Answering behavioral interview questions is shockingly uncomplicated

today I'm going to explain to you how to answer literally any behavioral interview question now it doesn't matter what job you're working in if you're someone who's highly technical like a

software engineer or if you're someone who works on the business side knowing how to answer behavioral interview questions is still equally as important because although in the interview process for someone who's more technical

there's more weight probably being placed on the technical portion of the interview you are still often going to run into behavioral interview questions which are more qualitative in nature and

are going to ask you about different experiences and times in your life or career when you've demonstrated certain qualities that the interviewer is looking for hi if you're new to the

channel my name is Matt I'm currently working in strategy Ops at Google before that I was a Management Consultant at BCG and I make these videos because I enjoy it but let's get back to it so the

first thing that I think we need to talk about is what is a behavioral interview question and I know most most people at this point are probably looking at me and thinking dude of course I know what a behavioral interview question is do

you think I'm stupid that's just a question when someone asks me oh yeah tell me about a time when you demonstrated leadership or tell me about a time that you failed right and then I just give them an answer draw off my

experience and demonstrate that I am a winner and that I am someone that they should hire right now while at a surface level that is what a behavioral interview question is it's actually a

little bit deeper than that and we're going to get into that today so a behavioral interview question is simply a question where the interviewer is trying to get you to demonstrate a

certain quality now this question can be framed in a million different ways but at the end of the day there are going to be a certain set of qualities that

employers are always looking for now what I have behind me are what I would argue 99% of employers would like to see in some way shape or form from potential candidates and this is based on my own

personal experience having interviewed at roles in finance Consulting and Tech so take it with a grain of salt if you're interviewing for a different industry things could be slightly

different but generally speaking if you are interviewing for roles where you are going to have to work with other people then these qualities are going to be

tested the First Quality is leadership now why is leadership so important well leadership is a really common quality that most companies want from their employees because at the end of the day

you eventually want that person that you hired when they were 22 to hopefully get promoted and move up through the ranks and how does that happen well part of it is they have to demonstrate leadership

now the word leadership is maybe a little bit overrated I think that at the end of the day this is similar to what I'll just call taking the

initiative AKA are you someone who is a self-starter do you take the initiative are you proactive when you're given a task or are you someone that's just passive and has to wait for your manager

to tell you what to do and so this is a quality that doesn't matter what job or what company you're at an employer will almost always want to hire someone with more initiative versus someone with not all else being

equal and so this is a very very commonly tested quality that you need to be able to demonstrate in behavioral interviews or at least need to be prepared if called upon to deliver a

story that demonstrates that you have shown initiative in the past or that you are a leader an example of this question that commonly could come up is yes tell me about a time when you demonstrated

leadership now that's the most straightforward version of this question but as I said earlier there can be many different ways of asking this question for example I just brought up the word

initiative so this question could have also been phrased as tell me about a time when you demonstrated initiative or even better than that tell me about a

time when you took the lead even though you were not in a formal position of leadership now all three of these questions are actually just asking the

same exact thing they're all just trying to ask you to demonstrate this quality right here but they're asked in slightly different ways and sometimes the more nuanced ways of asking it such as the

last one that I just mentioned of tell me about a time when you demonstrated taking the initiative even though you weren't formally in a position of authority now that trips some people up because they're not expecting it and

then suddenly they're thinking oh shoot uh I don't know if I ever had a situation like that in my life where I wasn't in a formal position of authority AKA I didn't have the title of being someone in leadership but I still took

the initiative right and so that's something to keep in mind as well as we go through these qualities now the next quality is resilience and resilience is an interesting one because you would think

that right off the bat oh they want me to show a positive quality right and your mind goes to thinking about things you've achieved but actually this question is simply trying to understand

how you react to challenges and how you react to failure and so there's a bunch of different ways that this question can be

asked or rather a bunch of different questions that can be posed to try and get you to demonstrate resilience the most common of which is tell me about a

time that you failed but also something that not everyone notices is that so this question while it can be posed as tell me about a time that you failed or tell me about a time that you overcame a

challenge you could also be asked tell me about your proudest accomplishment now that is a little bit different because it's not as obvious now that they're actually trying to understand your resilience because when

somebody asks you tell me about your proudest accomplishment or your biggest achievement up to date most people they immediately just want to start bragging about something that they're proud of

and it's totally fine to be proud of your accomplishments but they're actually more interested in what it took for you to go from point A to point B and to actually get to that

accomplishment which often times is going to involve overcoming some sort of monumental challenge or hurdle AKA demonstrating resilience they're not as interested in the actual accomplishment

