Your behavioural interview preparation will be more efficient and effective if you adopt a comedian’s mindset
Performing stand-up comedy is probably one of the most stressful things a person can do. I bet many people would agree that being interviewed could be just as nerve-wracking — and this is not all these two experiences have in common. I recently attended an improvised stand-up comedy show and noticed an interesting phenomenon that helped me during my recent job-seeking process. Even though analyzing what makes a comedy show funny is almost as bad as having to explain a joke, I’ll go ahead and share it with you.
Ten comedians participated in the show I watched, and this is how it went — a facilitator pulled random subjects out of a hat, and in their turn, each comedian took the stage and spoke on that topic. Some of them were hilarious, and others, as you can imagine, not so much. A few comedians were paralyzed as soon as they heard the topic they should be talking about as if they had a blackout. They could not think of anything to say, and it was unpleasant to watch.
As opposed to them, some comedians did manage to make the audience laugh. Observing them, I noticed they often didn’t actually talk about the subject that was pulled out of the hat — but cleverly switched the topic. It seemed like they were performing a stand-up act they had prepared in advance and somehow managed to link it to the random subject they got. And it worked really well.
Coming to think about it, it makes sense. The audience came to the show in order to laugh, not to be the word police. They prefered the comedians to be telling a flowing and funny story, rather than strictly sticking to the exact topics they were asked to improvise to.
At the time I was watching the show, I was in the middle of a job-seeking process for the position of engineering manager. During the behavioural and management parts of interviews for these roles, you are often asked questions such as “tell me about a mistake you have recently made” or “what difficult decision did you have to make as part of your job?”.
To prepare for such interviews, you might consider simply going through many potential questions and preparing answers to each one. This brute-force solution is not very effective, since there can be an infinite number of possible questions. Instead, I found it helpful to adopt the funny comedians’ attitude — that is, to create a list of some interesting stories, become really good and confident at telling them, and direct the conversation towards them from any question asked. After all, questions in an interview are mostly a means for getting to know the candidate better, just as pulling words out of a hat is just the framework for a show.
To adopt this approach, make a list of stories that demonstrate qualities that you want to highlight. For example, a story about the code review process you established in order to show that you are proactive and taking initiatives, or a story about how you resolved a conflict between teammates to demonstrate your empathy and social skills. You can take a look at some behavioural interview questions to get ideas for good stories to tell. The great thing is you don’t have to memorize them as answers to these specific questions, and you can use the same story to answer different questions. For example, you could use the code review story to answer these three questions (and probably many more) — “Tell me about a problem you identified in your team and how did you solve it”, “How do you ensure code quality in your team”, or “Tell me about a goal you set and reached and how you achieved it”.
A good framework to practice telling those stories in a concise and clear manner is the STAR method — Situation, Task, Action, Results. You start by describing the specific situation that you were in, then the task that you were working on, the actions you took and finally, the results.
To practice, you can then go back to the list of behavioural questions and quiz yourself — what story would you use to answer any of them. If you get stuck, think of a suitable story and add it to your list. Before going into the actual interview, you can briefly review and remind yourself of the highlights of your stories.
This way, even when the interviewer pulls out of the hat a question that you’ve never thought of before, you will not panic but rather direct the conversation to the interesting and meaningful story you can confidently tell. Who knows, it might go so well you decide to drop it all and become a comedian.
