New Jersey Enterpreneur - Small Business, Entrepreneurs and Venture Capital

Every time I do a seminar on hiring I ask the audience what they think is the most frequently asked interview question. They always get it right: “Tell me about yourself.”

Unfortunately, while they?re right, the question isn?t the best one to get to the heart of whether the person can do the job. It may be a good opener to establish dialogue and get the conversation started, but it doesn?t produce any real information about how the candidate solves problems, gets things done or attacks processes.

In today?s work world where folks change jobs frequently and lay-offs are no longer a stigma, many candidates have been well coached on how to answer the most frequently asked questions. Outplacement counseling is a common benefit in a layoff. These formalized programs help candidates develop their “tell me about yourself” speech. Some go as far as video taping the candidate?s response to this and other common questions so that they can see themselves as others see them. Smart people search the abundance of interviewing advice available on Monster, HotJobs and other job boards.

All these factors make candidates very slick in how they present themselves. More importantly, it gives you a much bigger challenge in differentiating between the good and the bad.

So let me share a simple secret to getting to understanding the real person. It?s called “behavioral interviewing.” While this sounds like one of those complex HR concepts, it?s as simple as asking the candidate to tell you how they have achieved goals and accomplished assignments in the past.

Most interview training programs will tell you, “past performance is the best indicator of future behavior.” So your task is to get a description of the process and techniques the candidate has used in prior situations.

Good behavioral interview questions are open ended and allow you to probe for more information. Any question that can be answered in a single word or two without follow on will tell you virtually nothing. Here?s an example:

Bad question: Are you good at working with details?

Good question: Tell me about a project you?ve done that required working with many details.

 Follow-on question: What was the process you used to ensure that no detail was overlooked?

Follow-on question: How did you assess the accuracy of the details in that project?

Follow-on question: Working with that many details must have put quite some pressure on you. How did you deal with the stress?

Follow-on question: This job requires that all details be handled very accurately. Our customer satisfaction depends on it. How will you ensure that no detail gets overlooked?

Note that in the bad question, it?s pretty easy to answer “yes” but you get no proof that the person is really good at details. With the good and follow-on questions you get a complete description of how the candidate behaved in specific situations that involved working with details. Ask many questions in different ways about the same process. Look for the candidate to repeat examples of behaviors more than once. If you hear about the same behavior several times in a few different contexts, you have some assurance that it really exists.

Here are some lead-ins to good behavioral questions. Just fill in the blanks.

An interview guide where you write out your questions in advance can be valuable in covering everything you want to know. This ensures that you ask all candidates the same questions for good comparison. You can also include a numerical score for each answer and compare scores for a more objective view. How well did this candidate answer this question? Assign a score from 1 to 10 or give a grade such as A, B, C, D, F, etc. You can easily figure a “grade point average” for each candidate.

Bringing this kind of objectivity to your hiring practices can dramatically increase the quality of your employees.