itself and I think that's something really really important to consider so this question can actually be also asked as tell me about your proudest accomplishment and what it took to get there but moving on so the third quality

is teamwork and like I said if you're interviewing for a role that involves you having to work with other people which is 99% of jobs today then you're going to probably run into this question

at one point or another which is tell me about a time when you had to work in a team now that's like the easy one though right as you're sort of probably picking up there's like first level questions

which are Super obvious and then there's sort of like second level and then there's like third order questions that are much more nuanced and so again the first order question here for teamwork would be something like tell me about a

time that you worked in a team tell me about a time that you collaborated with others like it's so obvious what they're asking right but if they get a little bit deeper and they ask a more nuanced version of that

like a second or third order question that could be something like tell me about a time when you had to bring together a group of people that you didn't know or tell me about a time when

you had to bring together a group of people with disperate backgrounds to achieve a common goal now that is a more nuanced question and I know some of you

might be thinking right now wait Matt isn't that also like isn't that a leadership question because if you're bringing together a group of people isn't that demonstrating leadership and yes if you caught on to

that you're one step ahead because what you'll realize soon is that a lot of stories actually can cover multiple qualities but we'll get to that in a bit and so anyways just be aware that

teamwork is another quality that is commonly tested now the fourth one which is similar to teamwork is how do you deal with other people how do you influence or persuade people to your

side to your opinion how do you voice your thoughts and so a common way that this is asked is tell me about a time when you had to influence someone or

persuade someone or a group of people of a certain objective or goal what did you do what did it take now that's the basic level question but a more nuanced version of this which is a little bit more difficult and might trip some

people up can be if they add a little bit more detail and they say tell me about a time when you had to convince someone who was more senior than you of your

opinion or tell me about a time when you had to convince someone more senior than you of an opinion that they disagreed with you on now that makes it even more difficult because now you start thinking

of okay how do I demonstrate that I'm able to influence not just my peers but also people who are more senior than me with more Authority and finally rounding it out the fifth bucket that you'll

commonly run into when interviewing at companies is an ethical or moral conflict and so these are going to be questions where they're asking you about a situation when you saw something or

you heard something that didn't really make you feel right maybe it was ethically or morally ambiguous and you had the choice of either like bringing it to the light and raising it to

management or you could have just shoved it under the rug and forgotten about it and this is really trying to test your integrity and so a common way that this question is posed is tell me about a time when you ran into a moral or

ethical Conflict at work and what did you do or tell me about a time when you saw a coworker doing something that was unethical what did you do about it now these ones are tricky because a lot of

the times you don't want to come across as someone who is necessarily A tattletail but you also don't want to come across as being someone that just turns the other way and turns a blind

eye to unethical Behavior right and so it's a nuanced approach to how you have to answer these questions but now that we've talked through these five major qualities one thing I want to note is that some of you are probably saying

wait but Matt isn't there a chance that someone asks me a question that's actually not related to any of these five buckets and yes it is possible

although the probability is quite low because again as I've mentioned a lot of questions framed in different ways are actually just asking about the same qualities so for example being asked

about success is actually also asking about challenges and failure and resilience asking about teamw work can also be asking about how you influence and persuade others and whether or not

you're a leader SL you take the initiative and so now that we understand this the first step you need to do and the first thing I always recommend to students or anyone who's

interviewing is in order to prepare you need to first start with a brain dump and what is that that's just when you take out a Google doc or you take

out a piece of paper and you start writing down everything that comes to mind when it comes to your experiences both in your personal and your professional life just write down every

single possible experience you've had and keep in mind these qualities as you think through what sort of experiences you've had in your life that potentially demonstrate each of these now I know some of you are probably like dude I

don't actually feel like I have qualities that these people are testing for like I don't feel like I'm a leader like I don't know if I've ever led a club on campus or I don't know if I've ever been like the speech and debate

Champion or I don't know if I've ever had to do anything at work where I was a quote unquote leader but here's the thing it doesn't have to be an official

position or title of authority it doesn't have to be something where you were like the president of a club CL think smaller and think more detailed there are tons of situations throughout

our daily lives and throughout our professional and personal lives that demonstrate leadership that demonstrate resilience that demonstrate teamwork persuasion blah blah blah it can be

literally as it can literally be as small as oh I was helping out with this event and then I saw this thing happen and then you know somebody tripped and Spilled their drinks everywhere and I

went over there and I immediately called for help and got rallied the troops and got everyone else to come over and help this person out and we cleaned it up in 10 minutes it can be something literally as small as that and so don't limit

yourself again this is a brain dumb we can cut out irrelevant stories later but the goal of this step is to Simply get as many experiences as possible that

