What is a Behavioral Interview?

A behavioral interview is an interview that focuses on asking questions about specific examples from your past. The goal is to present a graduate school applicant with relevant questions that might indicate how they would perform in a similar future situation. Standard interviews typically have a 10% predictive value in predicting the future success of an applicant. Behavioral interviews have a predictive value of over 50%, making them much better at finding good graduate students that will fit into a school’s culture.

Movie making is a multi-billion dollar industry in this country. Why? It’s because everyone likes to hear a good story, and the best movies contain great stories. An interview can be a big aggravation for both sides. Usually, they are tense, uncomfortable, and boring for both the interviewer and the graduate school applicant. Your attitude, confidence, body language, and conversation skills can make an interview less tense and more comfortable, but good stories are what can eliminate the boredom.

Think about your favorite relatives. In many cases, they are your favorite because they are such raconteurs, or good storytellers. These are your aunts and uncles that can turn a simple trip to the grocery store into high adventure and will keep you captivated and entertained. Even if you’re not a natural storyteller, with a little thought and practice, even you can turn your dull past work and undergraduate school experiences into exciting exploits.

Stories are your strongest weapon for captivating the interviewer and setting yourself apart from the other graduate school applicants. The questions in a behavioral interview literally beg for stories to be told. These need to be compelling stories, real time drama, and you’re the hero. You want the interviewer begging for more, asking follow-up questions, eager to hear how it ends.

The easiest way to prepare for these behavioral questions is to scour your memory for any instance in which you played a leadership role or accomplished a goal. You are not interested in situations that required a lot of effort, as much as you are interested in identifying situations that achieved or accomplished a lot of results. Results are the key to the end of your story.

These can be from any part of your past, during your education, at home with your family, projects at work, or anything that you might have had a part in. Identify the main characteristics of the story, you want to have things straight. Make sure you know the basics of what happened, who was involved, why it occurred, and how the events unfolded sequentially. You certainly don’t want to stumble over the facts and repeat yourself during the interview.

These basic stories are building blocks. Just as a piece of lumber can be cut into many different shapes and have many completely unique uses, each of your stories does not only answer one unique question. Your stories are one size fits all. With practice you will find that you can use the same story to answer two seemingly unrelated questions.

For example, a question about teamwork and working under pressure can both be answered by a story about your experience playing intramural basketball in college. The story could describe how you had to work as a team in order to get into the playoffs, spending time practicing together, coordinating plays, whatever was necessary for the team to advance. Alternatively, the story could focus upon the clutch shots that you made that season in order to win the game in the last few seconds of play under enormous pressure. The basic story is the same: your experiences playing intramural college basketball.

The questions were different, but you customized the story to fit the question. With practice you should be able to answer almost any question with just a few stock stories that can be customized.

The key to a great behavioral interview is telling great stories. Some questions will lend themselves more readily to a story than others. You must have a set of basic stories ready that can be modified to fit the occasion. You must “find the bridges” in the questions offered to make sure your best stories get told.

In WWII, the US Army used Bailey bridges. Bailey bridges were bridges made of prefabricated steel sections that were carried around and could be thrown together at a moment’s notice, allowing the army to move quickly across any obstacle and get to where they wanted to go.

You need to find bridges, i.e. opportunities to tell your stories. Look for any chance to turn a standard interviewing question about anything, into a bridge to begin telling your story. For example, “What was your former job title?”

On the surface that might not seem like the ideal bridge, but with a little insight your response might become:

“My former job title was Product Line Manager. I was responsible for everything from the development of new products, to the obsolescence of old products. Marketing, sales, engineering, and production of the entire product line fell under my responsibility. One of the products was even my own idea based on feedback I received from my interactions with our customers. In the first year, it alone had achieved a sales level of over…”

The key to remember is that just because a question is asked as a closed ended question (yes/no, or one word answers), doesn’t mean that you have to answer it as a closed ended question. Answer the question asked, but then find a way to develop your answer and a bridge to a good story of yours. With an open mind, the most closed ended of questions can become a launch pad into a story.

When a question is asked, there are two ways to answer it. You can give a short answer, or you can give a long answer. Remember that you are not checking boxes on a graduate school application. The reason for the interview is to allow you to do more than just fill in answers to yes/no questions. This is your opportunity to shine.

