"The best way to predict future behavior is to know how a person behaved in the past."

By Dean B. Wisecarver

Hiring a candidate with the right technical training and experience, whether it be typing 90 words per minute or having a degree in electrical engineering, is not all there is to hiring a person that will be successful in the actual job. In my 30 years as a management consultant I have heard hundreds of stories from managers about people they hired that seemed to have the right "stuff" to do the job but ultimately failed to fit in and/or otherwise failed to be successful.

The goal of the hiring process (or promoting someone from within) is to find a person that has both the right technical training/experience and the right behavior characteristics to succeed in the job. Your challenge, then, is to find a candidate that will exhibit appropriate and effective behavior in specific circumstances that are likely to arise in the job. And, the best way to predict future behavior is to know how a person behaved in the past in the same or similar situations.

But how do you find out about a candidate’s past behaviors? It would be great if you could get such information by talking directly to prior employers but in today's legal climate, previous employers may not be very helpful. Thus, in most cases, interviewing the candidate may be your only real chance to learn about his or her past on-the-job behaviors. But how can you get the candidate to tell you detailed, specific things about his or her past behavior? The answer is simple: you ask! This is the essence of behavior-based interviewing.

Many hiring managers, especially in small and medium sized companies, have never had any formal training in how to conduct an interview. These managers develop their own interviewing style based largely on their personal experiences. Many believe their experience has given them a sort of "gut feeling" about what makes a good candidate, and they tend to hold to this belief quite strongly. Unfortunately, these managers end up wondering why people that seemed so perfect during the interviews often never perform quite as well as expected. Let's take a look at some typical interviewing mistakes and some appropriate alternatives.

One typical mistake I see many untrained interviewers make is asking too many questions that can be answered "yes" or "no." A very simple example – if being on time to the job is a concern, the interviewer might ask:

"We need to start promptly every morning at 8:00 AM. Would that present any problem for you?"

If you were a candidate, what would you answer? The question itself makes it clear what the desired answer is. The candidate will naturally say, "No, I have no problem getting to work at 8:00 AM." Have you really learned anything from this answer, other than the fact that this candidate is bright enough to understand the intent of your question? In fact, only a very dim bulb would say, "Yes, I have a problem getting to work in the morning."

That example was, indeed, very simple. But the same problem can arise with questions that are more complex. For example:

"As parts manager, you may have to guide our field technicians through an explanation of the problem to be sure the part or parts they are requesting are really the right ones. Do you feel you have the experience to do this?"

Again, the correct answer is implied in the question. Further, the answer will tell you nothing about how tactful or helpful this candidate would be while "guiding" the technicians - something that might significantly affect the candidate's success!

Some interviewers have learned that they want to get the candidate talking and should ask "open-ended" questions that can't be answered with "yes" or "no." These more enlightened interviewers might ask the two sample questions more like this:

"What would you do if you were asked to be at work by 8:00 AM at our job site?"

"As parts manager, you may have to guide our field technicians through an explanation of the problem to be sure the part or parts they are requesting are really the right ones. Can you give me an idea of how you would go about this?"

These questions are open ended, but they are also hypothetical and would invite a candidate to think of the best story possible to prove he or she is reliable. Furthermore, the candidate understands from the nature of the questions what the desired responses should be and can dream up a personal value statement that sounds good in this regard. The interviewer still doesn’t know if this person will try diligently to show up on time or whether he or she will be truly helpful and tactful while dealing with others. Just asking open-ended questions and avoiding yes/no questions is not the whole solution.

Another typical error I find most interviewers make is asking questions they believe will reveal something about a candidate's personal traits or behaviors, but that more often than not yield nothing of value as to actual performance on the job being filled because the questions are not job-specific. Here are several examples:

"What was your favorite subject in school? What is your hobby? What did you like best about your last job? What was your best accomplishment in school, on your previous job, etc.?"

While, on the surface, these questions seem interesting and harmless, I can't help but wonder what even the most earnest answers will tell the interviewer about this candidate's ability to do the specific job at hand. Frankly, I find such questions disturbing because they are not job-specific and often yield information that might later be used as the basis for claims of unfair hiring practices or discrimination. If you use your imagination, I'm sure you can think of unexpected answers that might reveal information we'd all be better off not knowing.

