Behavioral Interviews: Success Strategies for Hispanic and Bilingual Job Seekers

By Mesia Quartano & Barb Freda for LatPro.com

The biggest concern for any job seeker going into an interview is the type of questions they will be facing. By far, the most popular type of interview involves a series of questions about how you handled real situations in the past. What problems did you face? How did you deal with those challenges? How did your actions affect the final result?

This type of interview, called a behavioral interview or situational interview, is so popular with employers because it is said to be 55 percent predictive of future work performance, compared to 10 percent for traditional interviews. Why? In a traditional interview, candidates are asked about character traits (such as leadership ability) or how they would hypothetically perform in certain situations. It’s much easier to put a positive spin on answers when discussing how you think you would react in certain situations. Behavioral interview questions, on the other hand, require candidates to give real-world examples of how they actually performed on the job. Employers know that past job performance is the best way to predict future performance.

What Kinds of Questions Will I Be Asked?

Behavior-based questions will often follow a “tell me about a time” format. Think about how you would answer the following sample questions:

“Tell me about a time when…”

• You needed to persuade someone (or a team of people) to do something
  
• You needed to use logical thinking to work through a problem.
  
• You set a goal and how you achieved it.
  
• You had to abide by a policy you thought was wrong and how you coped.
  
• You had to make a decision without having all the facts. What were the results of that decision?
  
• You failed at something and what you did about it
  
• You made a mistake and had to fix the consequences of your mistake.

As you can see, the interviewer will not only ask about your successes, they are just as likely to ask about times when you faced adversity or even failure. Think about experiences from your career (or college or volunteer work) that might apply to these questions.

What Skills Are Employers Looking For?

Interviewers won’t just listen to your story and move on. They will ask probing follow-up questions, digging deeper to discover the role you played, as well as the abilities and skills you brought to the table. How do you know what the employer is looking for? Well, many of the desired attributes for a position can be found in the job posting itself. Some skills listed in actual job ads include:

• Self-starter
  
• Provide leadership
  
• Ability to negotiate
  
• Ability to work in fast paced environment and think clearly under pressure
  
• Excellent communication skills
  
• Strong organizational skills
  
• Team player
  
• Detail-oriented
  
• Decision-making Skills
  
• Organizational Ability
  
• Ability to sell ideas and concepts
  
• Creative Problem-Solving
  

Make sure your examples show how you successfully used the employer’s desired skills in the past.

How to Answer Behavior-Based Questions

Now that you’ve brainstormed some past professional experiences, pick four or five and prepare a story for each one. The interviewer doesn’t need to know the entire history behind an event: your responses should be specific, brief and to-the-point.

The best way to keep your response on target is to use a technique known as SAR, which stands for Situation/Action/Result, and is sometimes referred to as CAR, PAR or STAR (Circumstance/Action/Result; Problem/Action/Result; Situation/Task/Action/Result). For each situation, prepare a sentence or two covering each of the following:

By combining 1, 2 and 3, you should have a concise summary of the situation that you can relate to employers during the interview.

Even when discussing a failure, stress what you learned from your experience and how you will use those lessons in the future. What the interviewer really wants to know is how you dealt with and learned from setbacks.

• Your ability to speak Spanish was crucial to landing an important international client.
  
• Your U.S. employer was about to launch a Spanish-language marketing campaign, unaware that the concept didn’t translate across Latin American nations. You caught the problem, saving the company not just money but damage to its brand image.

Behavioral questions form the cornerstone of most interviews you will encounter in your job search. Now that you’ve reviewed your past career experiences and thought about your answers in detail, you should be ready for almost any behavioral question that an interviewer throws at you. Even if the question isn’t one you anticipated, most situations can be adapted to suit a variety of questions.

Good luck!