Don’t stop with just answering the basic question asked. Don’t wait for the interviewer to prompt you to give more information or to explain yourself. Questions are opportunities. They are opportunities to launch into entertaining stories that will distinguish you from the competition. They are opportunities to show that you can be the perfect graduate school student.

Be specific and provide plenty of details. For example, if asked about goals, don’t just say that you are a goal-oriented person. Describe in detail HOW you are a goal-oriented person. At the beginning of every week you sit down with your planner and current projects and define what will be your weekly goals for each of your projects. Then, pull out your planner and show the interviewer the goals that you had set the week before. Explain and show the details that back up your answers.

Often a question may ask if you have had a certain type of experience. If you do, then by all means, say so, and into a story about one of those experiences. If you haven’t, rather than just answering, “I don’t have that experience,” say “I’ve found that the best way to learn something new is to have a willingness to just jump straight on in and get your feet wet. It’s always okay not to know the answer, as long as you know where the answer can be found. That type of willingness and a ‘can do’ attitude are the kinds of experiences that I bring to the table.”

Interviewers will typically get into areas that you often may not want to go. They are trying to push the envelope and find out everything about you. Sometimes those answers may not reflect positively upon you. For example, “What was your GPA?”

If you had a bad GPA, this may be a horrible question. But if you handle it properly, you could respond with:

“My GPA certainly does not reflect my capability. While I was in college, I had a goal that I wouldn’t get into debt. This meant that I was often working two, or even three jobs. The result was that I learned the true meaning of hard work, though I didn’t have as much time to study as was necessary. Now that I’ve graduated, that work ethic has…”

There are a lot of things that you don’t have control over in an interview, with the questions being asked near the top of the list. One thing that you are able to control is your answers. You alone decide what will come out of your mouth and be said. Therefore, use that to your advantage. If you are going to say something, be prepared; think quickly and say something good.

Don’t always try to have specific answers to every question. Many times a slight avoidance or maneuvering around a question will serve you much better than remaining specific and completely blunt. For example, if asked about any gaps in your employment, it may be wise to only give a generic answer. Don’t say that after you were fired, you fell into a state of depression, got arrested for disturbing the peace, were homeless for a year drifting between shelters, and finally decided to return to school. Instead, state that you spent much of the time traveling. Launch into a story about a place that you visited and how the experience taught you to appreciate different cultures and ideas, challenging you to look at things differently. By the time you finish, the interviewer will be ready to move on.

A good story can usually wind its way down a long path. There is always a danger that you will begin to bore the interviewer, who may wonder if an end is in sight. Some interviewers may get worried that they won’t be able to get through the fifteen questions on their list during the allotted time. Therefore, find natural breaks in your story and pause for a second. If the interviewer maintains eye contact or asks continuation questions, then keep going. But this will give them a chance to stop the story and ask a different question if they are getting bored and want to move on.

Take a few moments and review the standard interview form in the accompanying special report. This will remove a lot of the unknown and potential fear that you might have over what can be a scary process.

Recognize the type of person interviewing you. He or she might be a faculty representative filling out a standard form. His interview goal may solely be to fill out a form, and he might care less about how you could solve one of the problems facing your fraternity.

On the other hand, for example, you may have a grizzled old MD that doesn’t care in the least about your biggest weakness, but is looking for someone that is technically competent. Your best tactic is to find out his concerns and show him how you would overcome his doubts. When you are interviewed by the person that would be your supervising clinician focus on doing the task; tell them how you would do it.

When it’s all said and done, you should have an idea of how well the interview went. If the interviewer begins talking about the weather 10 minutes before the interview is over, then you know you came across poorly. If the interview is a success, the interviewer will generally give you a sign of that by giving out more specific information about the next steps and selling you on how great his graduate school is to attend.

Don’t try to answer every question by shooting from the hip. You’ll spend most of your time trying to think of what happened and repeating yourself. Think of the classic stories that you could tell and then practice going over them with your friends, explaining how you successfully achieved the goal, or took charge and gave leadership to your group project. You don’t want to have the story memorized, because it will become stale in the telling, but you want it to be smooth. This story must be live and in living color, where the interviewer can see himself taking part on the sidelines and watching the situation take place. Have your friends and family members quiz you by asking you random questions and see how well you can adapt to the question and give a lucid response.