Interviewing candidates can be a time consuming and often frustrating experience for managers and employers.
Whether you are a small business, or part of a large organisation, the reality is you will be involved in conducting or supervising job interviews at some stage in your career.
So let’s make the most out of it. Putting time and effort into interview preparation and planning are all important to making sure you have the opportunity to find the right candidate for your position and company.
Behavioural Interview techniques and questions are now regarded as a very crucial component of the interview process.
A behavioural interview is a style of interview that forces the candidate to provide specific examples from past experiences.
Research shows that past behaviours are a very strong predictor of future performance in similar situations.
So by introducing behavioural interview techniques into your process you may find a greater success rate of selecting and retaining the right employee for you.
Generally this means you may ask fewer questions than in a traditional interview, but the level of detail required for each answer is much greater.
A traditional interview question uses questions along the line of “What motivates you? What are your personality strengths? etc.
Whereas a behavioural interview question is phrased more along the line …Tell me about a situation where you had to deal with a difficult customer, what was the problem, what action did you take, and what happened.
Depending on the completeness of the answer given, a good behavioural interviewer should always probe further, trying to get more depth in the answer from the candidate.
The responses you are looking for are about how an applicant has managed and coped in various situations they have experienced.
You are not looking for their theoretical answer, but their practical and actual experiences. When you are looking to analyse behavioural answers from a candidate you can use the SAO approach. S for Situation, A for Action and O for Outcome, and overall predicting how they might suit the situations and activities of the role you are interviewing them for.
There is a vast amount of resource on the internet regards Behavioural Interview Techniques — just Google the topic and you will find examples of questions and other useful information to read about.
