Behavioral Interviews: Asking Bad Questions Gets Bad Employees.

Motivation is mostly thought of as the will or desire to do something. If you've ever wondered who the hide-and-seek champion of the world is, look no further than motivation. It's never there when you need it, often it's not where you left it, and many times you have it when you don't need it. However, let's take a further look into the other meaning of the word motivation: 'The reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way.' This gives us a unique insight, one that most businesses never get or understand because they ask the wrong questions—ones that answer the 'what' or 'how' but not the 'why'.

Currently, one of the most used interview questioning styles is behavioral-based. These questions have been designed and calibrated over the years to uncover what and how a candidate successfully accomplished something. An example of this is 'Tell me about a time when you had to successfully balance multiple projects and meet quotas.' Other examples include situations where the candidate had to adapt to difficult circumstances or overcome objections to retain a customer. There is no shortage of data stating that a well-structured behavioral interview can reduce bias, emotional decision-making, and increase objectivity, thereby reducing errors in the hiring process. However, this can be attributed to a standardized process designed to remove as much emotion from the interviewing process as possible. This does not compensate for the biggest flaw of behavioral-based questions—a potential decrease in the quality of hire because it does not predict someone's motivation to perform or their future success.

Let's say you are hiring for a retail associate for a major luxury retail chain. A typical question might be 'Tell me about a time when you had a difficult customer who was being unreasonable. How did you resolve the situation to ensure the customer left feeling satisfied?' The answer that the behavioral style elicits from the candidate typically focuses on the 'what' and 'how' (and obviously avoids anything negative). 'During my time at [previous experience], I had a customer who... so I tried to understand their issue and collaborated with my manager to find a win-win scenario where we could showcase our support for our customers... the client left satisfied.' You'll notice that while the retail associate understands the customer's 'why,' the interviewer asked the wrong type of question, resulting in a standard, average answer. Wouldn't it be more insightful to know that the candidate acted that way because they are incredibly introspective and like to challenge themselves to showcase their abilities to management because their goal is to attain a district manager position? Now you've narrowed down your candidates to the top 10, but they all provided the 'what' and 'how'. How do you differentiate them at this point? In most cases, you probably have to inject emotions back into the interview process to select your candidate.

Another shortcoming of this style is that it always takes more than 1-2 behaviors to effectively complete a task, and often people complete tasks differently and achieve the same results. So who did it better? Let's say you're looking for a project manager. This questioning style provides data on how a candidate delivered a project on time and within budget. A typical answer might be something like 'I leveraged tools to track progress, utilized time management skills, and effectively led my team to victory.' Once again, the 'what' and 'how.' What we missed in the answer due to the way the question was angled was how the candidate persuaded and led the team, persuaded leadership for budget approval, motivated the team, and adapted to changing conditions. And let's face it, everyone knows that saying 'I'm not good at... x, y, z' is not an acceptable answer, so candidates prepare ahead of time to craft a positive that masquerades as a negative. For example, 'My biggest weakness is that I am incredibly detail-oriented and hyper-focused to ensure that I deliver 110% results each time, where sometimes I find that I'm too close to see the full picture.'

Asking Smarter Questions Gets Smarter Answers

What we really want to see is what motivates a person to perform at or above the level needed for the job requirements, consistently, in a way that we can actually differentiate and not just getting task-oriented answers. The aforementioned questioning style led to asking for a specific example. Let's take a look at how to calibrate these questions differently to understand what motivates the candidate to perform, which will give us a better idea if their success is relative to their current job/title/company or if it is part of their value system. Unless it makes no difference to you that Candidate X completed their task on Monday and Candidate Y finished it on Thursday, as long as they both finished before the Friday deadline, it doesn't matter, right? If we dig deeper, we could find that Candidate X finds motivation in collaborating with their peers to reduce errors, so they completed their task early to collaborate with their team to iron out the issues, while Candidate Y postponed the project because it wasn't as urgent compared to their workload but they still got it done.

How do we evaluate multiple behaviors? How do we differentiate candidates better? How do we increase the quality of hires? We need to broaden our approach. