Photo by Benis Arapovic
To enhance your culture and enjoy business success, here are tips to conduct behavioral interviews.
Whether you run a small operation in a big company or you own a small business, you’re wearing many hats. So you need employees who can successfully wear multiple hats, too.
What does that entail? It entails several things.
Think: Avoid mediocrity. To enhance your culture, avoiding mediocrity is important. To avoid mediocrity and compete successfully, small businesses especially need people who are a good fit culturally.
Don’t just advertise the jobs’ tasks and seek people who can claim experience in a job. Conduct interviews that learn which of the applicants can adroitly handle challenging situations in every part of the job.
Mere satisfactory work in a job will not be acceptable if you want your company to be great. Moreover, you must first determine the skills that will lead to high individual performance for the overall welfare of your company.
Your best employees will be to think on their feet and be passionate about succeeding. That doesn’t mean hiring mavericks because a small operation usually needs flexible people who are also comfortable in settings requiring collegial teamwork.
Your best employees will be to think on their feet and be passionate about succeeding.
There’s nothing wrong with hiring workers who are independent-minded mavericks. But carefully ask about their short-term and long-term goals.
Beware: Frequently you’ll attract people who are only there to learn your business, and will soon leave to start their own businesses — often to compete with you.
Behavioral interviews
Past behavior in a myriad of situations is the best predictor of future performance. Ask the right behavioral questions for strong hiring results.
Five vital steps
1. Identifying the required key skills, knowledge and abilities. Employers need to learn the applicants’ attributes in problem-solving, teamwork and leadership.
2. Asking open-ended questions to get thorough, experienced-based responses. Avoid asking close-ended questions because all that you’ll hear are the worthless answers, “yes” or “no”.
3. For evaluation purposes, many are using the Star method — situation, the scenario; task, an explanation of the challenges; action, how the applicant responded to the situation; and the result, preferably with specific metrics.
4. Asking follow-up questions, much like a journalist who ask about five situations: who, what, when, where and how?
5. Steering clear of leading questions that alert applicants to use your desired answers. Instead, interviewers focus on past experiences that were learning opportunities for personal growth.
Effective behavioral questions
There are four suggested types of open-ended questions to ask applicants:
1. Regarding their teamwork
2. Decision-making
3. How they manage conflict
4. How they perform tasks while under pressure
Three tips for success
1. Prepare for the interview by reviewing your job description and comparing it with the person’s resume.
2. Take notes of the salient points. Be sure to compare answers of all the interviewees.
3. Consistently ask the same behavioral questions of each applicant.
Avoid two red flags
1. Don’t allow hypothetical answers. Follow up to get the specific answers you need to accurately evaluate the candidates.
2. Don’t accept vague answers using the pronoun, “we.” Get answers using the pronoun, “I.”
Trainable job applicants
If your budget only allows for inexperience applicants, look for three qualities: Curiosity, adaptability and a proactive personality.
The types of questions to ask should include requesting examples of how they learn new skills and how they respond after making mistakes.
Seek applicants who are focused on continuous learning.
Check their references, including to learn about their adaptability.
You might consider using the free Criteria Cognitive Aptitude Test. It tests critical thinking, problem-solving and learning ability. Included are questions on verbal, numerical and spatial reasoning. You’ll learn if they have a cognitive ability to visualize, manipulate and rotate 2D and 3D objects, which helps to learn if they understand their spatial relationships.
Hiring relatives
Be cautious when interviewing relatives. Avoid the temptation to take short cuts. Ask the same types of behavioral questions.
Make certain it’s a formal, legal hiring process.
It might be a given that you’ll hire the relatives, but be sure to assess their talents and place them in the right jobs to capitalize on their strengths.
From the Coach’s Corner, more management tips:
Hiring? 4 Pointers on Negotiating Wages with Applicants — Some employers have had difficulty in successfully extending job offers to applicants. Here’s what to do.
Need to Hire a Professional? Advertising Tips to Attract the Best Talent — Whether your business has grown so you need to hire a key professional or you’re replacing a person, there are certain advertising-recruitment tips to use. To avoid wasting your time, you must plan.
Check Your Motives before Hiring Sales Employees – 11 Tips — With many companies desperately in the hunt for sales revenue, it might surprise you to learn that their predicaments are often self-imposed. Why? They hire the wrong sales employees.
HR – Interviewers Give Higher Marks to Applicants Interviewed Early in the Day — Study has implications for HR professionals and job hunters, alike Interviewers often mistakenly give higher ratings to job seekers – whom they interview early in the day – at the expense of other applicants.
“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
-Steve Jobs
__________
