Interviews for technical jobs can broken down into two distinct parts: behavioral and technical. Here, we discuss the behavioral component of interviews. These can be part of a larger interview that includes a technical component, or they may be part of a separate interview.
Behavioral interviews are intended to gauge a candidate’s potential fit as a coworker, in a broad sense. These won’t be significantly different from interviews you’ve likely experienced before. An employer wants to answer questions like:
Your objective is to convince the employer that they can answer “yes” to each of these questions. Of course, you will not be asked these specfiic questions; you will be asked questions that are intended to measure the degree to which you fulfill these characteristics.
If you look online, you will find lots of articles and approaches to succeeding in behavioral interviews. Most of these are very similar, and we want to explore one such technique in detail, the CAR Technique.
CAR stands for Challenge, Action, Result, and it outlines the way in which you should try to respond to each behavioral interview question.
Read The C.A.R. Technique: Your Secret Interviewing Weapon to get an overview of this technique.
Read Context, Action, Result (CAR): answering interview questions and describing experience effectively to explore specific examples of good responses that use the CAR technique.
Now, practice using the CAR model by using it to answer each of the following questions.
User the Voice Memo app on your phone to record your response, then listen back to it and evaluate how effective you were.
