How long should I spend in answering a behavioral question?
How long should I spend in answering a behavioral question?
Hi Anonymous,
The main principle is structuring your answer top-down.
In this case the actual length of your answer becomes even mostly irrelevant, since you can always easily react to your interviewers' implicit signals and stop anytime or go into more details level by level.
With that top-down approach he still always gets the full picture (as opposed if you would build your answer bottom-up) and can prompt for more details whenever required.
Hope that helps - if so, please be so kind to give it a thumbs-up with the green upvote button below!
Robert
Present a summary in ~90seconds with situation, complication, resolution. Then give them time to ask questions and dig into the details.
Hi there,
Interviewers at McKinsey will generally lead you through the process and timing. In general:
Best,
Alberto
Hi there,
It depends on a number of factors. Mainly:
A good benchmark is 1-2 minutes for non PEI/stories and 3-4 minutes for PEI/stories for your part. At least for the PEI questions, the interviewer will interrupt you and with his/her questions and your replies overall it will last 10-15 min.
Best,
Francesco
Around 1-3 minutes per question, if you are not in a McKinsey interview.
In terms of preparing these stories....
Resume walkthrough
Why Consulting
Why x company
Personal Stories
Step 1 - Categorize the main stories
There are 5-10 "themes" you need to prepare for. i.e. Leadership, teamwork, challenge, etc. Figure out this list and make sure your stories cover this range (PM me and I can provide you with a template for this list)
Step 2 - Create FLEXIBLE stories that cover a range of categories
You need to create 4-6 stories that each cover a range of topics. They need to be powerful stories that can be adjusted and adapted based on the question asked.
One of my "core" or "killer" stories was usable for Initiative, Achievement, Leadership, Challenge, Change of direction, AND Persuasion.
Write down these stories along STAR or similar format...use bullet points
Step 3 - Organize these stories so you know which ones can be used for what and PRACTICE
Make sure you cover the whole gambit. Then, practice getting asked a question and thinking of which stories apply. I can assure you, no-one is coming up with full stories in a few seconds. Rather, they have practiced how to adapt an existing story to the question asked.
How much time exactly is not just depended on you, but it also depends on the interviewer. Because a lot of interviewers like to ask follow-up questions on your stories, and sometimes for the single stories the interviewer can spend the entire FIT part (it's around 20 minutes).
However, what I can surely tell you that, when you are answering, every answer you should try to restrict within the 3 minutes. Because psychologically, more the 3 minutes of a monologue is not good communication, because the opposite person loses his concentration.
So, how does that pen out?
For example, if the interviewer asks, "Can you tell me a story where you demonstrated entrepreneurship spirit?", so make your answer usingSTAR model. That answer shouldn't be longer than 3 minutes. It should be exhaustive to cover the story, but it shouldn't be too long. However, be prepared to answer the follow-up question, if an interviewer specifically says: "Ok, so why don't you tell me, what exactly you did in this particular part of the story?".
Again, your time will start, and make sure that this answer is in line with the structure and don't talk longer than 2-3 minutes.
This series of conversations sometimes gets to the entire FIT part, or sometimes interviewers ask different questions.
I hope this answers your question.
GB
The interviewer will look less on how long exactly it took you to answer the question and more on how effective communicator you are.
First, try not to give too much unrelevant context. Often candidates tend to go very long on the context which the itnerviewer don't care much about beyond getting the overall picture. Usually 1-3 sentecnces for the context are enough and then get ot the essence of the answer.
Second, make sure you are structured! It can be "Situation->Comlication->Resolution" and it can be just "3 factors" or "3 reasons". When you go through the structure it is always great to go top down - start with high level description of each part and then get to the details.