Based on recent successes with candidates for senior roles at NVIDIA, I thought more could be interested in how behavioral interviewing skills can help you succeed in job interviews.
What types of questions can be answered behaviorally?
Any non-technical question can, and often should, be answered behaviorally. Examples:
- questions starting with “Tell me about a time when you… [e.g. failed, dealt with conflict, faced a challenge]”.
- Introductory / general questions; for example: Tell me about yourself, Why you, why this company, why this role; what’s your weakness
- Open ended questions: how do you [prioritize, learn, help people develop their careers etc..]
- Hypothetical questions: how would you deal with [conflict inside your team, ambiguity etc.. ]
Key behaviors:
- Conflict & Influence
- Prioritization & Speed
- Failure Questions
- Vision / Strategic Thinking
- Results / Outcome Orientation
- Customer Obsession
- Elevator pitch. Why this company.
- Strength and weakness
- .. and more
This training program, at its core, is a bunch of videos designed to help you excel in behavioral interviews. Over time, more features were added:
- Stories dashboard: a place where you can add your stories in a structured format, filter them by behavior, score etc..
- Ability to evaluate your stories using AI reports on things such as behavioral fit, length, strength etc..
- Quizzes to test your knowledge while (or after) going through the videos; or quizzes to help you improve your listening skills
- The script of the videos (text) in each section as a recap.
- New sections such as employer, and candidate interviewing techniques
- More (notable) examples from exceptional people are constantly added
- Sections are also constantly being adjusted to both add new trends and trimmed to save you time
- Flexible access (6, 12 months or unlimited)
Any role
First, throughout my career, I've worked in both technical and non-technical roles.
Second. My experience coaching people for all major job categories has taught me an important lesson: anyone applying for such jobs should be able to qualify if an answer, including its depth, is for them. Some stories will be for mid-level roles while others will be for principal (advisory) roles, while others will be for sales.
While it is true that many of these stories are from IT, I picked examples from a variety of industries and roles.
Why buy this training?
This content is biased towards benefiting the candidate, on what connects with success in job interviews.
- Minimize risk of surprise by covering a broad range of behaviors and scenarios, specific to behavioral interviews.
- Examples from exceptional candidates who succeeded in their careers. Improve your listening skills through a variety of examples & quizzes
- AI done right; who passes interviews using AI? Very few people do; many more fail them because of AI; others capitalize on hooking you up on AI features which actually degrade your performance
- Time is something most candidates don’t have; this is why the training has been trimmed from 9 to 6 to 3 hours (over 5 years)
- Engagement triggers via regular YouTube videos
NVIDIA's Corporate Values
Keywords mapping with sections in this training program:
- Innovation: pitched as “Willingness to take risk” (customer opportunities - meaningfully better); risk (too much / responsible): process 3 things: pilot in command in every project, how many risks; reviewing all along the way;
- Speed and agility: “The world is moving fast”; efficient; fast; adaptability;
- Intellectual honesty: “Self critical” analyzing & admitting to mistakes, and to improve; getting the right answer vs being right all the time;
- “It’s not okay to attack people” -> Conflict & Influence (first + second section)
- “Self critical” analyzing & admitting to mistakes -> Failure questions
- Excellence: very best; top talent; (VP of operations); rather very unique product that very special people buy vs. “everyone”;
- Excellence means different things to different roles. (e.g. for a VP of operations it means they’d rather build a very unique product that very special people buy vs. something “everyone” could use)
- Interview question: “Tell me about a time when a product / service was already getting good customer feedback, but you decided to improve”; people with low standard will talk about a bug they fixed while people with high standards will speak about how they delighted a customer;
- Customer Obsession
- One team: together. Absence of politics; selfishness; agile;