EY Behavioral Interview Questions 2026: Three Criteria

Where EY behavioral interview questions come from

The US interview tips page opens with a declaration of method: "We lean heavily on a type of interviewing called behavioral interviewing. It's based on the premise that past behavior predicts future behavior, and it focuses on knowledge, skills and abilities, backed by specific examples."

Then it hands over the shape of the question: "The questions are open-ended and typically start with phrases like "Give an example of" or "Describe a situation when."" Two openings, both demanding one episode with a date attached. Neither accepts a self-description, a philosophy, or a habit.

Notice what is absent. The word "case" does not appear once in these tips. EY does name a case elsewhere, on its application-deadline page, among three possible formats. A candidate who prepares from the interview tips alone will arrive without knowing a case is even on the menu, and that is a gap in EY's own signposting rather than in yours.

The how we hire page then removes any single description of the process: "Your interview experience will be a combination of in-person, phone and video. We may also ask you to complete a written assessment, either online or at a testing center. The exact structure and content will depend on the country, service line and role to which you apply, as different roles need different skills." The firm says plainly that there is no one EY process. The invitation email is the authority on yours.

Three criteria, which are STAR minus its first letter

This is the part nobody quotes. EY writes "Your answers will be measured against these criteria:" and then prints three, in this order:

The verb is "measured". The same three sentences appear word for word on the EY India interview tips page, which is what turns them from an American page quirk into a rule the organization applies on more than one market. Two URLs, one grid, verifiable by comparison.

Read the grid closely and something jumps out. It asks for the experience, the action and the result. It never asks for the situation, and it never asks what you chose between. So EY's published standard is STAR with its first letter removed and no slot for the decision at all. That is worth knowing before you spend two sentences setting a scene nobody is marking.

Ten to fifteen examples, one and a half per named skill

EY is the only firm we have read that puts a number on the preparation: "For example, you should prepare 10 to 15 examples you can adjust on the fly to suit a question."

Work out what that means against the firm's own other list. Its UK student page names eight key skills. Ten to fifteen examples across eight named skills is 1.25 to 1.875 examples each, because 10 divided by 8 is 1.25 and 15 divided by 8 is 1.875. So EY is asking for roughly one and a half stories per skill, with some doubling up. It is not asking for one answer per possible question, which is the trap.

For scale, an Accenture recruiter publishes three to five prepared examples, and McKinsey asks for two examples against each of four themes, which is eight slots. EY's range sits above both. At the low end it is twice Accenture's three, and at the high end it is five times it, since 10 divided by 5 is 2 and 15 divided by 3 is 5.

The phrase that matters most is "adjust on the fly". Paired with the explicit instruction "Do not memorize or read your responses from a script. You don't want to sound too rehearsed", it tells you the unit of preparation is an experience and never an answer. Twelve experiences written in four lines each is twelve sheets of nothing much. Twelve rehearsed paragraphs is forty minutes of recital that the interviewer can hear.

Eight behavioral interview questions the two openings produce

EY publishes openings and never a question, so a question list copied from anywhere else is somebody's guess. What the firm does publish is eight named skills on its UK student page, each with a definition. Put one of its two openings in front of each skill and you get eight forms that are traceable to the firm's own words. The forms below are ours. The skill names are EY's, verbatim.

Two openings against eight skills is sixteen shapes, since 8 times 2 is 16. Hold that against the firm's own instruction to bring ten to fifteen examples and the arithmetic says what the preparation unit is: twelve examples across sixteen shapes means most of your episodes have to answer two of them. An episode that answers exactly one shape is an episode you will carry into the room and never use.

One behavioral interview answer run against the three criteria

Below is an example we wrote to show the grid working, with numbers that recompute. It is a demonstration and not a template, and copying it would produce the scripted delivery EY says it can detect.

Question form. "Give an example of a time you improved something with no authority to change it."

The answer. "I worked two shifts a week on a university IT helpdesk with one other student. We were taking about 340 tickets a week and our average first response was 19 hours. I pulled a month of tickets and sorted them by type. Six categories accounted for 204 of the 340, which is 60 percent. I wrote a twelve-item answer page covering those six and asked the web team to link it above the ticket form. Ticket volume fell to about 214 a week, a drop of 126, or roughly 37 percent, and first response came down to about 7 hours. I could not touch the remaining categories, because they all needed database access that students were not given."

