Copyright Institute of Management & Administration Aug 2004Now that hiring is beginning to pick up, your organization's interviewing techniques may benefit from heightened attention. If you've been seeking new strategies to secure just the right employees for your organization, you'll be interested in "behavioral interviewing."
WHAT IT IS
Behavioral interviewing is a coordinated system for identifying competencies in your organization, explains Carolyn Wehmann (864-943-0208; e-mail: cwconsult@juno.com), a consultant who has worked with corporations and law firms on recruiting, development, and retention strategies.
Before you teach managers and others involved with interviews to identify the job behaviors you're seeking, consult with the people at your organization who are closely involved with development, performance reviews, promotions, and outplacement.
Wehmann then suggests taking the following eight steps:
Step one: Look at the big picture. How successful has your organization been at identifying and hiring effective employees? Look at the traits of your most productive employees who are now moving toward management and other leadership positions. Review information on those who have left your organization as well, Wehmann adds. Consider: Has your company retained its best employees? Did the ones who left have unproductive attitudes and behaviors? Did the company cause productive employees to leave?
Step two: Focus on behaviors and attitudes. Research shows that you must train interviewers to seek out in candidates the attitudes and behaviors they've identified in the successful employees at your office. Then their questions will uncover whether the candidates will be a good fit.
Your goal in this training is twofold:
1. Help interviewers see if there is a match between the behaviors sought and the behaviors candidates describe or exhibit during interviews.
2. Offer interviewers a clear and concise method of determining which candidates should proceed through the hiring process or receive offers based on those behavioral criteria.
Step three: Link the company's hiring criteria from your candidate evaluation form to the behavioral competencies and patterns you've identified. Instead of relying on descriptions of behaviors, Wehmann recommends undertaking the following exercises:
* Meet with the company's newest managers or executives. Ask each to think of the most successful employee they work with and to describe, in short phrases, what attitudes toward work and what workrelated behaviors make this person such a valuable member of the group. Write down the comments, then ask the group to think about which behavioral traits are most important, and circle those traits on the list. Repeat this exercise with other managers and executives. Key: Only select participants who have shown a talent for working with more junior employees.
* Meet with managers who are responsible for evaluating employees' work and conducting performance reviews. Lead a discussion about the attitudes and behaviors of those who were fired because of poor performance. Discuss any behaviors that emerged that caused your organization to deem their performance unsuccessful. Wehmann cautions against simply accepting phrases such as "not smart enough." Probe further by asking group members to name specific work attitudes/behaviors that impeded performance.
Step four: Organize and use the descriptive information you gathered to re-evaluate the hiring criteria on your candidate evaluation form. Replace generic words like "intelligence" and "motivation" with more specific words from your focus group list to help interviewers identify how motivated people behave at your company.
You could use phrases like "takes initiative," "seeks additional responsibility," "responds to criticism," and "organizes time and work." These will help your interviewers come to understand what valuable behaviors the organization needs from new recruits.
Two resources to consider: Wehmann recommends Hire the Best ... and Avoid the Rest by Michael Mercer, which includes many exhibits that illustrate this point, and Human Resources Kit for Dummies by Max Messmer, which also has chapters devoted to this topic.
Step five: Disseminate, debate, and re-read resumes. Wehmann explains: "Even [converting] to amore coordinated recruiting/retention system requires this training component, so don't skip it. [Hiring managers] need to understand why they are being asked to move from ad hoc interviewing to a more rational approach."
Step six: Train interviewers to read a resume with an eye on your new criteria. Teach and remind them to ask candidates why they've done what they have and surmise why candidates included or excluded certain resume facts. Interviewers should also develop their own questions that will convince them of the training, credentials, and-most importantthinking, attitudes, and behaviors of candidates, those qualities they've discovered in the employees they consider excellent.
Step seven: Train your interviewers. Your plan can be loose or semistructured, depending on your company's culture. Some companies ask interviewers to discuss with the team behaviors drawn from one portion of a resume in a certain sequence. Many simply define valid behavioral criteria and train interviewers in a "behavioral questioning style," but prescribe no questioning pattern.
In Wehmann's estimation, questioning styles should mirror the company's management style. Key: Teach interviewers to generate conversation with candidates about how they behaved in a variety of work-related situations to get a sense of how they would behave at your office.
Have interviewers focus on "why, how, and what" candidates learned from their experiences and how they feel about what happened in each situation (e.g., angry, proud, relieved, etc.). Ask candidates to describe a setback or a time when the rules changed. Who else was on their team and how did everyone handle the situation? What result did they get? Was it a team result or an individual victory?
Interviewers must learn to assess the genuineness and credibility of a candidate's attitudes and whether the behaviors exhibited or described match those of your most successful new hires. Since listening is crucial for this, you may want to consider a separate training session to beef up interviewers' listening skills.
With the improving economy, making the right hiring decisions-bringing in workers who will provide the best outcomes-is more important than ever. Incorporating behavioral interviewing into your recruiting regimen should give you better results, Wehmann believes.
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