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Recruiting Strategies: The Basics of Behavioral Interviewing

Let's say you are about to interview Diane for your vacant field nurse position. Neatly inscribed on your legal pad are several tried-and-true questions that should help you determine her ability to do the job.

In your initial few moments together, you pose a couple of ice-breaker questions, followed by your usuals:

• Are you familiar with our opening?
• Do you prefer working independently or as part of a team?
• Is your ideal supervisor one who provides maximum independence or one who is a hands-on manager?

Not bad as far as interview questions go. However, these are all close-ended questions - potential dead-ends that can lead to two-word answers, or a lack of beneficial information about Diane.

In contrast, behavioral-based interviewing is discovering how your potential new employee will behave in specific employment-related situations. The rationale is that how they reacted in the past will predict how they will behave in the future; i.e. past performance predicts future behavior.

This style of interviewing is not a fad that is sweeping corporate America; it's been around since the 1970s. Industrial psychologists of that era conducted studies on the overall effectiveness of traditional interview questions (like the ones in our example with Diane). They discovered that those types of questions weren't very effective in determining how well a candidate will perform in a given job. Behavioral interviewing, on the other hand, is highly effective because it examines the past behavior of a job candidate, which is considered the most accurate indicator of future behavior. This is the reason why companies or organizations that use behavioral interviewing frequently hire the best available candidates.

We will continue to explore the benefits of effective interview questions in the weeks to come.