What Is Behavioural Interviewing?

Wednesday, 26 August 2026

What is behavioural interviewing?

Six candidates, six conversations, each one going wherever the candidate takes it. One gets asked how they would handle an underperformer. Another gets asked about their management philosophy. A third spends twenty minutes on a shared interest in cycling and is remembered afterwards as the one with the best rapport. Nobody in the room can say what evidence the decision rested on, because none was collected in a form that could be compared.

Behavioural interviewing is the correction to that. Instead of asking what a candidate would do in a hypothetical situation, it asks them to describe a specific occasion when they did something relevant: a time they had to give difficult feedback, a decision they made without enough information, a deadline they missed. The candidate supplies the event. The interviewer probes for what actually happened rather than accepting a description of general practice.

The premise is that recounting reveals more than speculating does. If you were to ask someone how they’d handle an underperformer, you’ll usually get the answer they know is expected, which is evidence they have read about management. Ask about a real underperformer and you get a person, a timeline, a conversation that went badly or well and often an admission that it took longer than it should have. All of that can be tested with follow-up questions, and it’s harder to fabricate on the spot.

The STAR pattern, and what it misses

Most behavioural interviewing is taught through STAR: situation, task, action, result. The candidate sets the scene, explains what they were responsible for, describes what they personally did, then says how it turned out. As a prompt for both interviewer and candidate it’s useful, and it’s the reason so many answers begin with a paragraph of context.

Two things get lost when STAR is treated as the whole method. The first is the interviewer’s job. STAR is a template for how a candidate organises an answer and says nothing about what the interviewer does next. A candidate who delivers a clean STAR response has given you a story they prepared earlier. What were the other options. Who disagreed with you. What did your manager say afterwards. Those follow-ups are the interview. The second is that STAR invites candidates to narrate the action and skate over the result, which is where the evidence about judgement usually sits.

Some panels add a fifth element, reflection, asking what the candidate learned or would change. Include it, but score it separately. A candidate can be thoughtful and articulate about an episode they handled badly. Those are two different findings, and a single score will blur them together.

Does behavioural interviewing actually work?

The evidence for structured interviewing has been strong for decades, and it got stronger recently in an unexpected way. For years the reference point was Frank Schmidt and John Hunter’s 1998 meta-analysis, which put the validity of structured interviews at around .51 against .38 for unstructured ones. A 2016 update by Schmidt, Oh and Shaffer complicated that, revising both figures to .58 under a different correction for range restriction, so a .51 quoted without a date is worth treating carefully. Earlier work by Michael McDaniel and colleagues, drawing on data from more than 86,000 people, had pointed the same way: structured interviews outperformed unstructured, and situational and job-related interviews outperformed psychologically framed ones.

Then in 2022 Paul Sackett, Charlene Zhang, Christopher Berry and Filip Lievens showed that decades of meta-analyses had overcorrected for range restriction and overstated the validity of nearly every selection method. Their revised figures are lower across the board, with structured interviews around .42 and unstructured around .19. The reshuffle matters more than the drop. Under the corrected estimates, structured interviews come out as the strongest single predictor of job performance available. Cognitive ability testing had held that position since 1998.

Two cautions before anyone puts a number in a business case. These are correlations averaged across many studies and job types, not a guarantee about your next hire, and behavioural interviewing is one form of structured interview rather than the whole category. The defensible summary is that structure produces the validity, and behavioural questioning is one of the better ways to get it.

Why merit-based recruitment pushes you towards it

Anyone hiring in the Australian Public Service is working under a legislated definition of a fair process. Section 10A of the Public Service Act 1999 provides that a decision to engage or promote is based on merit only if several conditions hold together: everyone eligible had a reasonable opportunity to apply, relative suitability was assessed through a competitive process, and the assessment was based on the relationship between the candidates’ work-related qualities and the work-related qualities genuinely required for the duties, focusing on their relative capacity to achieve outcomes.

Read that as an instruction to a selection panel and it describes the method closely. Relative suitability requires comparison, which requires everyone answering the same questions. Work-related qualities rule out the general conversation about someone’s outlook. Relative capacity to achieve outcomes points at what candidates have delivered. The Australian Public Service Commission’s Guide on Merit makes the same point from the practical end, noting that panels must base their assessment only on information collected through the assessment process. A selection process, it says, needs to withstand scrutiny.

