Behavioral Interview Question Breakdowns

Learning how to apply Decode, Select, Deliver to seven common questions

If you’ve been hanging around my Substack for a while, you know I don’t advocate for people to prepare by drilling behavioral questions—other than the Big Three (Tell Me About Yourself, Favorite Project, and Conflict). Instead, you should identify key stories from your career, align them to signal areas, and look to fill any gaps on those signal areas if your key stories don’t cover them. The upcoming book will cover this process in depth.

In the meantime, people still ask about how to answer specific questions and I can see the value—we all learn by example.

Hello Interview

gets these kinds of requests on their forums all the time so

Stefan Mai

and I sat down to discuss seven behavioral interview questions using the Decode, Select, Deliver framework.

For each question, we discuss what the interviewer is looking for, what kind of stories you might select, including breakdowns by level, and then talk through key points to keep in mind when delivering that kind of response.

Enjoy!

00:00 - Intro
02:09 - “Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a coworker. How did you resolve it?”
15:49 - “Can you share an example where you resolved a significant conflict between different teams or departments in your organization?”
19:36 - “What was a situation where you didn’t agree with your manager or superior’s decision?”
27:57 - “What project are you most proud of?”
47:59 - “Tell me about a project where you failed.”
56:29 - “Give me an example of a calculated risk that you have taken where speed was critical.”
01:01:46 - “Tell me about the hardest feedback you’ve ever had to deliver.”
01:05:44 - Outro