Here are some examples of effective behavioral interview questions. They come directly from the Manager Tools Interview Creation Tool, available to licensees of our work. The Interview Creation Tool provides behavioral questions like these (as shown in the Appendix) for any manager to use to conduct highly effective behavioral interviews. It asks you a series of questions related to categories of successful behaviors in the role you’re interviewing for, evaluates the relative importance of those categories, and creates an entire interview based on your preferences. It also gives you criteria to look for in both effective and poor answers.

If your new hire will have to give presentations as part of her job:

• You’re going to have to present regularly about the status of your work to people beyond just our team. Describe a situation when you presented to a group and how you went about ensuring your presentation was effective.

For a direct who will be involved in multiple projects at the same time:

• None of us get to work on one thing at a time. Describe a situation when you have successfully managed multiple projects simultaneously.

For a manager:

• Managers here are expected to grow the skills of their team members. Describe a successful development effort for one of your directs that you created and managed over time.

For a manager where your company uses metrics:

• We use metrics here to track performance and communicate status. Tell me about some metrics that you created or applied to your team. What were they, how did you communicate them, and how did you report results?