How Executives Answer Behavioral Interview Questions & Get Hired

When interviewing for director, VP, and C-level roles, you better bet your bottom dollar that you are going to be asked behavioral interview questions at some point. And you may know the STAR method. That's cute, but so does your competition. I'm going to teach you how to elevate your behavioral interview answers using the CTO test. This is so that you don't just survive behavioral tell me about a time when questions, but that you slay them like the Mother of Dragons, aka you get the job offer. Because I don't know if you've seen all the comments I get on my videos where I'm attributed with hundreds of thousands of success stories, including many of my clients landing roles at the senior level, and you're next, buddy. No other video teaches you to elevate your answers to this level. And so if you follow these steps, I guarantee your interview answers will dramatically improve. First step to absolutely crush behavioral interview questions at the director, VP, and C-level is to build out your story toolbox, which is a list of examples from your career that is ready to go at a moment's notice. A huge issue I see with VP and executive level candidates is that when they're asked for specifics, they often brush it off and say something like, oh yes, that has happened to me so many times in my career. Usually how I handle it is, and they will speak in hypotheticals and philosophies. I'm telling you right now, this will lose you the job offer. Mayday, mayday, you're going down, chief. You need to choose specific examples even though your career is glorious and vast like a CVS receipt. Okay, so grab the Story Toolbox prompts. They are in my book, Reverse the Search, which you can grab at your local library, or I also link them for free down below. You can grab that document. Respond to each prompt with an example from your career, and you'll end up coming up with 14 examples. This may not seem possible, but if you follow these prompts, you should be able to come up with answers to nearly any behavioral interview question. Since you are an executive, I want you to lock in on the prompt that asks for essentially your biggest accomplishment. And you aren't always going to be asked, what's your greatest accomplishment? But you will be asked for examples of you absolutely slaying the job that you're in for whatever scenarios are most common for your profession. If you work in in business development, you'll be asked about a big deal you closed. If you're in product, they'll ask about a successful product launch. Whatever it is, get 2 or 3 absolute banger accomplishment stories that you can share. Next, I want you to bullet point out each of your examples using the CAR formula. And if you're not familiar with what CAR stands for, it starts for C, context. What challenges were you facing? This gives us background of what situation you were in. The A is action. So what action did you take? And then R is the results. What were the results of those actions? So go one by one for your examples and just write out pretty briefly what happened for all three parts of the CAR formula. Now, this is where 99% of your competition stops and it's where rookies stop, but you are an all-star or whatever is the correct sport Sports metaphor. Insert sports metaphor here. Also, let me know in the comments what job are you targeting. Let's see who's watching and I'll tailor future content to that crowd. You're going to go through each of your examples and put them through the CTO test to whip them into shape. So I'll walk you through the CTO test and then an answer example that doesn't quite pass the CTO test and how to amplify it to perfection level. So the CTO test is 3 steps. C stands for character. So look at the story in your toolbox and say, what character trait does this show about me? So often we simply say a series of events that happened and things we did in response, but it doesn't say anything about us. Instead, you should include details that imply important things about yourself, such as sharing how you worked all night on a shipment that got messed up implies that you're hardworking. Explaining how you came up with a clever marketing campaign based off of research insights shows that you are creative, those types of things. So make sure your stories illustrate your character and think about it the other way too. If there are repeated soft skills and characteristics in job descriptions in your line of work, such as you need to be empathetic or you have to have great attention to detail, make sure that those characteristics are showing up in your answers. Step 2 of the CTO test is T, thinking. So since you're an executive, arguably the most valuable thing you bring to the table is your strategic mind. But too often we give examples that skip over our thought process. We tell the story as if the answer was inevitable instead of allowing the listener to come along with us for how challenging something was. Such as instead of saying the ticket sales to the conference was low, so we got key people in our industry to start online discussions about the conference to generate more interest, Okay, but how did you come to that decision? How did you know it was going to work? What steps did you make to ensure these actions actually converted? And that's the juicy stuff. And finally, that brings us to the last step of the CTO