Chances are that you have done some interviewing in the past. Chances are that you have hired someone. Chances are that you have made a hiring decision that you questioned… and maybe the hire didn’t pan out. For many managers this is an all too common scenario that has left them with the question, “How did THAT happen?” Let’s face it, some candidates have so much woo in their personality that it can over shine potential red-flags. Managers can become hypnotized by good conversation or an individual’s energy and lose focus on the interview’s purpose. But don’t worry, there is a solution—behavioral interview methods. Behavioral interview methods help keep interviewers on track by providing interview questions that are tailored to identify not just the necessary knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform a job, but to further identify behaviors that lead to successful performance in the job and company. These questions require an open-ended response offering the interviewer a specific look into the candidate’s past experiences and performance, helping to reduce the risk of making a hiring mistake. Because we know that past performance is the greatest predictor of future behavior, we can align a candidate’s responses on how he or she has handled a situation in the past with how we expect an employee to handle a situation while employed. After asking the candidate to answer several of these behavior-based questions, we can begin to see if a candidate is out of alignment with our expectations, knowing that what they have done in the past will most likely reoccur in the future.
Typically an interview guide is constructed listing all of the job-tailored questions, along with the target behaviors to be sought out in the candidate. By having an interview guide, this ensures that all questions are asked and that all candidates are given an opportunity to respond to the same questions. This allows the interviewer to compare each candidate’s response with the desired knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviors required by the job, ultimately aligning the candidate and the job. Obviously the win-win occurs when you have a candidate that matches all or the majority of the job requirements and displays the correct behaviors. According to Patrick Hauenstein, PH.D , President and Chief Science Officer of OMNIview, “Under a typical hiring scenario, if behavioral interviews were used as the sole method for making hiring decisions, you could expect over 90% of your hires would be successful on the job. This data indicates that a structured behavior interview is well over 9 TIMES more effective that a traditional unstructured interview.” So….are you ready to implement behavioral interview methods as part of your recruitment process? Written by Jeremy York jeremy@invigoratehr.com Comments are closed.
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