Behavior-based interviewing avoids these typical mistakes by focusing directly on the candidate's past behaviors in situations specifically related to the job to be filled. An interviewer trained in behavior-based interviewing uses questions that are:

• based on the behavioral requirements of the job
• open ended
• designed to require specific examples from the candidate's past.

If you ask the right questions in the right way, you'll be amazed by what a candidate will tell you. But behavior-based interviewing is not just a matter of asking different or better questions. To get truly useful information, you have to invest some time in preparation for the interview. Here is how it works.

Step #1  

The first step is the hardest, especially to those new to this process. You must develop a list of behaviors that you believe any person must exhibit to be successful in the job you are trying to fill. You might start by thinking about the best worker you have now who does this job. Why is that person so good? You might list specific things this worker does, like follows company rules and direction; sees what needs to be done and pitches in; offers good suggestions aimed at getting the work done correctly the first time; shows up for work on time; acts as part of a team. This preparation requires some diligent effort and analysis on your part, but it is a critical part of the process. Only after you identify the important successful behavior patterns will you know exactly what you're looking for in a viable candidate.

Step #2

The second step is to use your list of desirable behaviors to formulate interview questions that will probe into your candidates' past to see if they exhibited the desired behaviors. This means, rather than asking hypothetical or general "what if..." or "have you ever done..." questions, as typically asked by unprepared interviewers, you should ask questions like:

"Was there ever a time when you thought bending or ignoring a company rule was necessary to getting a job or task done? Tell me about the situation. What was the rule that you thought would get in the way and what did you do? How did things come out?"

"Can you recall a time in your work when you saw a co-worker who was swamped by the things he had to do or had fallen behind in getting his part done, perhaps to the point it was slowing up the project? Tell me about it. What did you do?"

"Can you remember a time when you saw a much better way to get something done and wanted to tell someone about it? What was it? Who did you tell and what happened?"

"Think back to a time when you were late to work. Tell me about it in as much detail as you can remember. What happened? What did you do?"

Notice how these questions are open-ended and ask about specific past behaviors. The questions ask the candidate to give responses based on actual situations. Furthermore, and very important, they are based on job-specific behaviors (remember what you did in the first step) rather than being non-job-specific questions that may result in useless and/or potentially discriminatory information.

Step #3

The third step is to ask every candidate the same questions and take detailed notes of each candidate's answers. Create and duplicate an interviewing guide that has all the questions written out with space between each question where you can make your notes. Use a copy of the guide for each interview so you can record each candidate's answers to each question. Be as detailed and diligent with your notes as possible. In the next step, you'll need reliable recall to successfully compare candidates.

Step #4

The fourth and final step is to compare the answers from each candidate. The situations the candidates describe to answer your questions, and the details and verbal expressions they use, will give you significant insight into the candidates' true behaviors and attitudes toward work-related situations. You'll be amazed, not only by what people will come right out and tell you, but at what you will learn from the differences in each candidate’s answers and how quickly you can identify the better candidate(s).

As a very simple illustration, let me use that last sample question above – the one about a time that the candidate recalls being late to work. Here are two possible answers:

"I remember that big snow storm a while back. I had to shovel out the driveway to get out and so my wife could get out later so she could go to work, too. I think lots of us were late that day. I wasn't the only one."

"You remember that big snow storm we had this past January, just a few days after the Holidays? When I saw all that snow in the driveway, I knew I'd be late because I had to clear it so both my wife and I could get our cars out to go to work. I immediately called the office and left a message on the recorder for my manager to explain what was going on and to give him some idea of when I'd get to work. I shoveled as quickly as I could and was only a half hour late. When I got there, I went right to my manager to make sure he'd gotten the message."

Notice both answers are essentially the same. Notice, too, that, by comparison, the second answer clearly reveals that the candidate values being to work on time more than the first answer. This is an overly simple example but it illustrates how asking each candidate the same set of properly prepared questions and carefully comparing all the answers will yield significant insight into each candidate and, ultimately, will help you determine which candidate is the best fit for your job. This is the real power of behavior-based interviewing.

Selecting workers who have the right attitude, behavior traits, and desire to do a job well is as important as selecting employees that have technical experience and training, perhaps even more important. After all, it is easier to teach people with good behavioral traits the technical aspects of a job than it is to teach people with technical skills the good sense of cooperative attitudes about duty, responsibility, teamwork and safety. Behavior-based interviewing is an essential and powerful tool in making the best selection.