This guide addresses “Nursing Behavioral Interview Questions” likely to be encountered in an upcoming interview. Interviewers use behavioral questions to evaluate your past accomplishments, and to better understand your leadership skills and potential for future success. Download the 18-page guide here.
Today’s healthcare environment is undergoing transformational changes resulting in many new and unanticipated challenges. In response, many healthcare organizations emphasize behavioral interviewing questions to identify a new generation of leaders.
Behavioral Questions During Transformational Changes
Transformational changes result in nurse leaders facing the stress of making complex decisions in ambiguous situations. For example:
You are a project manager during a hospital-wide EMR implementation, and your CIO resigns unexpectedly. Despite this interruption, you completed your project successfully and on time. Additionally, having worked collaboratively, you lost no staff, had two of your managers promoted due to their exemplary performance, and your team won the “Most Successful Project of 2019” award.
Implementing an EMR system is a significant accomplishment. Previously, this alone would have been enough to impress your interviewer.
However, today the interviewer will take a deeper dive and look past the accomplishment. Today, the interviewer wants to understand how you handle unanticipated challenges.
By describing the extenuating circumstances and discussing your collaborative approach, creativity, agility, and ability to adapt rapidly, you more effectively illuminate the required skills that predict your future success.
Prospective healthcare employers could ask questions such as:
- “Describe under what extenuating circumstances you were successful.”
- “Describe your decision-making agility.”
- “How have you addressed unfamiliar challenges in the past.”
- “Provide an example of your creative and innovative problem-solving skills.”
- “What non-healthcare process or methodology have you brought to your organization?”
The interviewer is trying to find an answer to: “Does this candidate demonstrate skills indicating an ability to deal with tomorrow’s unforeseen challenges?”
Before interviewing for a new career opportunity, you must re-examine the behavioral healthcare interview questions you will likely encounter.
Today behavioral interview responses are evaluated to identify leaders who are:
- Collaborative and empower their staff,
- Proactive and visionary,
- Transparent,
- Embracing Evidence-Based Practice ,
- Positive, engaged, passionate, and creative,
- Strategic and critical thinkers,
- Compassionate and empathic,
- Motivational,
- Innovative,
- Able to encourage and influence their staff to challenge, “but we’ve always done it this way” type of thinking, and
- Embracing Lean and Six Sigma processes.
Your chances of being hired improve when your potential employer understands your measurable and quantifiable accomplishments, the extenuating circumstances under which you achieved them, and your ability to adapted rapidly and proactively to unforeseen challenges. These are the hallmarks of leadership in today’s healthcare environment.
Today’s healthcare behavioral interview requires that you do more than relate to a prospective employer what you did in the past. Find ways to describe the circumstances, the ambiguity in which you worked, and the barriers you overcame.
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