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You sit down with a candidate and instead of asking, “What are your strengths?” you ask, “Tell me about a time you solved a tough problem under pressure.” Behavioral interviewing centers on this moment—real stories from past work, not rehearsed pitches or hypothetical guesses. It’s a tool that helps hiring managers predict how someone will perform by understanding how they actually handled real situations for interviewing techniques.
This approach goes beyond technical skills. It exposes personality traits and cultural fit, essential for long-term success.
Behavioral interviewing, also called competency-based interviewing, focuses on actions linked to success. Instead of vague answers, candidates share specific past examples. Interviewers dig into challenges like tight deadlines, conflict resolution, or key achievements.
For example, if a candidate shares they frequently engaged in litigation against employers, that hints at a possible confrontational style. This kind of insight rarely appears on a resume but matters when assessing teamwork.
Expect questions that dig into actual past experiences related to the job’s demands and company culture. If you’re hiring in finance, for instance, you might ask about communication during audits, attention to detail when reconciling accounts, or problem-solving around billing errors.
Candidates walk you through those moments: what happened, what they did, and the outcome. This concreteness makes evaluation clearer.
Good behavioral questions surface both technical skills and softer ones:
Management roles add leadership and resilience to the mix.
Both types matter. A technically strong candidate without teamwork or stress management skills often struggles in practice.
Hiring the wrong person carries real costs. You lose time and money on recruitment and training. Productivity drops. Morale dips. Customer satisfaction can falter.
Research shows replacing a salaried worker costs about $7,000, mid-level staff around $10,000, and senior executives near $40,000. In fields like accounting, bad hires risk errors in tax filing or financial reports that can damage a firm’s reputation.
Behavioral interviewing minimizes these risks by focusing on demonstrated patterns and fit.
Behavioral interviews offer a clearer window into how candidates work.
Preparation means setting up a fair, evidence-based process:
Keep them job-relevant. For leadership roles, go deeper into experience.
Use STAR to frame answers and evaluations:
This method keeps answers clear and comparable.
A standard session lasts about an hour with six to eight behavioral questions.
This keeps things clear and respectful of everyone’s time.
Behavioral interviewing focuses on past actions and real experiences to predict future job performance and cultural fit.
The STAR method provides a clear structure for candidates to explain Situation, Task, Action, and Result, making responses easier to evaluate.
Preparation ensures job-relevant questions, clear success indicators, and consistent scoring, reducing bias and improving hiring decisions.
Behavioral interviews explore actual past behaviors, while traditional interviews often rely on hypothetical or rehearsed answers.
They assess both technical skills, like report preparation, and soft skills, like problem-solving and stress management.
Behavioral interviewing gives you a structured, evidence-based way to hire. It surfaces not just skills but fit—helping avoid costly hiring mistakes. With clear preparation, solid questions, and the STAR framework, you’ll better spot candidates ready to thrive for interviewing techniques.
Try this next week:
If you’re building or scaling your engineering teams, think about how reliable, in-house-feel teammates from Africa and Latin America can fit. Learn about our hiring timelines, and see how that adds clarity and speed to your process.




