In my last Insight, I mentioned that behavioral interview questions should be targeted. It’s also important for companies to audit and review their interviews to make sure they are being conducted properly and effectively.
It is helpful to choose someone—an internal HR specialist or an external consultant, for example—to sit in on a few interviews and listen to the types of behavioral interview questions being asked. The reviewer will get an opportunity to hear what the interviewee’s response is and watch how the interviewer is documenting the responses. This will help the reviewer determine if the questions and overall process are effective.
It is helpful to get an outside perspective from someone who is not involved in actually conducting the interviews.
Measuring Behavioral Interview Effectiveness
Another way to tell if the behavioral interview process and questions are effective is to track—over time—your turnover rates and performance reviews for the people that you’re bringing into your company. Are you really getting the type of person you thought you were in the interview? Are they exhibiting the types of behaviors you expected based on your documented responses to the interview questions?
You’ll also want to think about your response to this question: “How do the person’s responses from their interview translate to how well they’re doing on the job?”
The proof is “in the pudding.” If the person isn’t performing the way you expected them to, it’s likely your interview process and questions are not effective.
Having been in the assessment industry for 20 years and a co-founder of an assessment company, I always thought that people were more interested in measuring somebody’s personality and their cognitive reasoning to see how it compares to the job-at-hand. But the input that we’ve been getting over the last few years is that clients are really much more thrilled with the applicant specific and targeted behavioral interview questions that come from the assessment process, because it helps guide and steer them toward asking the most effective questions they can. Each assessment gives the employer behavioral interview questions to ask a particular candidate based on how they scored on the assessment, as well as being specific to the job category report they chose.
And when our clients do this, they have told us frequently that they’ve been able to reduce their time-to-hire by 50 percent! The behavioral interview questions have streamlined their process tremendously. We are thrilled to hear this.
For Example
An in-bound call center company that we worked with—one of the largest financial companies in the country—said they implemented the behavioral interview questions that were coming with the assessments they were doing and they were able shorten their interview time by 50 percent.
They said to us, “We spent half the amount of time interviewing people and our retention rates went up.” As a result, they were hiring more appropriate people who fit the jobs they had available, but to them the big-bang was the fact that they were spending only half the time interviewing than they used to, which directly affected their bottom line.
We were impressed at how this company was truly paying attention and tracking their time and results. This is important because most companies don’t actually know how much time they spend on recruiting and other human resource management tasks, such as interviewing, even though such tasks definitely affect the bottom line.
Using targeted behavioral interview questions, taking the time to monitor the effectiveness of your questions and interview process and keeping track of your turnover and process time, will help your company more effectively hire the right person for the job and streamline your processes.