later we can then draw on and actually craft our stories which leads me to the Second Step which is time to craft Your Arsenal now I've said Arsenal because every time you go into an interview it's

kind of like you're going to battle and the person who's the most prepared who has the biggest Arsenal sure that might not necessarily ensure that you'll win but it certainly doesn't hurt to have as

many weapons as possible in Your Arsenal when going into a battlefield and so I'm going to gloss over this second section because I think this is very commonly known framework the star framework for

forming your behavioral interview responses but let's walk through it quickly one by one so just to run through the star framework really quickly you start with the situ situation which is laying the groundwork and spending like 10 seconds talking

about the context and then you move into the task which is what basically you were asked to do by someone finally the action which is what you actually did in response to

receiving that task and then the result which is closing it off and explaining what the actual outcome of your actions was and by the end of this once you get

to the result it should be clear to the person listening that you clearly have the quity of whether it's leadership resilience teamwork influencing whatever Integrity

it should be very clear to them what you've demonstrated there should be no question in their mind and even though it's split out into four steps the goal

here is to create a cohesive narrative so it shouldn't sound super like blocky or it shouldn't be like super awkward moving from situation to task or task to action or action to result it should

sound just like a story and it should flow seamlessly and so to give an example let's say that I got asked a question about uh tell me about a time when you had to influence someone more

senior than you at work of a certain decision so the situation would be something like okay so back when I was an investment banking analyst there was

a product that the team used called pitchbook which is a subscription-based website where you can access all sorts of data related to early stage startup companies including how much funding

they've raised how old they are who the founders are any news related to the company and any other internal metrics that are publicly available and this product was super important to the

investment banking analysts in my class but one day I was in a meeting with our head of m&a and he was mentioning to me that you know this pitchbook subscription it's so expensive I'm really thinking about canceling our

subscription because honestly it seems like you can get all this information on Google stop so that's the situation and then to continue it though now we have to go into the task or basically the Imp

to the actions that I later did so in this case it could be something like and so I was in this meeting listening to the managing director and I told him you know honestly I actually find this pitchbook product to be pretty useful

because it saves us a lot of time and he said to me you know if you can show me some data to back that up then I'll honestly renew our subscription and so I decided that I was going to go back and

Survey my analyst class and so that is the task that I was given by the managing director to basically find some data or come back to him with a more compelling argument as to why we should keep the pitchbook subscription and the

action that I'm going to take is I'm going to go and Survey my analyst class and so continuing the story and so I went out and I surveyed the entire analyst class at the bank and basically

asked them a few simple questions about do you find pitchbook to be valuable would your workflows be significantly inhibited or SL would your productivity be significantly reduced if you didn't

have it and why and after I ran that simple survey and aggregated all the results I went back back to the managing director and I showed him the results and I said hey look the data shows that all the analysts or the majority of the

analysts at the bank actually find pitchbook to be highly highly valuable because it's helping us to save a ton of time when we're building pitch decks and when we're building meeting materials

for investors it's helping us because it's aggregating all of the data into one place and once he saw that data he was convinced and decided to renew the subscription and so what I learned from

that experience is that even if you're working with someone more than you sometimes it helps to come prepared with some data or to go out and to do a little bit of digging on your own so that you can prepare a more compelling

argument backed by information that says this is the right decision so that's an example of how you might want to talk through a specific story using the star

framework of situation task action and result now notice also that at the end I said this one phrase which is and what I learned from that experience is X

this is something that's kind of small but is also pretty important and if you can Implement into your behavioral interview responses you will just be that much sharper in the interview

because what you're doing when you say and what I learned from that experience ultimately was X Y and Z is you're actually tying all of these things together you're synthesizing basically everything that you've just talked about

this whole story with all these details that you've told them you're basically tying it all up together into a little bow at the end and hammering home the point that this is how I demonstrated this quality or this

is where I learned that challenges setbacks are normal but I can overcome any new failure or this is where I learned that in order to successfully work in a team you have to understand everybody's

Viewpoint the lights are turning off because I've been talking for so long where was I so yes always try to tie everything up at the end and say

something about this is what you learned from the experience and ultimately this is what happened this is what you took away from it because if there's no takeaway then it's less clear to the interviewer after you finish talking

what you actually learned from The Experience now the next thing I wanted to talk about here is you want to always focus on showing not telling now what do I mean by that showing versus telling you may have heard your teacher talk

about this in English class it's when you basically don't just tell someone that you have leadership or that you're a team player but you actually show them through the story and through the

details and so to give a concrete example let's say we're talking about a story where you demonstrated that uh overcoming failure or in this case getting bad feedback from your boss

