Mootness of behavioral interview questions

Behavioral questions get asked in almost every interview, and I think they are nonsensical.

What you actually test is who can tell a good story on demand. So you optimize for people who are good at fabricating stories, or at least polishing them, and then delivering them well. That is who you select for, and that is who you deserve.

There are only a handful of these questions anyway. When was the last time you faced a complex challenge and how did you fix it. When was the last time you showed empathy. How did you handle a conflict. What tradeoffs did you make. That is about it. You can ask AI for the full list in ten seconds, and then ask it to write you a perfectly tailored answer for each one.

The same thing already happened to CVs. Look at any fresher's CV now and every line reads "did X, Y, Z to improve the ABC system by 98%". The pattern got copied until it stopped meaning anything.

Maybe behavioral questions were useful when they started. Now the format is common knowledge, everyone preps for it, and HR keeps asking for no good reason.

The people who do well are the ones who prepared specifically for your interview and rehearsed those stories. Some of them made up, most of them polished. The people who do badly are often the ones who did not bother, or who are simply not good at storytelling. Neither tells you much about the work. Sometimes the second group is better.

For engineering hiring especially, this is a damaging practice. You end up with people who interviewed much better than they actually work.

Worth reconsidering in your process.