Behavioral Interviews for Hiring
Job interviews have long been a traditional aspect of the hiring process as these help employers and managers determine the most suitable candidates for a position. No matter what type of company you have, employees will be one of your most valuable assets, so you want to be sure that you make the right hiring decisions. As such, having a dynamic and structured interviewing technique can guide you to make more informed and rational choices when selecting candidates to hire.
Over time, behavioral interviews have grown to be one of the most effective types of interviews. They help you gain insight into a candidate’s past experience and how they behaved in particular circumstances. This method has quickly become a popular tool among many hiring managers since it gives an idea of how a candidate is likely to perform in the future. Get to know more about what exactly behavioral interviews are and why you should start conducting them to find your company’s most qualified employees.
What is a Behavioral Interview?
As its name suggests, a behavioral interview is a type of interview where you look into a person’s past behavior to know more about their working style, skill set, and such. This technique often combines situational questions where you ask about how a person would react when faced with a certain situation, and questions about real-life examples of experiences that a job candidate has gone through.
Why Use Behavioral Interviews?
Compared to traditional interviews, behavioral interviews differ in the sense that you are not only asking the “what,” but also the “why” and “how.” When a potential employee talks about an experience where they had to deal with a problem, you want to know what was going through their mind at that time. What motivated their actions? How did they come to a decision? Why did they choose to do one thing over another? Knowing these things can give you tons of valuable information on a candidate’s preferences, motivations, and way of thinking, all of which you cannot find in a resume or CV.
Behavioral interviews are so effective because they allow you to make more informed decisions, so you do not rely merely on your instincts to choose who to hire. While your gut feeling certainly plays a part in the evaluation and decision, this must also be backed up with more objective criteria. A behavioral interview gives you just that as it helps you dig into a candidate’s past experiences and see how they acted or performed in their previous job.
Finally, a behavioral interview’s main premise is that past behavior is predictive of future behavior, which explains why this interviewing technique has become extremely common nowadays. By knowing how an individual handled a certain situation in the past, you get an idea of how they will handle a similar situation in the future. Knowing this will be highly beneficial since you likely have expectations about the type of work that is entailed by the position you are offering.
All in all, behavioral interviewing is a critical and powerful tool that you can use to help you make appropriate hiring decisions. A bad hire can have detrimental effects for your company, from productivity loss to poor co-worker relations, so you must come up with an effective interviewing technique that can help you evaluate your candidates properly. No matter how strong your gut feelings may be about a particular candidate, it is always best to also use rational strategies in choosing your prospective employees.
Sources: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/interviewing/how-to-prepare-for-a-behavioral-interview