Promotion decisions in the APS can be reviewed by the Merit Protection Commissioner, and a review considers the information available to the original panel. If the panel scored each candidate against defined criteria at the time, the material exists and can be handed over. If it worked from an overall impression, what exists six months later is whatever three people can still remember. That tends to have converged on the version they agreed on in the debrief. The same logic applies well beyond the public sector, wherever an unsuccessful candidate might ask how the decision was made.

How do you write and score a behavioural question?

Start from the role. Generic competency lists produce generic questions, which produce answers a candidate could have given for any job in the sector. Identify three or four things the person will have to do, then write a question that asks for an occasion when they did something comparable. Tell me about a time you had to deliver bad news to a stakeholder who hadn’t seen it coming is a better question than tell me about your communication skills, because only one of them requires an event.

Scoring deserves as much preparation as asking. Agree before the interview what a weak, adequate and strong answer looks like for each question, in a sentence or two each, so panellists are calibrated against the same standard rather than against each other. Score independently before discussing, since the first person to speak in a debrief tends to anchor everyone else. Write down what the candidate said, not what you concluded. Notes that record your conclusions look identical to notes that record evidence. By the sixth interview you won’t be able to tell which kind you have.

There are limits worth knowing. Candidates with less work experience have a smaller stock of examples to draw on, which can penalise career changers and graduates for their circumstances instead of telling you anything about their capability, so panels often accept examples from study, volunteering or other settings. Rehearsal is uneven too. Candidates who have been coached, or who have simply interviewed a lot recently, arrive with polished stories, and panels sometimes read that polish as substance. The answer is to keep going past the prepared account.

Most of this is straightforward on paper and harder in the room, where a panel is running late, a candidate is giving a fluent answer to a question you didn’t quite ask, and the person beside you has already decided. Getting comparable evidence out of six conversations, and then defending what you did with it, takes practice. AcademyGlobal (AG) runs a one-day Getting Recruitment Right workshop covering candidate assessment and interview technique, taught through presentations, group tasks and case studies.

If you’re on the other side of the table, the same logic applies in reverse. Have four or five real episodes ready and know the numbers attached to them. Expect the follow-up questions, and expect at least one of them to be about something that didn’t work, because most panels are told to ask.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between behavioural and situational interview questions?

Behavioural questions ask about something you have done, situational questions ask what you would do in a hypothetical scenario. Both are structured approaches and both outperform unstructured conversation. Behavioural questions test recall of real events, while situational questions can be fairer to candidates who lack directly comparable experience.

What does STAR stand for?

Situation, task, action and result. It’s a way of organising an answer: describe the context, explain what you were responsible for, set out what you personally did, then say what happened. For an interviewer, a complete STAR answer is where the questioning starts.

How many behavioural questions should an interview include?

Enough to cover the criteria and few enough to allow proper follow-up, which usually means four to six in an hour. Each question needs time for the candidate to give an example and for the panel to probe it. Ten questions in the same hour will fill in more of the form and tell you less about the candidate.

Can candidates prepare for behavioural interviews?

Yes, and that isn’t much of a problem. Preparation means arriving with relevant examples in mind, which makes for a better conversation. What preparation can’t supply is the detail behind the story, so probing questions about alternatives, disagreements and outcomes will usually distinguish a genuine account from a rehearsed one.

Is behavioural interviewing suitable for graduate or entry-level roles?

It can be, with adjustment. Candidates without work history have fewer examples, so panels should accept evidence from study, casual work, sport or volunteering and should say so in advance. Where the role requires no prior experience, situational questions or work sample exercises may produce fairer comparisons.

References

Australian Public Service Commission. Guide on Merit in the APS.

Commonwealth of Australia. Public Service Act 1999, section 10A. Federal Register of Legislation.

McDaniel, M. A., Whetzel, D. L., Schmidt, F. L. and Maurer, S. D. (1994). The Validity of Employment Interviews: A Comprehensive Review and Meta-Analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology.

Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M. and Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting Meta-Analytic Estimates of Validity in Personnel Selection. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040 to 2068.

Schmidt, F. L., Oh, I. and Shaffer, J. A. (2016). The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology. Working paper.