Taking Your Interviews from Good to Great – Tip #2

Have you ever hired someone who knocked your socks off during the interview only to see her performance fall short when you hired her? There are plenty of candidates who have mastered the art of interviewing; unfortunately, once hired you find out they haven’t perfected the art of performing. While there is no silver bullet there are several techniques that will help you gather information to make more informed hiring decisions.

Our last post examined the first interview technique – creating a custom interview guide – to take your interviews from good to great! This week we’ll explore a second interview technique, conducting a behavior based interview.

What is a behavior based interview?
The behavior-based interview is based on the premise that the best predictor of future performance is past performance. In other words, what a person has done in the past is an important predictor of what a person will do in the future. A behavior-based interview focuses on gathering concrete data on past job performance. Here are a few examples of behavior-based questions.

• Tell me about your most difficult sales call in the past 6 months.
• Tell me about a time you encountered an unexpected obstacle that interfered with your ability to get the job done.
• Tell me about the most challenging customer complaint you resolved in the past year.

You’ll notice an incredible thing happening when you begin asking behavior-based questions. As your candidate describes a particular work situation you get a clear sense of how they typically handle customers, co-workers, and managers. You begin to imagine how their work habits will work in your environment and you are able to more accurately assess their “goodness of fit.”

Equally important to asking a behavior-based question is knowing what to listen for so you can appropriately evaluate the strength of your candidate’s response. Let’s return to the question mentioned earlier, “Tell me about a time you encountered an unexpected obstacle that interfered with your ability to get the job done.” Your candidate’s work-related example will provide insight into his determination and creativity in overcoming obstacles and challenges. You will listen carefully for his persistence, his creativity in overcoming an obstacle while working within company guidelines, and his definition of an obstacle. Using your candidate’s examples you will be able to evaluate if he’s the right person for the role.

Behavior-based interviews are proven to the most reliable technique to gather relevant job-related information and should account for the majority of your interview questions. Check back next week for the third interview technique that will take your interviews from good to great, using the acronym SARGE to evaluate the strength of your candidate’s responses.

Do you need assistance in developing your manager’s competence with behavior-based interviewing? Contact JS Performance Strategies to develop your manager’s behavior-based interviewing skills.

Taking Your Interviews from Good to Great! – Tip #1

What are your strengths?

Where do you see yourself in 5 years from now?

Describe your weaknesses.

Ring a bell? Are these the questions you typically ask? Then this week’s blog (and several to follow) will give you a broader perspective and freshen up your interview approach. During the upcoming weeks we’ll examine 4 interview techniques that will take your interviews from good to great!

Interview Technique #1 – Create an Interview Guide
Before you begin interviewing candidates take the time to create an interview guide. Why take the time? Here are just a few benefits of creating an interview guide.

• Focuses your interviews on job competencies that are critical to job success
• Probes the candidate’s knowledge, experience and ability in areas that are predictive of job success
• Identifies “what to listen for” so you can quickly evaluate the strength of the candidate’s response
• Uses a consistent format and rating scale for “apples to apples” candidate comparisons
• Allows you to gather better information during the selection process

When you gather better information you are setting yourself up to make more informed hiring decisions! So where do you begin? A systematic job analysis will help you identify the competencies and behavioral tendencies that are predictive of job success. Once you’ve identified these important job characteristics you’re ready to develop an interview guide.

Remember to use the proper mixture of question types in your interview guide. The following questions illustrate the types of questions you should include in your guide.

• What are your strengths? This is an opinion-based question and it focuses on self-evaluation.
• What were your typical job duties in your last job? This question focuses on work duties and responsibilities and is an experience-based question.
• What was your major? This question focuses on education and is a credential question type.
• How do you administer CPR? This is a technical question whose goal is to determine if the candidate can meet the job’s minimum performance requirements.
• Tell me about a time when you disagreed with your manager. This is a behavior descriptive question and the focus is on a specific work-related experience.

Without an interview guide, interviewers tend to rely heavily on opinion-based and experience-based questions. In reality, opinion questions should represent only about 10% of the total interview and experience-based questions should comprise another 20%. Can you identify the most effective interview question type? If you guessed the behavior descriptive interview question, you’re right! This type of question should be used 60% of the time. Our next blog post will examine the important benefits of using this question type as part of conducting a behavior based interview.

Do you need help with conducting a job analysis, creating custom interview guides or educating your managers how to be better interviewers? Contact JS Performance Strategies for help!