maybe you're you messed up on something and your boss told you that you messed up so if you were going to just tell someone what happened or how you felt you would just say my boss told me that I messed up and I felt

upset right nothing you're saying is factually incorrect but it simply doesn't hit the point as well as if you say something like my boss told me that I messed up and the first thought that

came to my mind was boy am I screwed right two different ways of saying the same exact thing but the second way really demonstrates like wow

you were feeling under pressure and you at that moment felt like you were actually screwed what are you going to do now right and then that's where you start going into and this is what I did to bounce back blah blah blah this is

how I overcome that failure and so again the Nuance here is that the second option when you're showing not telling you're storytelling again your storytelling and this comes back to

tangent here but majority of interviewing and conveying your experiences to other people is knowing how to craft the right story and knowing how to tell your experiences in a way

that's captivating to the audience and doesn't cause them to tune out you have to give them a reason to want to pay attention because again put yourself in your interviewer's shoes they're

literally interviewing probably 10 20 people a week why on Earth should they listen to the 10th person talk about a time that they failed why on Earth

should they listen to you talk about that oncampus Business Club that you're a part of when five other people also talked about the oncampus business club that they were all also a part of the

day before you make it interesting by telling stories stories are what Captivate people and how do you tell good stories well you show you don't

just tell but now let's move to the final step so once you've crafted your r person and now let's say you have at least two stories aim for at least two stories that demonstrate each of these

qualities now the reason why you want to have at least two and not just one is because say for example you have one story that demonstrates leadership and also uh influencing and persuasion and

then you get asked tell me about a time that you demonstrated leadership and then you give that story but then right after they also ask you tell me about another time that you demonstrated influencing SLP persuasion

and now you've used used up your story that covers this quality and you're like oh shoot now I have to make up something on the Fly and you never never never want to run into that situation and so

best case scenario have more than one story that backs up each of these qualities because you never know what might happen and you don't want to be caught short-handed but moving to step

three practicing the delivery now this is a step where I think most people think that all they have to do is just practice a few times maybe with a and

then they'll be fine but the reality is I think most people underweight the importance of this third step and then they overweight the importance of this first and second step which is the brainstorming stage because I've talked

to a lot of students and I've done some coaching as well and almost everyone always has like a giant word dock with all their behavioral questions and then

it's like 10 15 pages long and they've written out like huge paragraphs of different times when they've demonstrated leadership or teamwork or resilience but then I go in and I

actually ask them like okay let's do like a mark question and let me ask you okay tell me about a time when you demonstrated this quality and then I pretend to be their interview and we do some role playing and then the delivery

is just not good and the reason is because they didn't practice properly and they've done all this thinking and they put it all on paper but all of this work is nothing if you can't deliver it

because an interview is in person it's live it's when you speak to someone it's not like you submitting an essay to your professor so how do we get good with the delivery

well the number one question that I get and the number one problem that I see a lot of people run into is how do I avoid sounding scripted how do I avoid

sounding like I'm just reading off of a paper the solution is really simple nine times out of 10 the reason why you're sounding scripted is because you

prepared by writing word for word what you thought you should say and you have maybe a whole paragraph and you're trying to memorize it or you're trying to remember what you wrote word

for word and so what that's doing is it's making you focus more on memorization than on fluidity and forming cohesive coherent sentences and

so when you practice you should never never practice using completely scripted out written paragraphs it's okay if during your brain dump phase you want to

do that but when you're practicing verbally always use bullets short bullets and then force yourself to practice by only looking at those like four or five bullets per story and what

this is going to do is yes it's going to be tough it might be awkward because you're going to forget what you wanted to say but it's going to force you and it's going to force your brain to actually work you're not just memorizing

it's going to force you to form cohesive sentences coherent sentences that flow because your brain's going to be like oh shoot okay I know bullet one is like uh I got a bad grade at school and bullet

two is like I talked to the professor at office hours to see if there was anything that could be done but then how do I connect the dots between bullet one and bullet two and then it's going to force you to think about what to say and then you're going to say something that's more natural because you're not

going to be just memorizing and so bullet points is number one second thing is you have to have to record yourself I say this in a lot of videos but I'm going to say it again the number one

thing that you can do to get the most immediate feedback on your communication skills and your delivery is to record yourself because the harshest critic of

ourselves is us and so if you can look at yourself on a screen and you're forced to not only see what you look like when you're talking but also hear how you sound nine times out of 10

you're going to cringe if you're not someone who does this on a daily basis like I do say you don't you're not a YouTuber or you're not someone who has to be on camera all the time you're

going to be like what the heck I sound like that I sound like that uh but it's good good because what it's going to do is you're actually going to notice really acutely all the times that

