The main reason for stress during an interview is lack of awareness of what is happening.
Hello everyone, I’m Yulia, for the last 4 years I’ve been successfully selling IT specialists, I know how to put together an ideal IT resume and prepare candidates for entrance and managerial interviews.
In general, interviews are loved by those who attend them often, which means they often change jobs. The rest experience stress in one way or another, which can cause them to make offensive mistakes. In this post I will discuss the topic behavioral interviewI hope this turns out to be useful.
Behavioral interview, or competency-based interview is a metric that companies use to assess candidates' non-technical skills and culture fit when hiring. That is, this is not a random set of strange questions – there are patterns in it.
Behavioral questions are not straightforward, they are rather situational. The interviewer is primarily interested in your teamwork skills, personality traits, communication style, approach to problem solving, and behavior in conflict situations.
It's important to remember that behavioral questions test your actual experience, Unlike a case interview, where you are asked situational questions that are not related to real examples from your work life.
How to understand what questions will be asked specifically to you?
In general, the higher your level, the more carefully your soft skills will be checked. Also, the answer to this question lies in the description of the vacancy for which you are interviewing.
Let’s take the Test Analyst job description from HH.ru:
From the description we can conclude that this vacancy is about team leadership responsibilities, meeting deadlines, planning, interaction with the team, contractors, and the ability to put out fires.
This means what we do Focus on preparing for questions about teamwork, leadership, project management, communication skills, planning work under pressure.
How to answer questions?
The easiest way to answer behavioral interview questions is to follow the method STAR:
Let's look at an example
Question:
“Have you ever had a situation where two developers from your team constantly argue on calls, causing the whole team to waste time, while their arguments do not lead to any results?”
Answer:
S – Yes, there was a situation when the backend and frontend engineers of my team could not find a common language. This greatly disturbed our teammates and because of this, we really could not have time to release the application on time
T – My goals in resolving the issue were: not to lose team members, not to allow a drop in velocity
A – I set up separate calls with engineers and received feedback from them on a colleague. At the same time, I called their managers and found out the goals from their plans and personal characteristics
R – It turned out that the backend engineer considered the frontend engineer not to be fully involved. The front-end engineer simply did not like to talk about his achievements. We have introduced weekly reporting for 5 minutes from each person on the work done within the framework of the daily, so that the process looks more transparent. And it really helped
What conclusions can be drawn from your answer:
You are a good team player and team leader, have positive experience in people management, conflict management, retention management
You are an experienced PM, capable of preventing a decrease in velocity and meeting the agreed project deadlines
You have good communication and negotiation skills
Thus, by answering 1 question, you have earned at least 3 pluses.
I hope this post was useful for you. In the next one I will discuss the topic of case interviews.
Good luck to all,
Julia Working bee