test, C-O, and that is ownership. The rule is I over we. I over we. I over we. Okay, I'll tell you what I actually mean. Interviewers want to hear what you contributed. The strategy you uncovered, how you delegated, how you got the best work out of your team. If you make your answers sound like, we did this and then we did that, and ultimately Unfortunately, the results we got were the interviewer isn't going to be sure what you actually contributed. You may think you sound humble and team-oriented, but you're actually potentially ruining your chances of getting the job. So use the word I more than the word we. I over we. Now, does that mean that you never give credit to your team and you never say we? Absolutely not. It's great to even throw some compliments in there about your team, because when you compliment others, that actually reflects even better on you. But just don't do that at the expense of not showing the interviewer what specifically you bring to the picnic. You hear me? If you would like coaching and help in your job search, we've got you covered. I will add the link to coaching below. Let me show you an example that follows the CAR formula, but doesn't quite pass the CTO test. And then we will CTO it up. We had an issue with our technical team that employees kept coming to work after 10:00 AM. And the CEO came to me and asked that the HR team create a company-wide mandate that everyone needs to be at the office by 10:00 AM daily because it felt like it was degrading morale, productivity, and the ability for everyone attending the 10:00 AM standup to be in person. First, we sent a survey around to the technical team asking them what time they think in-office hours should start and if they think any current behaviors are disruptive. We then called a meeting with the team and and showed them slides of the overwhelming majority of the team wanting everyone to show up by 10:00 AM and also quotes from their team members saying why it was disruptive to them to have their coworkers arriving later. By showing this to the team and having the messages come from the team members instead of HR mandating a show up time, those who were showing up late understood the consequences of their actions and felt bad for impacting their coworkers and immediately changed their behavior. Therefore, team members started showing up before 10:00 AM and we didn't have any issues after that. Okay, this is a pretty Good answer. This is actually something that happened in my career. So let's go through the CTO test. First, character. What is the character trait you want to come through here? I'm thinking the characteristic is strategic. So instead of creating a policy, instead I went the route that I thought would be more likely to change the culture. So I wanna make sure that that comes through and it is implied, but that could be better. Next, there's the T, thinking. I showed almost none of my thought process here. Adding the thought process would help me to meet my character goal of appearing strategic, so that would be perfect to add in. Finally, O, ownership. I used mostly we in the story despite the fact that it was my idea, my strategy, and my order to call the meeting. I, I, I, I, I. And so I should have taken credit. Okay, so here is the revised CTO-tested answer. We had an issue with our technical team that employees kept coming to work after 10:00 AM. The CTO came to me and asked that I create a company-wide mandate that everyone needs to be in the office by 10:00 AM daily because he felt it was degrading morale, productivity felt like it was going down, and people weren't all in the office for the 10:00 AM standup. I agreed that it was impacting morale, but one thing I know from leading HR in my career is that Policy alone does not change behavior, and I needed to find a way to get employees to want to come in at 10:00 AM intrinsically. I know that a powerful way to influence culture is to look at your peers. So I sent a survey around to the technical team asking them what they think in-office hours should be. Also, just in general, some of their thoughts about the behaviors of arrival times of team members. The results were clear. The team members agreed with the CEO that they wanted people to show up on time, but they didn't wanna have to police their coworkers. And so a lot of them also decided to show up late too, since other people were doing it. I then called a meeting with a team and showed them slides of the data of responses and also quotes from their team members saying how disruptive it was to have their coworkers arriving later. I facilitated a discussion where it become clear that essentially everyone agreed that it would be better to have everyone show up on time. And at the end, I asked the group if they wanted to establish expectations, and I simply he wrote down what they said and then emailed it out to everyone. No stuffy HR policy needed. We saw an immediate behavior change. This method allowed people to want to come to work on time for their coworkers and created less work for the HR team in the long run because then we didn't have to enforce a new policy. And we haven't had an issue with that since. Okay, so my answer still wasn't that long. I added a few extra details so that the listener could understand the the strategic thought process that went into the action and see me as the owner of the situation. You've got this. Wi-Fi high five.