Shyamal Majumdar: 'Tell us when you get bored'

Behavioural interviewers ask such questions to figure out if you have it in you

As you confidently walk into the room of the managing director (MD) for the “final” interview for the vice-president’s job, you know you have a bright chance. The last two interview rounds had gone off quite well and you have prepared well for the final interview.

The impression is reinforced as the MD and the human resource (HR) director greet you warmly. You are completely at ease now and ready to showcase your rather formidable academic and on-the-job credentials.

And then comes the googly. The MD, a grey-haired man in his late 50s, says, “Tell me about a time you failed.”

Failed? Here you are ready to showcase your success stories, the strategy you adopted to corner the last business deal worth crores, and all that your prospective employer wants to talk about is your failure?

You are stumped and talk vaguely about how you don’t remember any failures in your career, etc. The MD smiles and says you must be a rare exception, before moving on to other questions.

You know you did well overall in the interview but leave the room with an uneasy feeling that you faltered at the very beginning by failing to come up with a good example of a failure.

The question was nothing but part of what HR heads call a behavioural interview — a test of how well you have handled certain stressful situations in the past that are relevant to the position you are being interviewed for. The premise of behavioural interviewing is that the most accurate predictor of future performance is past performance in similar situations. By asking you to elaborate upon your professional experiences, employers can assess whether you possess the requisite skills for the position. The idea behind such interviews is to get candidates to think creatively, to stare at a problem and then come up with a potential solution.

These questions generally start out with “Tell me about a situation…” or “Give an example of how you…” For example, “Tell me about a situation in which you worked with team members to develop new and creative ideas to solve a business problem”. Or, “Give an example of a target you reached in your current job, and how you achieved it”. An employer might even ask an applicant to describe a time he or she had to work with a difficult client. In that sense, they are different from traditional interview questions such as “Tell us about yourself” or “Can you tell us why you are suitable for this job?”.

The common impression about behavioural interview questions is that these are easy to answer as you are being asked to relate stories about specific instances of your success. Therefore, you have a golden chance to hide your shortcomings and talk only about your achievements. But hang on, it’s not that simple. For, seasoned interviewers would go deeper and ask you to cite specific examples of what you just said to figure out if you have fudged a bit on the truth. Besides, your answers can often be way too long and unwieldy, exposing your lack of focus and proper articulation of thoughts.

Behavioural interviewers have now refined their questions further to know the real “you”, and ask about failures, which is what the MD did. Such questions are a recognition of the fact that fairy tales don’t exist in corporate life and failures are inevitable. The idea is to find out the insights you gained from those failures.

For example, if the question earlier was, “Tell me about a time when you faced dissent from a couple of your teammates, and how you managed to sort out the situation”, the rephrased question talks only about the dissent part and is silent on the sorting out part. The reason for this is simple: the interviewer wants to see whether the candidate himself brings up the issue of how he sorted out the problem.

One of the toughest questions in a behavioural interview is “Tell us when you get bored”. That’s a tricky one, as most candidates struggle for an “interesting” answer but those who just talk through their hat give themselves away. But HR heads say a smart and honest answer to such questions separates the men from the boys.