Most of the reading I do is self-improvement related. I’ve read the Steven Covey books, books about emotional management, and I’ve read plenty of books geared toward helping people find jobs.
In those job-seeker books, I frequently see commentary that the interviewer is typically more frightened than the interviewee. I don’t believe that claim, just like I don’t believe that snakes are more frightened of people than we are of them. What I do know is that most hiring managers tend to have below average interviewing skills. I’m talking about when the hiring manager is interviewing candidates for a job. They don’t typically have a plan or don’t have a method that helps them reliably uncover the necessary details to enable them to make a good hiring decision.
At our company, we require all of our managers to attend interview training. The training is conducted by yours truly in conjunction with the other recruiting manager. It’s a four-hour session that covers the dos and don’ts. Also, most importantly, it covers the fundamental questioning technique called “behavioral based interviewing.” In the next few paragraphs, I’m going to explain behavioral-based interviewing. I’m also going to explain why it’s an incredibly useful means to getting what you, as a hiring manager, need to know in order to make a sensible hiring decision.
When you’re interviewing candidates you have a few different types of questions you can ask. You can ask hypothetical questions. These are questions whereby you ask the candidate to speculate how they would respond to a made-up scenario. For example, you might ask, “Suppose that you had several customers who all had urgent demands, but you had a limited amount of time. How would you go about handling that situation?” You can ask factual questions such as, “Can you please tell me about the different kinds of equipment you’re able to repair?” The behavioral-based question asks the interviewee to describe in detail a specific life experience when they were confronted with something and to explain in detail what he or she actually did. For example, you could ask, “Give me an example of a time when you had to write a magazine article under a deadline, but also had equally pressing commitments at the same time.” As an aside, my answer to this question would include, “Friday, August 19, 2016, which happens to be right now.” However, my answer would also include situational details, how I prioritized the demands, what I actually did, and how the situation was resolved.
The interviewee is asked to recall and relate a chronological experience. This serves the end of determining how the person will act when confronted with similar circumstances. The experience has been imprinted. This is important because it reveals tendencies. When things get difficult, people rely on their tendencies or habits to quickly find resolution. As a hiring manager, you want to know how your staff is going to respond to demands.
This technique doesn’t come without possible pitfalls. There’s a very good chance that the interviewee is nervous. When you ask nervous people penetrating questions, frequently they will draw a blank. Interviews can be confrontational. Confrontation can trigger the fight-or-flight response, which is part of survival. When your brain is in survival mode, digging up subtle anecdotes can be extremely difficult. So, don’t be surprised if you ask a good behavioral question and then you get the deer in the headlights look. To ease the tension, it’s helpful to supply an example of your own experience that ties into the question you’ve just asked. “Give me an example of a time when you didn’t have enough time to complete an assigned task. One that comes to mind for me was last week when I was working on…” This gives the interviewee time to think about something that’s relevant to your question.
Interviewees may not recognize that you’re asking for a real-life step-by-step story. When this disconnect occurs you’re going to get an answer that uses platitudes. It is imperative that you not accept this sort of answer. You must redirect the interviewee back to what you’re seeking: a detailed account of actual life-experiences. Let me illustrate, and pay close attention because this is how these questions usually play out. You ask a behavioral based question: Give me an example of how you’ve dealt with a stressful situation. The candidate responds with, “I handle stress pretty well. I just take a few deep breaths, clear my head, and then figure out what’s most important and work on that thing first.”
STOP RIGHT THERE! This is unacceptable. You politely go back to your question and ask the candidate to talk about the last time he or she was under stress, “Describe what was going on that caused you to experience stress.” You may have to do this a few times before that interviewee finally says, “A couple of weeks ago this colleague and I were on a project together and he didn’t get his part of the work done. It was 30 minutes before the deadline and I knew this was a no-fail project … ” Once you get the person talking about the experience you might have to lead him or her through the details; you should slightly nudge the person through to the end. Then, you turn that example into the topic for further discussion. This will tell you what causes stress for the person and it will tell you how he or she is likely to respond to stress, which is pretty important in today’s working world. I cannot emphasize it enough: do not let the interviewee off the hook with generalizations or platitudes. If you do, you will have wasted your time with the interview and you will move yourself closer to making a bad hire.
Here’s my relatable task. On a sheet of paper, write down three characteristics that you as a hiring manager find desirable in a team member. They can be single word attributes. My three would include “creativity.” Next, write out a behavioral-based question that is related to that desirable characteristic. In my case, I’d ask, “Give me an example of a time when you had a problem to solve and all of the usual solutions just would not work; a time when you had to come up with something new in order to resolve an issue.” If the person needs a moment to think, let him or her have that time. As noted, you can even supply an example of your own to get the person into the right frame of mind. The next time that you conduct an interview, ask one or all of these questions. But remember, if you get a generalized platitude, don’t punt and let the candidate off the hook. You must demand a specific life experience.
There you have it: a simple definition of a behavioral-based question, examples of what they sound like, examples of answers, and examples of non-answers. This technique works, I promise you. Now take five or 10 minutes and write down what you want in a candidate and what you will ask in order to determine if it’s present in candidates.
