Behavioral Interviewing 101

Behavioral interviewing is based on the tenet that the best predictor of future behavior is the record of past behavior.

As an interviewer, the challenge is to ask the kinds of questions that lead an interviewee to reveal just how they performed in certain situations so you can project that behavior into the proposed job. This kind of interview goes well past checking out previous job experience and actual job skills. Instead, it focuses on trying to foretell a candidate’s performance. How would they act in various scenarios? They may intellectually understand what it means to be a “team player,” for instance, but when push comes to shove, will they actually behave in a cooperative, collaborative way?

Interviewing skills training can help interviewers learn how to probe for a candidate’s underlying motivation and attitude. Any savvy job seeker can provide satisfactory answers to standard questions. But until interviewers know how to dig beneath the surface answers, they are only getting rehearsed replies that come out of a book.

The first step in behavioral interviewing is to identify the critical competencies needed for the specific job and organizational culture you are hiring for. Once those are listed, there will be questions that are designed to zero in on whether or not the job seeker has displayed those specific behavioral competencies in their previous positions.

Here are examples of questions that require careful consideration by job candidates and are likely to show their true past behavior. You will note that the questions typically begin with phrases such as “describe a time when,” “give me an example of,” or “in your last job how did you handle a situation when.”

• Describe a time when you had to use your verbal skills to get across an important point.

• Give me an example of when you had to go “above and beyond” to get the job done.

• In your last job, how did you handle a situation when others on your team resisted working toward the team goal?

• Talk about a situation when you had to change direction in order to respond to the needs of others on your team?

• Describe (and give specifics) how you prioritize the way you spend your time.

• Give an example of how you resolved a conflict between you and a team member.

• How, specifically, do you try to achieve a work-life balance that suits you?

• Describe a time when your supervisor was unhappy with your work and how you resolved the problem. What did you learn as a result?

Hiring for Culture versus Qualifications – What Matters Most?

The debate continues. What matters most as you hire new employees, their cultural fit or their skills? And what are the most effective ways of uncovering both in the interview process?
 
Once upon a time, interviews focused solely on your resume which was a standard report of your work experience and education. Oh yes, there was always a sentence or two at the end that filled in some personal information about your family perhaps or how you spend your leisure time. But the questions zeroed in on your professional life…where you had worked, in what capacity, and why you had left.

Behavior based interviewing training has taught interviewers how to dig beneath the surface to learn more about a candidate’s on-the-job behavior. It is no longer enough to check out the work experience. Interviewers want to be able to predict how a candidate will actually operate in their unique work environment. They want to know about their work ethic, their ability to get along with others and their willingness to accept feedback and learn new skills. So the savvy interviewer is able to ask questions that uncover a candidate’s attitude.

Smart interviews go a step further. They seek to determine cultural fit. Will the job candidate be able to adapt to the company culture and thrive in the organization’s environment? As a job applicant in this situation, you never know just what questions you will be asked. They can be as bizarre as “Would you rather watch Star Wars or Star Trek and why?” or as apparently irrelevant as “Where do you go for vacation?” These questions are asked in an attempt to learn about an applicant’s working style and to predict their fit with the company culture…how they do business day-to-day.

So what is the answer? Today’s gurus seem to favor the notion that what matters even more than skills and qualifications are attitude and working style. Skills, they say, can be learned; one’s basic personality cannot and comes with the package. Too many new hires (90% by some accounts) leave companies because they do not fit with the culture. So smart companies now spend time defining how they work and what they value; then they seek employees who have the same orientation and who will be aboard for the longer-term.

Bottom line? As counter-intuitive as it seems, high growth companies don’t necessarily hire the most skilled candidates. They want new hires to stay. They do not want the disruption and cost of the turnover of new hires that don’t fit.