Hiring the right staff has always been and always will be vital. Finding someone who is capable of doing the job required now is one thing. Uncovering an individual whose skills can bring additional value to the team and your (clients) organisation might be the icing on the cake.  But the one ingredient you can’t afford to make a mistake with is someone’s behavioural traits and personality. If those don’t blend in well with the company culture, then that’s a recipe for disaster.

Essentially, you can give someone additional knowledge and you could enhance existing skills or teach people new ones with good coaching, training and guidance. Therefore you don’t need the perfect candidate for the role you are filling. But the one thing that is near impossible to change is an individual’s behavioural traits.  For example, if the job needed a ‘meticulous attention for detail’ and the work was repetitive, then it’s extremely likely someone with a short attention span who liked variety would revert to type quite quickly and their work and the end product would suffer.  They may tell you in an interview that they have all the right attributes but, with effective questioning, you can gain evidence to check out their claims.

Q. Will interview skills training help? A. If you haven’t updated your interview technique in the last 2 to 3 years or you haven’t had any formal training in recruitment procedure then you need to give it serious consideration. Not least that your clients may well be interviewing candidates in a different way from you. Simply understanding how they go about it will mean you have to be flexible in how to conduct an interview and perhaps mirror their interview technique.

 So, back to the subject in hand - if behaviour is so important, then interviewing someone with the use of behavioural based questioning makes perfect sense. Clearly testing whether someone has the key competencies to be able to do the job is crucial too. Put the two together and you have a competency based interview structure. More and more employers are talking about and using competency based interviews (CBI’s) to great effect. It is important to be clear what that entails and whether you need to implement CBI’s or, perhaps, simply become a better interviewer with the use of behavioural based questions.

Any organisation with core competencies may well use competency based interviews to support them, so it can hire people who are strong in those competencies. This is one critical way of matching candidates’ competencies to the role and the organisation’s culture.

Furthermore, these interviews should be customised for the different organisational levels, so you can measure whether people are acting on the competencies in a way that is optimal for their level. These levels and what is expected at each one will be outlined within the competency dictionary. So, asking a prospective managerial hire about a time when they instilled a customer focused culture in their department is more relevant than asking them about when they individually demonstrated customer focus.

For example, suppose “Teamwork” is one of the organisation’s competencies, and is defined as “Work with others to produce results greater than people could have achieved individually.” This suggests the following interview questioning if you want to hire someone who is strong in that competency:-

"Describe a time when you asked a team member to join you on a project because his or her skills and yours complemented one another. What did you accomplish together, and how is this better than you could have achieved individually?”

This is a great question for hiring workers with this kind of orientation. But should the same question be used with people whose main contribution is in leading or managing? While it could apply to them, their value to the organisation lies primarily in managing teamwork and capitalising on it, more than actually doing it.

For example, if we want the workers to work in teams to accomplish more than they could individually, than we might want the managers to coach others to build on, rather than resist, one another’s ideas. That, in turn, suggests this interview question for managers:-

“Think of a time when your team was successful, partially due to your coaching, in building on, rather than resisting one another’s ideas. Exactly how did you coach them, and what happened?"
So, the above questions all had a common format:-

1.    Identify what you want done for that competency and at that level.
2.    Then, you create a behavioural based interview question by adding “Describe a time when ...?” in front of it.
3.    Then, you edit it to make it more meaningful.

In that way, you can create behavioural based interview questions about whatever you want done in your organisation. Why is that logical? Because people who can give you good answers to those questions will probably demonstrate the core competency just the way you want them to at that level. Therefore, true CBI’s will have a competency based dictionary and a set of questions for each level within the organisation.

Whether you need to go to the lengths above will depend on how your clients go about interviewing. CBI is just one of the things we discuss on our interview skills training courses. But let’s leave you with this thought:

As human beings, we are, in the main, consistent and predictable. As an example, I bet you know someone who is always late for appointments and another who always arrives in plenty of time. That’s behaviour. Let’s say that they are both capable of fulfilling a task you need doing. Which one would you give it to if it needed to be delivered on time to a major client? Understanding a potential hire’s personality will give you peace of mind that you will make the correct decision.

Click Interview & Screening Techniques for an overview of our popular one day course.

If you have an need to understand more about hiring Gen Y for you or your clients then do speak with our resident expert Liz Jones   - Trainer, coach & consultant specialising in the attraction and retention of 'Gen Y'

        Founder of 'thetrainingstudio' - we are pleased to be working with Liz in helping provide much needed help in this growing arena.

• Liz has worked in various HR positions for over 6 years across large retail & media organisations
• In 2010 she founded thetrainingstudio specialising in the attraction, development & retention of Generation Y talent
• Courses include 'Interviewing Gen Y' and 'Recruiting in a Digital Age'
• Liz also conducts inhouse programmes including 1:1 coaching

        Find out more about Liz via LinkedIn and keep up to date on Twitter .       


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