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The Telephone Doctor

Secrets of Successful Interviewing

Hiring errors rank amongst the costliest of common business mistakes. A recent study showed the direct costs associated with a poor hiring decision of a mid-level manager approached $40,000.

What strategy is in place at your organization to lower this risk and maximize your chances of hiring the right person the first time? Organizations willing to make an up front investment to train team members on proper interviewing and recruiting techniques will earn big dividends on such an investment.

The purpose of this article is to provide a quick introduction to behavior-based interviewing. This topic can be complex so reader’s wishing to learn more are invited to review the new DVD-based course mentioned in the side-bar box.

What is behavior-based interviewing?

Behavior-based interviewing is a technique where questions are asked about past behaviors. It is effective because past behavior is the best indicator of how a person will behave in the future.

Behavior-based interviewing is different from biographical interviewing. Biographical interviewing also involves asking questions about the past and is what most interviewers usually do. In biographical interviewing, you ask questions like, "I see you worked in the engineering department for three years. What exactly did you do there?" You are likely to get an answer like this: "I worked on the design of the T54. My job was to take the specifications that the market research department had generated and convert this into an engineering specification." This is useful information and you will often need to ask questions like this before you can ask behavioral questions.

A behavioral question goes deeper. It focuses on one specific incident, sometimes called a critical incident, and probes to find out how the individual behaved during that incident. An example of behavioral question is: "Can you tell me about a time during your work on the T54 when you realized that you were not going to complete a drawing on time? ("Yes"). What did you do?"

Behavior-based interviewing is also different from hypothetical interviewing. An example of a hypothetical question would be: "What would you do if you realized that you were not going to complete a drawing on time?" This can be useful for understanding someone’s thought process but not a reliable indicator of what someone will actually do. Someone could tell you that if the building caught fire they would rush repeatedly into the flames, rescuing children, cats and old people. What is more, they might believe it. But this does not mean that in an actual fire they wouldn’t be tripping over children and elderly ladies in their rush to escape.

Behavior-based interviewing is also called competency-based interviewing or critical-incident interviewing.

What is behavior and why does it matter?

When psychologists talk about behavior, they refer to all the responses that a person has to a stimulus. This is different from the everyday use of the word, where we tend to talk about children behaving badly, for example. The psychologist means everything that goes on in and from a person in a particular situation. This includes what they think, what they feel and what they do. Being scared is behavior and laughing is behavior.

At work, we are interested in the way people do their job. This is observable behavior. All sorts of things might be going on beneath the surface but the part we can see is the way they do their job.

When we recruit somebody, we want to know how he or she will approach his or her job. In other words, what their observable behavior will be. The best indicator of this is their past behavior and that’s why the behavior-based interviewer is interested in it.

A person’s observable behavior is like the tip of an iceberg. It is the visible portion of a complicated mass of things we cannot see. These are things like how the person feels and what he or she thinks, what motivates the person and what traits they have. In other words, behavior stems from the underlying personality, in all its complexity, of the person concerned.

We cannot begin to understand all that is going on beneath the surface. Much of it is not even known to the person himself or herself. But behavior is remarkably consistent. If a person is scared of heights atop the Sears Tower, they are likely to be scared on the 82nd floor of the Empire State building. We do not have to understand everything that is going on inside to make predictions about how someone will behave in a given situation.

Does this mean we cannot change our behavior? Certainly not. But we all have natural characteristics, which tend to assert themselves again and again. We can adjust these and in some cases, such as overcoming a fear, we can change our behavior, but past behavior remains the best, though not a perfect, indicator of how we will behave in future.

The advantages of behavior-based interviewing

The advantages of behavior-based interviewing can be summed up as:

• Effective
• Objective
• Transparent
• Legal

Effective
The key advantage of behavior-based interviewing is that it gets better results. Behavior-based questions find out how people have actually behaved in the past. This gives you a much better indication of how they will behave in the future.

Objective
Behavior-based interviews focus on what someone actually did and how they actually did it. They then compare the way someone has actually behaved with behaviors that the interviewer is looking for. This is an objective process, unaffected by subjective feelings that the interviewer may have.

Transparent
Behavior-based interviewers are open with candidates about the skills they’re seeking. This enables them to involve the candidate in helping them in the process. Otherwise, an interviewer might miss a good candidate because the candidate fails to recognize what the interviewer is looking for and not provide the right information. The candidate can’t tell the interviewers "what they want to hear" because he or she will be describing actual events. The candidate would have to quickly construct a complicated lie to do this, and that story would certainly not hold up as questions proceeded.

Legal
Behavior-based interviews are fair because they are objective. The competencies sought are openly described and all candidates are given an equal chance to demonstrate that they have those competencies. Provided every candidate is asked for evidence of the same competencies, and provided those competencies are genuinely necessary to the performance of the job, organizations will avoid discrimination by asking behavior-based questions. Furthermore, if you are challenged over your reasons for a recruitment choice, you will have objective evidence to substantiate your decision.

By Hugh Murray & David Friedman

Want to learn more about this topic? Managers and supervisors interested in viewing courseware designed to improve behavior-based interviewing, may click here to request a no-charge, executive preview of the new behavior-based interviewing DVD training course: A Question of Evidence: The Behavior-based Interview.

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