Behavioral Based Business Blogging

Business blogs, I’m fond of saying in corporate blogging training classes, are nothing more than extended interviews.  Just as in a face-to-face job interview, searchers who read your blog evaluate the content, judging whether you’re a good fit for them.

Behavioral interviewers don’t focus on facts (the employer already has read those facts on your resume). Instead, the purpose is to ask questions that reveal the way you, the prospective employee, tend to function in various situations. In other words, the employer is trying to discover the person behind the resume.

Just as employers want to know how reliable you’ve been in the past, your blog posts need to include stories about how you solved client problems, and what lessons you’ve learned through your experiences, lessons you’ll be applying in your dealings with them should they choose to become your customers.

Employers will want to know what others are saying about you and your staff. That’s where it becomes so important to include testimonials and interviews in your content writing. As we Indianapolis blog content writers present you and your business to the public through your blog, we need to anticipate the questions readers would ask if they were interviewing you.

Alison Doyle lists the “Top Ten Behavioral Interview Questions”, designed to reveal how you work effectively under pressure, handle challenges, handle your own mistakes, set and achieve goals, work on a team, handle disagreements, motivate employees or co-workers, and handle difficult situations.

Behavioral questions. Doyle explains, are more pointed, more probing, and more specific than traditional interview questions. Transposed into business blogging, that tells us freelance blog content writers that we need to focus less on presenting facts and more on creating emotional connection with readers.  

Stories is one way to do just that. Stories, of course, are made up of words, yet stories, in a way, speak louder than words. The TED Radio Hour takes a look at the power of narrative. “Telling stories is that thing that makes us human. Stories ignite our imagination, and let us leap over cultural walls and cross the barriers of time,” TED explains.

Blogging for business means answering the behavioral-based interview questions before they’re asked!