Human Resources: Out-Savvy the Savvy Behavior-Based Interviewing Candidate by Better Executing Fundamentals

The Rise of Behavior-Based Interviewing

Since the early 1980´s, behavior-based interviewing has become a very prominent form of selection interviewing. It has been validated in respected research journals repeatedly. Specialized HR-solutions companies have trained thousands of people in it.

While there are many variations of the approach, there are important common threads. For example, questions should take the form of, "Describe a time when you..." The questions should relate directly to job-related skills. The same questions should be asked of every candidate for a position.

The underlying premise is that people will handle future job-related situations the same way they have before. So, to find out how they will handle critical job-related situations, you ask them how they handled those same situations in the past. Validation studies have borne out the success of this approach, using an array of different positions including insurance salespeople, educators, law enforcement personnel, and others.

How Candidates are Responding

Candidates are now being taught how to prepare for their behavior-based interviews. They are advised to present coherent, detailed examples of their successes in areas likely to be important to the job. For example, Katharine Hansen on QuintCareers.com writes, "Researching the company and talking to people who work there will enable you to zero in on the kinds of behaviors the company wants ... Ideally, you should briefly describe the situation, what specific action you took to have an effect on the situation, and the positive result or outcome."

Getting prepared as such is good for candidates, because it lessens the extent to which they can´t think of successes they´ve truly had, and it helps them present their skills accurately. It is probably helpful to interviewers, because they don´t have to probe as hard to get the kinds of information they are looking for.

But there are probably candidates who try to lie their way through behavior-based interviews. Many probably make up lies after they hear a question, and many probably prepare lies ahead of time. How prominent is such lying? One article says that in performing 2.6 million background checks several years ago, ADP Screening and Selection Services found that 44% of applicants lied about their work histories. While I understood this to refer to resumes, it suggests that attempting lies in behavior-based interviews might be at least somewhat common.

What Should Behavior-Based Interviewing Practitioners Do to Compensate?

Let´s first reiterate a few key points: First, it is desirable that candidates prepare for behavior-based interviews. We do not want to "compensate" for preparation. We only want to "compensate" for the possibility that people might provide untrue or exaggerated answers that we accept as true. If people are just getting better prepared for their interviews, then more power to them.

Second, the following suggestions are not aimed at tricking candidates. They are for the most part good behavior-based interviewing practice, and provide interviewers fuller information on which to make hiring decisions. Thus, the central premise of this article is that good execution of fundamentals is a good way to minimize deception.

Solution 1: Define hiring criteria more articulately. If a hiring criterion is what drives questions, then the more articulate the hiring criterion is, the more articulate the rest of the process will have to be in order to enable the interviewer to evaluate the candidate on that criterion. For example, the following criterion provides good clarity.

Attention to Detail: Able to thoroughly review data and documents for accuracy and consistency, by carefully reviewing for typos, wrong information, and format inconsistencies.

This definition means that the criterion can only be fully evaluated if the candidate has provided evidence of these factors through his or her behavioral examples. If the criterion were more abstract, the interviewer would be able to accept more vague information while still addressing the criterion. In that case, the vague candidate information matches the criterion and the interviewer might think he or she obtained an adequately detailed example.

Solution 2: Ask more precise questions. The more vague the question is, the larger the range of potential answers you might get, including answers that are fairly broad and unfocused. Consider the following two questions aimed at getting information about "Attention to Detail," as defined above.

Describe a situation where you had high attention to detail.

Describe how you reviewed data or a document for accuracy and consistency. What did you check for and how did you check for it?

The second question is likely to yield a more thorough and behavioral answer that addresses what the interviewer is looking for. And, the interviewer has more guidance about what he or she should be looking for.

Solution 3: Ask helpful follow-up questions to obtain more information about the defined criterion. For example, assuming the definition above and execution of Question 2 above, here are helpful follow-up questions.

How did you identify what errors to look for?

How did you keep track of the errors you found?

Which parts of that task were the hardest?

Lying through the original question and its follow-up questions persuasively seems very difficult, for several reasons. First, it is harder to lie about a web of interlocking details than it is to lie one´s way through a simple story. Second, if the person hasn´t done it, how would he or she know the right things to do? Third, it would be easy to trip him/herself up in the details.

Solution 4: Prepare and use a helpful and behavioral rating scale. This should contain a list of descriptions of desirable and/or undesirable answers. While a primary purpose of rating scales is to promote consistent evaluation, the intent here is to ensure that the interviewer gets enough information to rate the candidate. A simple rating scale for the above question might be:

Low evidence of skill

Does not use a written checklist
Lists types of errors to find vaguely
Looks for many types of errors simultaneously
Tries to remember errors after discovering them

High evidence of skill-

Creates a customized written checklist of potential problems

Defines types of errors to look for carefully

Cross-checks for one type of error at a time

Notes errors clearly when found

One author (Stephen Jackson of HR Strategy), said that one way to use such a list wrongly is to ask candidates if they have experience with such a point, and if they say, "Yes," to believe them and just move on. He is correct that such a technique is counter-productive. Instead of saying, "Do you have experience with X," the interviewer should say, "How did you go about doing X?" In the above example, something like "Tell me how you identified what factors to look for (based on the top bullet)," would be appropriate.

Deception or Good Practice? A Second Look

The primary focus of the above is on obtaining in-depth information about specific candidate skills. The deeper the interviewer digs, the better (if the digging is in a job-related and meaningful direction). Behavior-based interviewing ideally should always be practiced this way. This should make hiring decisions much more informed.

The fact that this is also a good method for defending against liars and exaggerators is important, but the benefits extend beyond that. To be clear, the way to out-savvy a savvy behavior-based interviewing candidate is not to outsmart him or her, but to execute the interview better in the first place.

One subtle implication of this is that behavior-based interviewers need to be trained well in their fundamentals. Only then can they execute behavior-based interviews with high effectiveness. I would bet that well trained behavior-based interviewers both make better hiring decisions and allow fewer non-truths to pass by undetected.