Behavioral Interviewing
Every spring, many look forward to The Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. Who is your pick to win this year? I’ll bet many of you are picking Phil Mickelson or Tiger Woods. Why are these names coming to mind? The reason is that they have won it before…MULTIPLE times.
“A pattern of past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.” This is the underlying principle behind behavioral interviewing. This is one principle behind our guess as to who might win the Masters this year.
At the SHRM-Atlanta Conference during the Behavioral Interviewing concurrent session, we’ll discover how this principle comes into play in the hiring process.
When a company seeks to fill a vacant role, the job description is created. To facilitate behavioral interviewing, job competencies are also defined for the role. As candidates are interviewed, competency/behavioral based questions are used to assess the candidates past with the aim of trying to predict how they will perform if hired.
Let’s take an example. Assume your company is hiring to fill a supervisory position. So, one competency that will be needed is management. In the interview for this role, one might ask, “Give me an example of a situation when two subordinates weren’t getting along.” The interviewee will give the overview of a real-life situation from the past. Then, once we understand the situation, we’ll ask, “What did you do?” This is the “RESPONSE”. The interviewee might share that they got the two subordinates together and discussed it, or maybe they ignored the situation, or maybe they fired them both. There are certainly many different management approaches to this situation. Finally, we ask, “What was the outcome?” From this, we learn what ultimately happened.
This line of questioning gives us the PROBLEM, RESPONSE, and OUTCOME of a situation that the candidate might be faced with in the role we’re hiring for. Ultimately, we look at the RESPONSE and see if this behavior is in line with the company culture and the needs of the open position.
Behavioral Interviewing is used by most large companies and continues to evolve as an effective technique to assess a candidate’s potential fit with a position.
You can see Tom’s session, Behavioral Interviewing, at the 22nd Annual SHRM-Atlanta HR Conference at the Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta, on March 13 from 2:20 to 3:20 to learn this technique and bring it into your organization!
Thomas M. Darrow is the Founder and Principal of Talent Connections, LLC, Career Spa, LLC, and the Atlanta HR Prayer Breakfast, Inc.
Tom has over 23 years experience in the Human Resources and Recruitment profession — including 9 years with the global professional services firms of Price Waterhouse (now PricewaterhouseCoopers) and Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). He was the 2006/2007 President of SHRM-Atlanta, the largest city Chapter in the country. Under his leadership as President, SHRM-Atlanta’s membership increased 60% to over 2600 members and the Chapter won a SHRM Pinnacle Award for membership growth and a Pinnacle Award for the Mayor’s Youth Program.
Tom earned a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Accounting from the University of Notre Dame. He currently resides in Murphy, NC and Smyrna, GA with his wife Anne and their three dogs and parrot. Tom enjoys golf, Notre Dame football, Christian music, shows at the Fox and Alliance theaters, eBay shopping, spending time with family and friends, and comedy. In 2004 he made his stand-up comedy debut at The Punch Line, the premier comedy club in the Southeast. Tom is an originating shareholder of the 13-time World Champion Green Bay Packers.
