How to Craft Behavioral Interview Questions [and Get Revealing Answers]

One of the toughest things about interviewing is making the most of your limited time with a candidate—especially if you’re assessing skills that you have little or no experience with yourself. Incorporating behavioral interview questions into your process is one effective way to help get the information you need to make a more confident hiring decision.

In fact, behavioral interview questions are 55% predictive of future on-the-job behavior (while traditional questions are only 10% predictive). Paired with a standardized process that uses interview scorecards, behavioral questions are key to identifying the best candidate for a role. Here’s how to craft ones that inspire revealing answers and enhance the candidate experience.

In this guide, you’ll find:

What is a behavioral interview question?

Behavioral interview questions are open-ended prompts that allow hiring managers to assess a candidate’s potential for future performance based on past behavior. They invite detailed responses that illustrate a candidate’s effectiveness, communication style, and self-awareness.

Behavioral interview questions often start with “Tell me about a time…” or “Could you tell me about a time..?”

Why are behavioral interview questions important for making good hires?

Unlike situational questions, which use hypothetical scenarios to assess a candidate for specific skills, behavioral questions require answers with real, historical examples. They offer a window into past performance and are effective in evaluating areas of expertise outside of an interviewer’s wheelhouse.

Here are additional reasons why behavioral questions are important for making good hires:

They enable fairer hiring decisions. When the same questions are asked to all candidates for a given role, behavioral interview questions facilitate evaluation based on competency and past performance in a consistent, objective way, reducing the weight of personal affinity or gut feelings on decision-making. This also reduces the risk of interviewer bias.
They make room for follow-up questions. Behavioral interview questions allow interviewers to tease out additional details through follow-up questions and lead candidates through the STAR Method (defined below).
They help effectively assess soft skills. Hard-to-measure soft skills such as collaboration, communication, and creativity are best evaluated through frank conversations facilitated by behavioral interview questions.

Four keys to crafting behavioral interview questions

Successful behavioral interview questions are open-ended, correspond to a role’s requirements, and are asked in the same way for every candidate. The following best practices outline where to start, what to avoid, and how to prepare your interview team to get the answers they need.

1. Lean on your company and team values

With so many behavioral interview questions floating around online, it can be helpful to begin the ideation process by referencing your company and team values. Doing so gives you must-assess categories, such as culture fit, personal values, and professional standards.

For example, the SmartRecruiters value “As One” correlates to behavioral interview questions that assess a candidate’s teamwork, collaboration style, and inclusivity.

2. Use the job description as a guide

Effective job descriptions outline the capabilities and skills required for a role, which makes them the perfect guardrails for crafting behavioral interview questions. Look at the requirements and responsibilities sections, as these are the must-assess capabilities candidates need to possess.

For example, software engineers need to have excellent problem-solving skills, so you might ask a question like: “Explain a project you worked on recently that was difficult.”

3. Avoid wording that gives away the answer

Two pitfalls of behavioral interview questions are wording them in a manner that gives away the desired answer and only asking about past successes. Candidates should feel free to share times when they didn’t succeed, and you’ll learn a lot more about them from how they describe failure.

For example, when looking for an indication of self-motivation, instead of asking, “Tell me about a time when you were bored at work and what you did to make it more interesting.” you can use, “Tell me about a time when you were bored at work.”

4. Split up desired capabilities among the interview team

Last, but not least, no one interviewer should ask all behavioral interview questions. It’s exhausting for the candidate and inefficient for the interview team. Everyone should share the responsibility of assessing candidates for desired capabilities and hard-to-measure attributes.

For example, an interview team consisting of a hiring manager, relevant supervisors, key internal stakeholders, and important potential colleagues would split up behavioral interview questions based on which areas are most relevant to their expertise or role.

How to get revealing answers to behavioral interview questions

Often, candidates will only answer 75% of a behavioral interview question. But the last 25% — how their actions delivered impact for the business—can remain a mystery without additional probing. Failing to find the end of the story does both candidates and interview teams a disservice, since results are just as important as the action.

To ensure you’re getting the objective data you need about candidates, you can use the STAR Method. This framework for structuring answers helps you elicit clear, detailed replies to behavioral questions by guiding candidates through a description of the situation, task, action, and result.

You can ask candidates to structure their answers this way or lead them through each step:

Situation: What was the situation and context?
Task: What specific task was undertaken?
Action: How was the situation handled?
Result: What was achieved by their action, and why was it effective?

Look for “I” statements when listening to answers to behavioral interview questions. If you hear them using “we” in their replies, be sure to bring them back to their contribution by asking them to clarify how they personally solved a problem, tackled a situation, or achieved a result.

Bonus tip: Ask follow-up questions

Once a candidate is finished answering a question, take the opportunity to dig deeper into behaviors and competencies with a follow-up question or two. This is especially important if the candidate hasn’t gotten around to demonstrating the desired capability in their response.

For reference, here’s a list of follow-up questions:

What would you do differently next time?
What did you learn from this?
Could you come up with an example that is more recent?
You mentioned that “we” did…. What exactly was your contribution versus the team?
What was your biggest contribution?
How did you deal with this problem?
Tell me more about…
How did you influence a positive outcome?  
How did you measure the success of this project?
What results did you achieve specifically?

How behavioral interview questions improve hiring equity

While there are many strategies for improving diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace, recruiting is an area where policy, culture, and data come together to support a company’s efforts. Here are three ways behavioral questions can facilitate this critical initiative.

Using the same criteria for every candidate. Behavioral interview questions help ensure more accurate, equitable hiring results because they use the same criteria to evaluate applicants. This facilitates making stronger hires based on a role’s responsibilities and a company’s values, versus a candidate’s personal background.
Offering a way to address unconscious bias. Defined by Harvard Business School, unconscious bias is “the term for the mental processes that cause a person to act in ways that reinforce stereotypes even when their conscious mind deems that behavior counter to their value system.” Behavioral questions reduce these risks by giving every applicant an even playing field to discuss their past approaches to specific scenarios.
Providing teamwide transparency and efficiency. Because behavioral questions support alignment within the interview team on desired capabilities and attributes, they help create a quantitative basis for decision-making with the use of a transparent system that includes scorecards. More equitable hiring occurs when the evaluation stage becomes more data-driven than emotion-driven.

Why behavioral interview questions are just the start

Introducing more objectivity and standardization into your hiring processes with behavioral interview questions is an important step towards being able to make more equitable hires. However, sustainable impact requires modern technology that supports a data-driven approach with candidate feedback captured in one system by each member of the interview team.

“The SmartRecruiters system creates transparency about how we evaluate candidates in a structured way. It helps us make fair decisions across international hiring teams because everyone has all the needed information at the same time.”

– PACCOR

Curious how SmartRecruiters can help your team reduce bias in the hiring process while simultaneously accelerating interview productivity? Explore our collaborative hiring platform that offers structured feedback forms, built-in scorecards, and the ability to seamlessly integrate with assessment providers.