The ECI Blog

One of the most frequent searches that leads to our website is “How do you answer Behavioral Event Interview questions?”  Or more often, “How do you answer ECI interview questions?”   For those of you who are in the job market, and it seems like there are a huge number of people looking for work these days, here are some tips from a firm who provides such questions to potential employers.

Before you go to your interview session, take time to think through your own key experiences and success stories.  What are the situations where you personally achieved outstanding results?  What did you do specifically to achieve the outstanding result?  What was the benefit of your efforts to the company and to your own personal growth?  This is the fundamental structure of behavioral event interview questions.

A good interviewer will be able to probe into your answers and check on the validity and sincerity of your responses to the questions.  What employers want to confirm by using behavioral event interview questions is that you have the experience (real, actual, accomplishments and knowledge) that you said you had in your resume and in your application.  Employers are verifying the presence or absence of the key skills and competencies that are required for success in the role.  It is an expensive proposition to bring people into an organization these day, so the better the selection process, the better the results after hire.

Some things you definitely don’t want to do in the interview:

1.  make up a story – this is big trouble and you will get yourself into a jamb with an experienced interviewer using a Behavioral Event Interview process who knows what he/she is doing

2.  stick with one or two examples of your experiences and continually end up going back to these as you answer questions. This shows that you have limited experience or knowledge and that you cannot talk intelligently or in-depth around a particular subject

3.  use the proverbially “we”  “my team”  “I should, I would, I could have” examples.  These are also dead give-aways that you don’t have the experience.

4.  fail to answer the question.  Don’t bother providing another answer to a question or avoid answering the question.  If you don’t have an answer, admit that you don’t have an answer.  However, if you have more than 2 such responses, you might really not be a good match to the position for which you are being considered.

5.  try to take over the interview by answering the question with another question.  Well trained interviewers will find this arrogant or condescending if done too frankly and with persistence.  Your best day is when a poor interviewer starts gabbing about his world and the company and how wonderful he/she thinks it is.  In those cases, nod and smile and definitely ask more questions to keep him/her going.  If his/her ego is that big, they deserve to hire you, even if they don’t know about who you are!  This happens much more frequently than you might imagine.

Things you should do:

1.  Be honest and open about your prior experiences, without complaining.  Do not, however, demonstrate a poor attitude about your most hated boss or colleague, your worst nightmare job, what you can’t stand about your current or past company.  If you offer these responses, we don’t want someone with a poor attitude, so regardless of you skill set, better interviewers will not move you forward in the process.

2.  Stick with business.  Answer the questions without going on and on.  Don’t start talking about personal information, relationships with people, who you know or your off-time activities.  This is not something that should be discussed in an interview anyway.  And if I, as the interviewer, don’t know who you do, who cares.

3.  Be polite and professional.  Do not interrupt or tell jokes.  Dress appropriately for the interview and clean yourself up.  Get your hair cut or styled in a more traditional manner.  Nothing worse than going to an interview with heavy perfume, bad breath, body odor or other issues that people could find offensive.  Fine if you have tattoos and piercings.  That’s your business, but do we need to see all of them during the interview?  Match your persona to the company environment into which you wish to gain employment. That’s your best bet.  If people see that you fit, you are 30% of the way in the door.

4.  Make sure your resume and application are accurate and that they clearly reflect your skills, experiences, and accomplishments – embroidering your actual experiences and adding in some accomplishments you might not have achieved can be red flags.  If you get caught, which you might in the interview, you will be knocked out of the process.  If the employer checks references, as more are doing these days, you will have problems.  Something like over 50% of people’s resumes cover up employment gaps, include errors or downright misinformation these days.

5.  Have prepared 4 or 5 really good questions about the company you would like to know more on.  DO NOT ask about salary until you get down to the later stages of the interview process and let the interviewer be the one to bring it up.  Wait until you get down to the top candidacy stage to  negotiate.  Your research should be able to tell you what the employer pays for people in similar roles.

That’s it.  Getting a new job requires persistence and a lot of activity.  Be sure to load your pipeline with at least 10 or more possibilities each month and keep that many prospects in your pipeline until you get hired.  Having that many options is what it will take these days to get yourself hired.  Good luck and happy interviewing.