Which of the following is an example of a behavioral question?

Which of the following is an example of a behavioral question?

a. Why do you want to leave your current job?

b. Have you ever been fired from a job?

c. Describe an experience when you dealt with an angry customer.

d. How would you describe yourself?

Answer: c. Describe an experience when you dealt with an angry customer.

This option reflects the idea of the behavioural question, which is a question aimed at revealing the candidate’s behaviour in specific circumstances. Behavioural questions are derived from the fact that people’s future performance can be best assessed from their past performance. Most of them require the candidates to explain, with supporting cases, how they dealt with some issues in their past endeavours.

Here, inquiring about working with an angry customer makes the candidate remember a certain incident, as well as how they solved it. It allows the interviewer to assess the customer relations disposition and problem-solving skills of the candidate apart from his attitude to being under pressure.

For example, a candidate might answer the question by providing an example outlining a situation where a customer complained regarding the delay in the shipment. They could describe instances where they have heard the complaints of the customer, formally agreed with them and offered an apology, suggested a solution (for instance to offer a quick shipment at no more cost from the client), and made sure that the customer was satisfied. Such a response would illustrate the candidate’s ability to understand the need and take the appropriate action, identify the problem and the solution to it, be empathetic and show commitment to execute the task.

The behavioural questions seem not to fall under the conventional interview questions. For instance, ‘Why would you like to leave your current employer?’ is a motivational question. ‘Have you ever been fired from a job?’ is a fixed-bias true-false form of question. ‘‘How would you describe yourself?’’ is a type of self-identification question. In contrast with these kinds of questions, behavioural questions rely on the assessment of the proven behaviour of the candidate and focus on the ability to give definite examples from the experience, so there is more ground for evaluating how the person will work in this position.