Behavioural Interview

‘Past performance is predictor of future behaviour’ believing this we can evaluate the potential of candidate for Leadership, Initiative, Communication Skills, Problem Solving Skills, Interpersonal Skills, Adaptability etc which we can call behavioural interview.

The interview format is not different. Interviewer will still meet with candidate and asks the questions. The difference is in the type of interview questions that will be asked which are mostly open ended questions with no specific answers and which candidates should relate to his/her past experience and answer.

The questions would be something like:

Tell me about a difficult decision you've made in the last year.

Give me an example of a time when something you tried to accomplish and failed.

Give me an example of when you showed initiative and took the lead.

Have you worked with someone you didn't like? If so, how did you handle it?

These all are open ended questions so there will not be any specific answer to them even there might be additional follow up questions based on the answer/ scenario and based on candidates response you can evaluate how suitable the candidate is for the position you are looking for

Start with a Positive Event. Most people find it easier to tell about their high points or successes, times they felt effective. Telling how he or she has done something well tends to empower a person, making him or her feel more confident and ready to talk.

Get the story in proper sequence. Try to get the candidate to begin at the beginning and take you through the story as it unfolded. Otherwise you may get confused about what happened and who did what. This may be difficult, because the candidate will usually start by remembering the outcome of an event. Think of a time line running from a starting point to a conclusion point. Do not proceed until you are clear about those two. Probe for Thoughts behind Actions. 

The most important step in behavioural interview is to understand the job requirement and find out the exact characteristics required for the position like team effectiveness, leadership and vision, building relationship, risk taking etc list down them and come up with your behavioural question set and continue the discussion focusing the related areas and try to collect the evidences of skills present, don’t jump to any conclusion continue till you get some pattern of the candidates background.  Consider all the aspects of discussion and all your required criteria, keep away the bias points like first impression, one strong area, similar to me effect etc and come up with the unbiased ratings.

Appreciate the candidate for good incidents, detailed descriptions of behaviour. Avoid Questions That Shift the candidate into Abstractions.

In this entire discussion focus on STAR

Specific situation

Task to be done

Action by candidate

Result.

Probing Techniques

Effective interviews depend on well-thought out and well-structured questions, with good mixture of various types like Open, closed, multiple, leading, hypothetical, behavioural, reflective and probing questions.

Probing are follow-up question generally comes after the open questions. Probing works far better than having scripted question, since it is rare that a candidate will give you all the required information from your lead question. The questions should be short, simple, and in past tense. “Can you give me example?” or “What did you do?” or “What was the outcome?”

According to Richard Boyatzis a competency is defined as “an underlying characteristic of an individual which is causally related to effective or superior performance.” Once you have defined the competencies you need for a role, you can use simple question structures to probe them.

Probing Techniques:

Repeating:  If candidate is going off the track and keeps explaining around the subject and not very specific to the question repeat the question will help to get better evidence of subject understanding.

Hinting: Interviewer gives the hints while probing "Is this something like...." which will help candidate to start.

Rearranging: Interviewer rearranges his question for better understanding of the candidate so that the candidate understands it better and starts talking on that.

Explanation: Interviewer can ask more explanations or examples to probe the understanding of certain area to the candidate.

Silence: If candidate is taking time or hesitates the interviewer maintains the science so that the candidate breaks science.

Start again: when candidate keeps silent interviewer can start the discussion with questions like "what else you can think of?"

Probing should not have inappropriate closed questions like after the candidates answers should not ask "did you really....?" and multiple questions at once or not related questions to the job requirements should be avoided.

Phone Screening

Next important step in hiring a good candidate is phone screening, this is the opportunity to know the candidate and deturmine whethere its worth to call him/her for face to face interview.

While phone screening we need to take care of:

Balance The Talk: Dont let the candidate drive the interview, many times the candidate keeps talking and interviewes keeps looking at the resume. Try to get specific answers you expect
Skills probing: If candiate got specific skills (very limited) then it would be unfair to probe broad range of skills instead these cases should be decided at the time of resume shortlisting.
Judgement: dont judge too early you might get biased to your early judgement which is not good for hiring the right candidate.
Communication: Be patient to people who speaks English as second language, phone communication may not give you the fair idea abot communication and many job positions dosenot requre fluent english except customer facing positions.
Time: Call on time, dont miss the call, good candidates are busy in their daily schedule and after the interview they might want to go back to work.
Agenda: keep good mixure of introducing the requirment, company then questions and reserve some time for candidate if he/she got questions.
Discussion: Keep focus on fundamentals if fundamentals are clear he can pickup early, make good mixure of technical and behavioural questions to know the candidate
Misc: Keep writting notes during the discussion, be aware of othe open positions in your group/company as the candidate might better suit the other position and finally dont end on negative note.

Happy Hiring!