Recompute it. 204 divided by 340 is 0.6. The fall from 340 to 214 is 126, and 126 divided by 340 is 0.3706, so roughly 37 percent. Nothing in the answer needs a figure the speaker could not have known.

Now score it against EY's three. A relevant experience that answers the question: the authority constraint is in the first clause and the fix is outside the speaker's remit. What action you took: sorting, writing twelve items, asking the web team. What your action led to: two numbers, one of them the response time a manager would actually care about. The last sentence is not in the grid, and it is the sentence that makes the rest credible.

What EY forgives on a prerecorded video, in its own words

EY runs two video formats and says so: prerecorded, with questions sent in advance, and live. The page is unusually specific about the prerecorded one, and three of its instructions change what a candidate does.

1. Do not wait until the deadline to record. EY says it directly to students, and the reason is practical rather than moral.
2. Do not assume you must use all of your allotted time for each question. An answer that stops when it is finished reads better than one padded to the timer.
3. Look into the camera rather than at your own face, and if the preview is distracting, EY suggests covering that part of the screen with a piece of paper.

Then there is a list of things the firm says explicitly it will not hold against you: a sneeze, a barking dog, a passing ambulance, a blip in your audio or video. Very few employers put that in writing. It is worth reading once before you record, because the failure mode on a prerecorded interview is a candidate restarting a good take over a noise nobody was marking.

One technical line is easy to miss: "Ensure your internet browser is up to date (Chrome is recommended)." EY Canada adds a different point, that a video there is a piece of the application rather than an interview stage, and publishes a list of words it says sound insincere, including "ninja" and "rockstar".

The eight UK skills, and why they stay a separate list

The UK student page names eight key skills, written in the first person plural: We are proactive, We do the right thing, We are curious, We build relationships, We show agility, We think critically, We embrace technology, We are motivated. Each carries a definition. "We think critically" reads: "You enjoy problem solving critically analysing the situation and coming up with effective solutions. You think strategically and consider different perspectives to help guide your decisions." The spelling is British on that page and a quote keeps its own spelling.

Here is the discipline that matters. Nothing on any EY page links these eight skills to the three measurement criteria. It is tempting to present them as one system, with the eight as the content and the three as the marking. That link would be our invention. Both lists are real, they come from different markets, and no EY page we read puts them in the same sentence.

Use them differently, then. The three criteria decide whether an answer is complete. The eight skills are a plausible index for a story bank if you are applying in the UK, and the fourteen signals on behavioral and fit practice do the same job with a probe attached to each, which is what tells you whether a story survives a follow-up.

Answering why EY against its eight published skills

No EY page we read prints a "why EY" question, and the how we hire page says the structure depends on country, service line and role. The question still arrives, and the firm has given you one checkable surface to answer it against: the eight skills come with definitions, and a definition can be quoted back.

The method is three lines long. Pick two of the eight. Lift the verb out of EY's own definition. Attach one dated episode to each verb. The published definition of "We think critically" supplies the verbs directly: it says you "enjoy problem solving critically analysing the situation", that you "think strategically", and that you "consider different perspectives to help guide your decisions". Three verbs, one sentence, and all three are the firm's.

A forty-word opening, written to that method: "Two of the eight skills on your student page describe what I have already been doing. Last spring I rebuilt a helpdesk answer page after sorting a month of tickets, and the sorting changed the plan twice."

Then the test that keeps the answer honest. Read your two sentences and substitute another firm's name. If they still hold, they are not an answer about EY, and the quoted definition is doing no work. Anything you add about the firm's culture, its people or how it feels to work there sits outside everything EY publishes, and an interviewer who asks where you read it has nowhere to be sent. The eight definitions have a URL. Use the ones that have a URL.

How we score this, and what EY does not score

EY publishes three yes-or-no criteria. It publishes no weights, no threshold, and no score. The weights below are ours, applied by our own grader and read from the code that scores, and no firm publishes a marking scheme for a behavioral answer.