Does anyone have any tips or helpful suggestions for answering Behavioral Interview Questions during a job interview?<p>(explanation and examples: http://www.quintcareers.com/sample_behavioral.html)<p>If you are an employer, do you find using this interview technique effective?<p>Thank you.
I have a negative experience with behavioral interview questions, both as an employer and employee.<p>There's a lot of room for embellishment and most behavioral questions don't properly summarize the candidate's qualifications. They're a snapshot of an hour or two when the candidate was faced with a problem, or had to exceed a goal, or had to wow someone with a presentation. Anyone can think of one or two things that they did extraordinarily well and one or two things that challenged them, but that doesn't qualify or disqualify anyone from a job.
I've never used these in hiring. Assuming the candidate doesn't have the questions beforehand, seems you're mostly testing someone's ability to BS/improv and promote themselves on the spot. For coders, I don't find this skill to be closely tied to job performance. Possibly an inverse correlation.<p>Providing them beforehand would possibly be more useful, but in this case there's no real need to "practice" so I don't think that's what the link you provided is referring to.