Your big job interview is today, and you're primed for it. You know the company and its players inside and out, you've practiced answering questions about yourself and your skills -- you've even worked on responding effectively to those hypothetical, "what if" questions you're likely to get during the discussion.

The interview begins and, sure enough, you're sailing. "Tell me about yourself," the interviewer says to open the conversation. You deliver a great response -- one you rehearsed so much, in fact, that you're a master at making it sound unrehearsed.

"Why do you want to work for us?" the interviewer continues. You're ready for this one, too. Now you're two for two in the "wonderful answer" category.

But then the interviewer crosses you up -- big time: "Tell me about a time when you had to work with someone you really didn't like."

Yikes!

You stumble your way through an answer and hope the interviewer doesn't see through your smokescreen. You had figured you would spend most of the time in the interview responding to hypothetical scenarios, not talking about your real past experiences.

Welcome to the behavioral interview, an increasingly popular way for employers to determine whether you're the person who can best fill their job vacancy and help their companies. Unlike more traditional interview approaches, which often rely on getting you to simply talk about yourself, behavioral interviewing focuses more on your past behavior in actual work or conflict situations.

From an employer's standpoint, the philosophy behind behavioral interviewing is simple and straightforward: Your past behavior predicts your future behavior. In other words, if an employer wants to know how you'll respond to a future situation in the company, he or she can get a pretty good indication by figuring out how you've responded to similar situations before.

That's why, when you find yourself in the middle of a behavioral interview, you'll often hear questions phrased as "Tell me about a time when…" or "Give me an example of a case where you had to...." Questions like these are a dead giveaway of a behavioral interview, and they call for a specific type of response on your part -- a response you must prepare for ahead of time as best you can.

How do you get ready for a behavioral interview? By developing brief stories from your past highlighting the skills you think the company will be looking for.

Suppose, for instance, that based on the job description of the position you've applied for, you figure there's a good chance the interviewer will ask you about your leadership skills. Think like a behavioral interviewer for a moment: How might he or she phrase this question?

It might sound something like this: "Give me an example of a time when your leadership/team/conflict resolution skills made a school-related project succeed."

You then need to come up with a good story to tell in response to what the interviewer is looking for. And that will be much easier for you to do if you've thought about it ahead of time and you don't, instead, have to "wing it" during the interview itself.

As you think about stories to tell in relation to the various skills you think the interviewer will be looking for, practice as well the way you'll tell your stories. For each story, make sure you cover three specific areas:

• The situation or the task you had to perform
• The action you took in response to the situation or task
• The results of your actions

In your mind, you can use the acronym STAR (situation/task, action, result) to easily remember these story elements, each of which the interviewer will be looking for specifically.

Behavioral interviews can be nerve-wracking, especially if they catch you off guard. But if you're ready for them, they can also offer you a wonderful opportunity to show off what you've accomplished in your past -- so that prospective employers see you as an asset for their future.