Ever ask a job candidate to create a marketing plan for an egg?
Ginny Burgess, manager of staffing and associate relations at Grand Circle Corp., an international travel organizer based in Boston, has. In fact, it's a regular part of her workday.
Grand Circle uses behavioral interviewing, a technique that probes job candidates' real-life experiences and engages them in exercises to determine if they're a good fit for an organization. "How someone handles situations in the interview is a very good indicator of how they'll perform on the job," Burgess explains.
Indeed, behavioral interviewing is 55 percent predictive of future behavior of an employee, compared with 10 percent for traditional interviewing, according to Katharine Hansen, Ph.D., director and associate publisher of Quintessential Careers, a career development clearinghouse. Perhaps that's why more business owners are turning to behavioral interviewing to find a good fit between new hires and their companies.
Effective Interviewing
"Discovering genuine past and present behavior in the interview predicts future on-the-job performance," explains Leif Everest, executive vice president of Management Team Consultants Inc., a San Francisco-based organization that puts such a premium on behavioral interviews, it developed its own competency-based interviewing system for clients.
Behavioral interviewing differs from traditional methods by focusing on how candidates act when faced with particular situations, rather than on a review of employment experience and skill sets. The employer's goal in behavioral interviewing is to uncover the candidate's values and qualities.
"Many technical skills of a job can be quickly learned, but attitudes and behaviors come with the package," says Ron Selewach, founder and CEO of Human Resource Management Center in Tampa, Florida, a provider of talent acquisition technology.
Too often, hiring managers rely on résumés to structure interviews. "Following the résumé in the interview yields a script the candidate controls," explains Everest. "You want to move away from their script."
Instead of reviewing a résumé during an interview, you should be assessing whether or not a candidate is right for the job. "Do you need to hire the best résumé writer, or the best job performer?" asks Selewach.
The way to assess job performance is to ask probing questions about how the candidate handled situations in the past. It's that experiential information that will help determine whether or not candidates will mesh well with the company and the job.
Valuing ValuesTo structure an effective behavioral interview, you first need to identify your company's core values by drilling down to assess what's really critical to your company culture. Then you can use those values to determine which questions or exercises will reveal the candidate's skills and behaviors in relation to your company.
Grand Circle, for instance, identified six core values: open and courageous communication, risk taking, teamwork, thriving in change, speed, and quality. Grand Circle backs up those values by basing 60 percent of a company employee's performance review on them.
Also identify what you need to fill a particular job. "Build out a job profile that identifies what you're looking for and lists the competencies of top performers in your company," explains Everest. "For instance, many companies value leadership, but what does that mean? Does it mean being inspiring, thinking strategically, acting decisively? This needs to be clarified before you interview the first candidate."
Structuring the InterviewTailor interview questions to solicit examples of how candidates behaved when faced with particular situations in past jobs. "We ask direct questions to get situational answers that draw on experiences job candidates have had," explains Burgess. "For instance, we might ask how difficult it was to get criticism from a supervisor, and then ask how they effected change based on that criticism."
Once you get an answer, probe further. For example, you might ask job candidates to describe situations when they were asked to juggle multiple tasks at once. How did they do it? What role did others play in getting it done?
The answers you're looking for will depend on your company culture. In one work environment, an employer might be looking for a self-sufficient performer. In another, where teamwork is prized, the employer would want to know how well the candidate reached out to others for help.
Doing Your ExercisesIn addition to experience-based questions, many companies also design exercises to assess the fit between the candidate and the company's culture. These run the gamut from brainteasers to problem-solving challenges, and are designed to give interviewers a chance to view candidates in action so they can assess behavior firsthand.
At Grand Circle, candidates are invited to do a group interview, generally consisting of four to eight interviewees. At this stage, Burgess is evaluating values, so candidates for positions in departments as varied as worldwide finance, IT, and the call center might all participate in a single joint interview.
One of Burgess's favorite exercises involves that egg. Candidates are broken into teams and tasked with creating an adventure for a raw egg. They're given a supply of straws and tape to create a travel vessel for the egg and told to market the trip. "This concept gets at all kinds of competencies, from teamwork to innovation to risk taking," Burgess claims.
Because behavioral interviewing is still new -- and so different from traditional approaches -- many companies turn to hiring consultants for help. Consultants can help businesses create exercises tailored to the behaviors and values they're seeking in candidates. If that's out of your budget, there are free online resources to help you brainstorm exercise ideas. Glassdoor.com is aimed at job seekers but offers a substantial section on group interview exercises from real companies. Management and leadership site NW Link also details examples of specific exercises.
Assessing ResultsOf course, gathering information on candidates' behavior is only valuable if the people assessing it know what they're looking for. Interviewers should arm themselves with a list of their company values, and their observations should relate back very specifically to that list. "If a company has agreed-upon core values, this provides a starting point for evaluating a candidate's demonstration of these competencies," says Everest.
Grand Circle credits behavioral interviewing techniques with playing an important role in maintaining employee loyalty. In a company with 680 employees, 464 of them have been there for more than five years. "We have very firmly held core values," explains Burgess. "Behavioral interviewing is critical in determining who is going to be successful."
Andrea Poe is the author of hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics, including small business.
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