Behavioral interview
Also called: competency-based interview, STAR interview
What a behavioral question looks like
The opening is always specific: “Tell me about a time when…”
- “…you missed a deadline. What happened and what did you do?”
- “…you disagreed with your manager. How did you handle it?”
- “…you had to give difficult feedback to a colleague.”
The structure forces concrete answers. “I would…” answers fail; “I did…” answers pass.
The STAR method
A useful framework for both interviewer and candidate:
- Situation: the context. One sentence.
- Task: what the candidate was responsible for. One sentence.
- Action: what the candidate specifically did. The bulk of the answer.
- Result: what happened. Quantified when possible.
When a candidate floats into the abstract (“we usually…”), pull them back to a specific incident with a follow-up: “Can you give me a specific example?”
What it doesn’t catch
Behavioral interviews don’t catch raw skill — “tell me about a time you wrote Python” is weaker than asking the candidate to write Python. Pair behavioral interviews with work samples for technical roles.
Where Join fits
Behavioral question banks attach to roles in Join with the STAR rubric inline on the scorecard. See the features page.
