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Behavioral interviews are based on the premise that your past behavior is the most reliable indicator of your future response in a similar situation. Utilized by most firms, behavioral-style questions shy away from hypotheticals like "How would you deal with an angry customer?" or "How would you communicate to your boss that you disagreed?" Instead, they ask you to draw on your actual life experiences - e.g., "When you've had to juggle numerous projects at once, how did you ensure that nothing slipped through the cracks?" or "Tell me about a time when you had to work with someone you didn't like or agree with."

There is no right answer to a behavioral question. Interviewers posing such questions are not trying to elicit information about your writing or technical skills, rather about your temperament. Most organizations have a clear sense of their organizational culture and the kinds of people who will succeed in a given type of job in that environment. They ask behavioral questions to help determine - whether or not you're a good fit.

What is a company looking for? Information you can gain from an organization's website, published & other web-based resources, and, especially, opportunities to talk with current employees and representatives at Employer Info Sessions or Career Fairs can tell you a lot about how a potential employer views itself, its culture, and the qualities it looks for in a new hire. There are no right answers, but there are helpful strategies. Your goal is to use stories about past experiences to illustrate aspects of your personality that interest them. The content of the story itself is not important, rather what does the story say about you, how you respond to pressure, what motivates you, etc. The stories need not have anything to do with business or the kind of task the job involves. They can be drawn from academic, volunteer, as well as social experiences. The story is the vehicle or means by which you communicate important information about yourself.

The first time you try to use a past experience to illustrate some aspect of your personality, it's not likely to flow very easily or smoothly. You want to go into an interview having thought ahead of time about how you might draw on your past experiences to answer the kinds of behavioral questions commonly asked. Always keep in mind the point of the story. What is it about yourself that you are using the vignette to illustrate or demonstrate? You don't want to come off overly scripted, but you want to walk into the interview having practiced the art of using your past to communicate to your audience the value you have to offer them in the future.