line?

  • Has there been an occasion where you anticipated problems much before others did and developed some preventive measures on your personal levels? Did the problems actually occur and were your solutions productive in solving the problem?

This is just a short list of behavioral questions you can be asked at a job interview, but will give you a fair idea of the types of questions to expect.

Image By: Sidharth Thakur