How to include data in your answers to behavioral interview questions

It’s important to include data in your answers to behavioral questions. By data I mean specific, quantifiable, granular information, like amount of money, number of hours, number of gigabytes, etc.

Your answers should have a balance of enough data but not too much. Use enough to show that you clearly know details but not so much the answer becomes hard to follow or boring to listen to. If your answer is longer than 3.5 minutes you’re probably including too much detail/data.

Data is often the difference between a mediocre answer and an excellent answer.

Examples of how to add data to sentences

Whenever you can, replace adjectives or vague/general information with data. Here are some examples of how to do this:

Without data: We made the performance much faster

With data: We reduced server side tp90 latency from 10 ms to 1 ms

The phrase “much faster” is so vague - What was the speed in the beginning? What was it in the end? What type of performance were you measuring? And who is “we” - I assume you already explained this earlier in the story.

Without data: Nearly all customers

With data: 92% of Bonus-club members

“Nearly all” and “customers” are both vague terms. Give the number of customers and also specify the type, unless you are talking about the total number of customers. But even then, you should say that.

Without data: Significantly better

With data: Up 34 bonus points

I think you see where I am going with this. “Significantly better” is too vague.

Example of how to add data to an entire answer to a behavioral interview question

In the following scenario the candidate is the CEO of a mid-sized landscaping company. You may not be able to relate to this business, and in fact I don’t think I’ve ever had a client in landscaping, but it’s a simple answer that will show you the right way to use data.

Question: You mentioned you didn’t make revenue in 2016. Can you walk me through why?

Mediocre answer:

In 2016 there wasn’t as much rainfall as there had been in previous years so it led to a lot of our customers’ grass yellowing and subsequently not being cared for by our team. This ultimately hurt revenues.

Better answer:

In the area of Texas around metropolitan Houston, where my company Johnson Landscaping, does 65% of our business, the average rainfall in the summer is 6 inches. In 2016 the rainfall total was down to 2 inches.

Unfortunately, the grass that is most common in that area of Texas is St. Augustine, which requires at least 4 inches of rain to sustain a natural growth pattern. When the grass grows naturally, we are able to remain on a typical cadence of lawn service for our customers, which is bi-weekly. When the grass doesn’t grow enough (like when it doesn’t rain as much), customers generally cancel some of their work with us because the grass simply doesn’t need to be cut. This is what happened in 2016 after the rainfall shortage. We lost 25% of our revenue, and most of that was because of the rainfall affecting grass growth.

In order to prevent the same loss of revenue in 2017 and subsequent years that we had in 2016, we knew we needed to do as much as we could to prevent the same thing from happening again. We can’t control the weather, but we hired a weather analytics firm to give us estimates of rainfall 60 days prior to summer. We also began to develop other ideas for low-rainfall year gardening, such as educating our clients about xeri-scaping (low-water requirement landscaping) and varieties of grass that require less water. Educating clients needs to be done in advance; it isn’t a last minute fix. So we began this plan quickly before we had the weather reports for the next year.

When our weather firm let us know that there might again be less rain in 2017, we had already begun educating our clients about their options. Some of them did wish to take precautions and changed their plants in advance.

Analysis of the answer

The “Mediocre Interview answer” above is an example of answering the question and getting to the root of the issue. Unfortunately, this response is very surface level and does not go into enough detail for what interviewers are looking for.

In the “Better answer” the candidate used data to work though the scenario.

Is this enough data?

No. I doubt the interviewer would accept this as enough info. They would ask “Why is this what you chose to do?” “Did you think about X, Y, or Z?” “What happened in 2018?” “What about 2019?”

How could you improve the answer even further?

Your answer can be longer than this – this is a fairly short answer. You should actually give even more details about what you did to prevent the problem from happening again and what the results were. There aren’t really many results in this answer.

Your answer should be between 2 and 3.5 minutes long.