How to Answer Behavioral Interview Questions (Best advice for S.T.A.R. stories!)

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In this video I'll teach you impress your interviewers during an interview and how to have AMAZING S.T.A.R. stories! Follow this simple step by step approach to have stories that will help you get that job!

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📝 Creating S.T.A.R. Stories from Leadership Principles Template: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-...

📝 Common Behavioral questions and Amazon Leadership Principles Questions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16...

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Examples of Behavioral questions:
* Tell me about a time you had to influence/convince your team to do a project when it was not part of their plan?
* Tell me about a time you used data to convince your manager of something
* Tell me about a time a customer asked you for a requirement that wasn't good for the product and how did you handle it?
* Tell me about a time you couldn't get data and you had to make a decision.
* The questions can also be very open ended
* Tell me about a time you failed
* What has been your greatest achievement?

STAR Format stands for
* Situation
* Task
* Action
* Result

- Why use it? You are telling your interviewer your story. A story that probably took weeks or months to happen - and you are trying to tell this story in a few minutes.
- One very important skill for Product Managers is communication and during an interview, Behavioral questions are a good way to assess that.
- If you feel you have been talking for too long, you probably have. Try to keep your stories between 3-4 minutes.

1) Situation
* The situation is about setting the context, it's about telling the interviewer just enough information for them to understand the rest of the story.

2) Task
* The task is a moment that you take to explain your role in the situation you described

3) Action
* This is where you will explain how the situation was resolved. Now, we tend to talk about the team and what "WE" did. If it was a team effort, focus on your role and actions YOU took during this situation. This is also where you'll spend the majority of the time.
* Make sure you also structure your answer in a way to make it easy for your interviewer to follow your story. Use lists and keywords to help your interviewer follow your story. For example: First, second, third.

4) Result
* Very briefly, mention what was the outcome of the situation. Shouldn't take long.

5) Lesson
* One extra thing you can add is a small lesson at the end. It's a nice way to recap the important skills you learned.

Common Mistakes in an interview and Behavioral questions:
* Not adding enough "I" in your story - make sure you tell what YOU did in the situation, not what the team did.
* Not being concise (I once interviewed someone who took 15 minutes to answer the first Behavioral question of the interview).
* Not having a structure - Very often I see candidates repeating themselves over and over, and going back and forth between explaining the situation and the actions they took - This usually leads to not being concise
* Not going deep - Many candidates try to tell a story that doesn't go into the details and ends up being a very short and superficial answer
* Memorizing word by word - Sounds too robotic and not natural.


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