Behavioral Interview Questions Should Be Targeted

For the last decade, most companies have subscribed to the fact that they don’t want to just ask close-ended interview questions anymore. They don’t want to ask questions such as, “Do you think you’re a good leader?” because, of course, if the applicant is any good at interviewing, they’re going to say, “Yes, I think I am.” But this response doesn’t really tell you much about the candidate, their skills or their job experience.

Behavioral Interview Questions
Behavioral interview questions are basically a way of asking an applicant open-ended questions that really explore what they’ve done in the past to get them to talk about actual experiences, instead of theoretical or philosophical experiences that they may not have even had before.

A behavioral interview question takes a concept, such as leadership, and allows the interviewer to ask something to the effect of, “Joe, give me an example of when you have been part of a group that you were leading and you ran into a performance issue with one of your employees that you had to deal with—What was the issue and how did you resolve it?”

With a question like that, you’re really getting the applicant to think. They have to think about their past and instead of coming up with some hypothetical response, they have to think about something that’s happened to them.

This way, you get a more genuine response from the person and get to know their leadership style and how they tend to go about solving problems. From this information, the interviewer can figure out if the applicant has the leadership style that the company is looking for.

One Common Mistake to Avoid
One of the common mistakes made regarding behavioral interview questions is that interviewers often ask the same behavioral interview questions to every applicant.

There’s a point of being consistent—obviously companies want to be consistent with their interviewing—but different jobs have different needs. And if you ask all applicants for all jobs the same behavioral interview questions, you’re probably asking them things that aren’t necessarily relevant for the position they’re interviewing for.

Companies often don’t take the time to really think about the kind of information they want to find out from each applicant, such as, what kind of competencies are necessary for this particular job?

If you know ahead of time what you are looking for, you will be able to pick out some behavioral interview questions for each position that you might not ask candidates for other positions.

Companies need to streamline their interview process so that they are spending the best time with the applicant talking about things that are really relevant for that particular job versus the shotgun approach where you throw every question at every candidate, and then the interview takes a lot longer than it needs to.

This is the key mistake that a lot of companies make. And some will argue and say, “Oh, but we do behavioral interviewing,” but they don’t go a step further and do something that I call targeted behavioral interviewing.

In my next Insight, I’ll give you steps to take to ensure that you’re using behavioral interview questions effectively.  

For the last decade, most companies have subscribed to the fact that they don’t want to just ask close-ended interview questions anymore.