How to prepare for

1/4 behavioral interview?

Collect stories, assign keywords, practice
the STAR format

Keywords List important keywords that will be populated with your personal
stories. Most common keywords are given in the table below

Conflict Compromise to
Negotiation Creativity Flexibility Convincing
Resolution achieve goal
Another team Adjust to
Handling Challenging Working with
priorities not a colleague Take Stand
Crisis Situation difficult people
aligned style
Handling – Coworker Working with a Your Influence
Your strength
ve feedback view of you deadline weakness Others
Handling Converting Decision
Handling Conflict Mentorship
unexpected challenge to without
failure Resolution /Leadership
situation opportunity enough data

Stories
1. List all the organizations you have been a part of. For example
1. Academia: BSc, MSc, PhD
2. Industry: Jobs, Internship
3. Societies: Cultural, Technical, Sports
2. Think of stories from step 1 that can fall into one of the keywords categories. The
more stories the better. You should have at least 10-15 stories.
3. Create a summary table by assigning multiple keywords to each stories. This will
help you filter out the stories when the question asked in the interview. An
example can be seen below
Story 1: [Convincing] [Take Stand] [influence other]
Story 2: [Mentorship] [Leadership]
Story 3: [Conflict resolution] [Negotiation]
Story 4: [decision-without-enough-data]

STAR Format
Write down the stories in the STAR format as explained in the 2/4 part of this cheat
sheet. This will help you practice the organization of story in a meaningful way.

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 How to prepare for
2/4 behavioral interview?
Direct*, meaningful*, personalized*, logical*
*(Respective colors are used to identify these characteristics in the example)

Example: “Tell us about a time when you had to convince senior executives”

“I worked as an intern in XYZ company in

S
Situation the summer of 2019. The project details
provided to me was elaborative. After
Explain the situation and some initial brainstorming, and research I
realized that the project approach can be
provide necessary context for modified to make it more efficient in
terms of the underlying KPIs. I decided to
your story. talk to my manager about it.”

“I had an hour-long call with my manager

and explained him in detail the proposed

T
Task approach and how it could improve the
KPIs. I was able to convince him. He
Explain the task and your asked me if I will be able to present my
proposed approach for approval in front of
responsibility in the the higher executives. I agreed to it. I was
working out of the ABC(city) office and
situation the executives need to fly in from
XYZ(city) office.”

“I did a quick background check on the

A
Action executives to know better about their area
of expertise so that I can convince them
Walk through the steps and accordingly. I prepared an elaborative 15
slide presentation starting with explaining
actions you took to address their approach, moving onto my proposed
the issue approach and finally comparing them on
preliminary results.

“After some active discussion we were able

R
to establish that the proposed approach
Result was better than the initial one. The
executives proposed a few small changes
State the outcome of the to my approach and really appreciated my
result of your actions stand. At the end of my internship, I was
selected among the 3 out of 68 interns
who got to meet the senior vice president
of the company over lunch.”

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 How to answer a
3/4 behavioral question?
Understand, Extract, Map, Select and Apply

Example: “Tell us about a time when you had to convince senior executives”

Understand the question

Example: A story where I was able to convince
Understand my seniors. Maybe they had something in mind,
and I had a better approach and tried to
convince them

Extract keywords and tags

Extract useful keywords that encapsulates the
Extract Example:
gist of the question

[Convincing], [Creative], [Leadership]

Map the keyword to your stories

Shortlist all the stories that fall under the
Map keywords extracted from previous step
Example:
Story1, Story2, Story3, Story4, … , Story N

Select the best story

From the shortlisted stories, pick the one that
Select best describes the question and has not been used
so far in the interview
Example: Story3

Apply the STAR method

Apply the STAR method on the selected story to
Apply answer the question

Example: See Cheat Sheet 2/3 for details

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 Behavioral Interview
4/4 Cheat Sheet
Summarizing the behavioral interview

Gather important topics as keywords

1 Understand and collect all the important topics
commonly asked in the interview

Collect your stories

How to
2 Based on all the organizations you have been a part of,
think of all the stories that fall under the keywords above

prepare Practice stories in STAR format

for the 3 Practice each story using the STAR format. You will have
to answer the question following this format.

interview Assign keywords to stories

4 Assign each of your story one or more keywords. This will
help you recall them quickly

Create a summary table

5 Create a summary table mapping stories to their associated
keywords. This will be used during the behavioral question

Understand the question

U Understand the question and clarify any confusions that
you have

Extract the keywords

How to E Try to extract one or more of the keywords from the

question
answer a
Map the keywords to stories
question
during
M Based on the keywords extracted, find the stories using the
summary table created during preparation (Step 4)

interview Select a story

S Since each keyword maybe assigned to multiple stories,
select the one that is most relevant and has not been used.

Apply the START format

A Once the story has been shortlisted, apply STAR format on
the story to answer the question.
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