Behavior Based Interviewing
As you are looking for some tricks and tools to identify the perfect candidate to hire in your firm? Many of your peer firms have begun using a technique called “Behavior Based Interviewing.” Behavior Based Interviewing is a technique to evaluate a candidate’s experiences and behaviors in order to determine their potential for success. The interviewer identifies desired skills and behaviors, then structure’s open-ended questions and statements to elicit detailed responses.
Behavior based interviewing can be extremely useful because it helps to alleviate misunderstandings about an applicant’s past experiences, prevents personal impressions from affecting evaluations and reduces applicants “faking” their answers just to get the job.
The areas that should be addressed when using behavior based interviewing are:
- Technical — job skills and related knowledge
- Functional — transferable skills, including managing and organizing people or information
- Adaptive — personal characteristics, such as dependability or a strong work ethic
This “interactive” interviewing technique will elicit responses from the candidate that will be very helpful in determining their fit in the position – from all perspectives. The candidate will be given the opportunity to:
- Recall a specific project on which they worked
- Discuss their role in the project
- Talk about specific problems they encountered
- Describe how they solved the problems
The most effective way to hold a behavior based interview is by using the SAR formula.
- Situation (S):
My manager asked me to be the project manager for the paperless office initiative in my firm. I was directed to select my team and develop a plan and a deadline date that would allow the firm to be completely paperless in 3 years. - Action (A):
I began by looking at the firm’s strategic plan and utilizing the peer networking that I had within the Boomer Technology Circles. These resources gave me the initial information I needed to see where the firm was going and what “pitfalls” I might encounter. I then selected my team and we worked in tandem together to develop the plan that we then presented to the executive committee for approval. - Result (R):
There have been many challenges along the way, but I am proud to say that my team succeeded in the task. We are a completely paperless firm today and a story about our success was in Technology Insider Magazine last month.
Once you develop a list of questions, double-check to make sure they are open ended. To avoid questions that allow for a "yes" or "no" answer, structure them to begin with "tell me about a time," "give me an example" or other phrases that invite a detailed response.
For a list of behavior based questions to get you started, simply e-mail Sandra Wiley at sandra@boomer.com.