Each year, applicants to top MBA programs, law schools and other graduate programs face interview questions that are situational. They often start with, “tell me about a time when…” or “please talk about a project that…”. These are called behavioral questions, and the interviewer is trying to get a sense of how you, as the protagonist, either alone or as part of a team, navigated a given situation to create an impact or results.
If you scan the Internet, you can find different methodologies to handle these behavioral interview questions. After conducting mock interviews for over 20 years for graduate school applicants and job seekers, I find the easiest way to handle these situational prompts is through a classic three-act dramatic structure you would find in most great movies or books.
- The Set Up/Context
- The Actions to Combat Worthy Challenges
- The Conclusions
The Set Up/Context
For the Set Up, it’s critical to set the stage so your reader cares about the situation and understands its importance. When was this project, was it for a huge client, was it high visibility for your career, was a college club you were leading in decline, did you have all the skills to complete or lead this project…? Many clients will forget to give much detail in their intros, so the listener is not really in the trenches for their story. So “Load the Gun” as I always say for behavioral stories and get the listener excited—if they feel the stakes and the context, they will be hooked to hear how your behavioral story unfolds.
Actions to Combat Worthy Challenges
For Part 2, now you must explain what actions you took to solve the challenges of this work project, research or extracurricular initiative. Your story can feature two distinct types of challenges—people/political problems and then analytical/operational/quantitative problems. Great behavioral answers often showcase both types in your retelling. Did you have an ally or skeptic? Did you add some statistics to your analysis? Did you have a difficult boss to placate? How did you complete your analysis with incomplete information? These are the types of challenges that allow your evaluator to see you in action. This is the meat of your sandwich, and many interviewees gloss over the specifics of Part 2 and jump right to Part 3, their conclusions.
Conclusions
For Part 3, explain how your work impacted your company or club. Did it lead to other work or a promotion? Was your analysis used by another group going forward? Were you asked to present your work to a group for training? The listener wants to know what happened and how the results were leveraged.
So use this dramatic three-part structure for your behavioral questions, and you will impress your interviewers by letting them into the specifics of your projects.
