- Hey everyone, this is
Self Made Millennial, I'm Madeline Mann. Want to know the step by step process on how to rock behavioral
interview questions? Well, fantastic. Because that's what this
whole video is about. To keep getting interview and career tips from the person who has seen it all from the recruiting side, subscribe to this channel and hit the bell to get a new video every Thursday. I'll be teaching you my
story toolbox strategy that gets exceptional results. I get the most testimonials of fabulous results from this tip, including this fellow who
got the job from this advice and being a loyal watcher of my videos. Heck yes, thank you so much. So I'll give you the steps
you'll need to answer behavioral interview questions. And I'll give you an
example of this in action and stay to the end
because I will tell you my trick for remembering
all of this information. A behavioral interview is a question that starts with something
like, tell me about a time when. They are asking for examples
of things you have done in your past and at the
core they're asking you to tell them a story. Stories aren't just for bedtime folks, you need to tell stories to be memorable and help them to see
themselves working with you. This is my favorite type of question to ask when I'm the interviewer because I can better
understand the way you think and approach situations. When I ask something like
how do you handle stress? I get a very generic answer, but if I ask, tell me about a time you had
to complete several projects within a tight deadline. I can hear a story and better understand the way that you respond to the world. What you need to do first is
get notable career moment, all written down, which is
what I call a story toolbox. This will be the basis
of all of your answers to behavioral interview questions. And when they ask you a
question that's behavioral, it will keep you from doing the old, Um. - Um. - Um. - Um. - Um. - Um. - Um. - Mmm what was the question? So take the time to write
this all down in a document such as a time you saved the
day or solved a big problem, a time when you worked
with a difficult person and how you handled it, a
time you messed up or failed. Put this all down in your story toolbox. Now I have a lot more prompts for you and it's kind of boring for me to list them all out verbally here, so I will put a link in the description with a full document of prompts, but by the end of this
worksheet you'll have about 10 or even more stories locked and loaded. So you need to get that
story toolbox filled out before moving onto the next steps and I want to emphasize you
creating that story toolbox, just 10X your potential
to rock the interview. I'll link a video that walks through how to use this story toolbox for essentially every interview question. Yeah, it's super impactful so you can get that
full education on this. I will link in the description. Okay, now we need to answer the question. They may ask something like, tell me about a time you had to deliver a piece of tough feedback. If we were to look in the
toolbox I provided you, you might start sweating and say, Oh God, Madeline, you
didn't tell me to write a story about giving feedback. What a curve ball? Nope, think for a minute, feedback absolutely played a
role in one of your stories. Think for a minute and pick one. For example, I said that
you should have a story or two about a time when you worked with a difficult person
and how you handled it. I bet there's a great
chance you had to deliver some sort of feedback in
that story, so tell it. You will be so pleasantly surprised at how many behavioral questions your preconceived stories will fit. Then you answer this in the par method, which is also similar to the star method, but I prefer par because
it's three steps instead of four concise is key in the interview. So P stands for problem. What is the problem or challenge
that was put before you? A is for action. What action did you take
to attempt to resolve it? And R is the result. What were the outcomes of those actions? Let's say we wrote down a
story about how we worked with a coworker who was
flaky and didn't do things when they said they were going to. Here's an example, problem. I had a coworker who I was
depending on for reports, but he would constantly tell me that he wouldn't be able
to get it to me in time, right when the deadline was about to hit, which impacted my ability
to do my job in time. Action. I respected him, so I took the concern straight
to him to talk it through. I first showed empathy and said, I can imagine you have so
much that you're working on right now and I can tell
that you're working hard. Then I was direct about
how he was affecting me, so I said, and I wanted to
discuss the past three deadlines that we set that you weren't able to meet. When you don't get me the reports on time, it delays the entire production process and leads the rest of
us to take several hours to readjust the schedule. How can we ensure this
doesn't happen in the future? And then finally you explain the result. I was nervous about the conversation but he opened up to me about how he has always
tried to chase down the information for the report and so we came up with
a streamlined solution where we now submit a form
with every report request and he now he stopped putting off the task and from then on we have been
getting the report on time. And that's it. The same exact story works
for those two prompts, but it could also fit a lot
of different other questions. Like, tell me about a time that you had an interpersonal
conflict you had to deal with or tell me about a time when there was a communication breakdown. Tell me about a time you took charge when your boss was unavailable. Once you have your story toolbox, you can fit these answers every which way. And what I do before every interview is if it's a phone or a video interview, I have the title of every
story to trigger my memory on the computer screen
or a paper on the table. If it's an in-person interview, I always read all the stories right before I go into the interview to stay fresh and I bring a notebook in and I bring notes that
I set in front of me. Now I'm smooth about it. I'm not like sitting
there reading the answers while talking, but no one
does this and I have notes out and I'm taking notes
while I'm in the interview and it actually comes
off as me being prepared and just giving way more of
a hoot than everyone else. If you want every single
job search email template you'll need in your job
search, I've had it for you. I have an ebook called
Fill in the Blank Job Hunt- Essential Email Templates
for the Job Search and it tells you what to say
to recruiter or hiring manager, right after you submit
an application online, how to follow up with a company, how to negotiate your salary over email. It has everything. So I will link that
book in the description for you to check out. Make sure you like this video
and subscribe to this channel. Thanks so much everyone. Wi-five high-five.