you say um or like or all the times that you like broke eye contact or you looked down from the camera and you're going to be like wow I actually I look so not confident when I look down at the camera maybe next time instead if I want to

break eye contact with the interviewer I should just look to the side right or maybe next time when I don't know what to say instead of saying like or sort of or you know I should just pause

and take a second to think because it makes me come across as actually more thoughtful right okay so the third thing I already mentioned here but this kind of ties into the recording yourself

thing just remember to watch yourself and remove any filler words remember that pauses always feel longer to you than to the person on the other side of the table and an easy way to honestly

just come across as someone who's a little bit more thoughtful is to take pauses instead of using filler words take your time and let yourself think

and be comfortable with the silence now if you can do all of these things and deliver your stories in a way

such that you demonstrate the situation task action and result in a cohesive way and you have stories multiple stories that demonstrate each of these major commonly tested qualities then I

guarantee you the next time you go into an interview and you get asked a behavioral interview question you're going to deliver it with confidence you're going to deliver it with conviction and ultimately you're going

to leave the interview thinking to themselves dang I want to hire that guy or that girl I want them on my team now the last thing I'll do is I now just want to go through some examples for each of these five

qualities and I'll give you an example that I've used personally in the past for Behavioral interviews now that we've talked through the entire process of how to prepare and so with the leadership and initiative question and the

influencing of persuasion question I sort of already walked through an example where I convinced the head of m&a at the Investment Bank that I work at that we should renew our pitchbook

subscription but now let's talk about a story relating to resilience so I used to play the violin in high school and

when I was a senior in college I really really really wanted to join this one orchestra that was the highest level at the music school and uh went on

International tour every year and it was my last chance to get into this Orchestra because so I was a rising senior and so I practiced super hard on the violin went into my auditions the

day of the auditions gave it my all and unfortunately wasn't selected and so I was really upset for about a week and I thought that was that but a week later I got a call from the

director of The Orchestra program telling me that hey Matt although the violin auditions were extremely competitive this year we actually have a need for more

violists which is a different instrument and so if you're willing to to actually study the viola over the summer for the next couple months will give you another chance to re audition in the fall for a

chance to join the viola section so what did I do well I absolutely jumped on the opportunity and I for the next few months hired a viola teacher spent all my days basically practicing trying to

learn how to read the music because it's like reading a different language it's in a different clef if you're Musical and I just remember practicing so much my family was driving to

vacation in Maine and uh my parents thought it was crazy I was literally practicing in the Airbnb but by the end of the summer I re auditioned and was fortunate to get

accepted in the orchestra and ended up going on tour in Norway through five different cities and it was one of the most incredible experiences of my life and ultimately what I learned from that experience is sometimes opportunities

come up serendipitously and so it helps to have an open mind when it comes to failure and just being prepared for new opportunities that you may not have expected did

initially and so that's an example of resilience overcoming Challenge and failure and I think the last quality that I'll cover is a demonstrating ethical/moral conflict and how you responded to that so basically

demonstrating integrity and so an example here could be yeah so the summer of my freshman year I actually worked at a UPS package facility where we

basically processed packages and loaded them into the backs of tractor trailer trucks it was a super grueling job manual lay labor every day would show up to work my back would be hurting and

basically for 8 hours straight with a few breaks we would be throwing bags into the back of trucks now this was an hourly wage job and so we had to punch in and punch out and about halfway

through the summer I noticed that one of my colleagues one of my co-workers was actually punching in and punching out a little bit early during the day and then delaying his punch out time so that he

basically would get an extra hour of pay an hour or two hours of pay every single day now it didn't seem like a big deal to me at the time because you know what's an extra hour really it's just a

minimum wage job and so it didn't feel like something that required escalating to a manager or making a big deal about it plus I didn't want to get on his bad side but as I thought about it a little bit more and as I brought it up with my older brother and had a conversation

with him he mentioned something to me that really struck me which was that it's really the little things that define who we are it's how we react when people aren't watching and it's the little things that see insignificant

that actually reflect the most about our character and when I thought about that I realized that this wasn't really something that I felt comfortable letting slip by and so I brought it up with the manager and I I told him that look I don't want this person to get in any trouble but I just want to raise

this to you that I've been noticing that this has been happening and what ended up happening was the manager obviously had to speak with that person and they didn't end up losing their job thankfully but the company later then realized they needed to implement a

better timekeeping system that was less manual and again what I took away from that experience is that the little things are the most important when it comes to your character because it's the small things not the big things that

make a huge Splash or noise it's the little things that people don't see that actually Define who you are as a person I hope you guys find this video helpful that's all I got for you I'll see you in the next one