Got a call yesterday for interview prep advice.  Great candidate, looking to take the next step with another company.  My friend was in the best position he could be in related to the interview - he has direct experience working with the technology required and he was a external referral of the PERSON BEING PROMOTED OUT OF THE ROLE.

There's just this one little problem.  He was anticipating a behavioral interview.

And he hates behavioral interviewing.

My advice was simple, and it's the most powerful thing any candidate can do when fearing the behavioral interview:

--Think about 3-4 themes that you think are important to the interviewer/company/position combo in question (for my friend, it was leading people through change, fear of technology,  and lazy people who don't want to learn new things, etc.).

--Then pre-prepare a behavioral interviewing STAR (describe SITUATION/TASK, then talk about the ACTIONS your took given that situation, then talk about what happened - RESULTS).

Each story should take about 3 minutes to share effectively.

If you want to win with behavioral interviewing, you should pre-prepare your stories.  It's amazing once you have 4 stories/STARS how you can use the same story to answer a multitude of questions.

They're going to ask "tell me about a time".  If you hate that, take your fear down by pre-preparing your stories/STARS.  

A little prep leads to a stress-free interview.  Even if they don't ask behavioral questions, you can find time to share the examples/stories you've created.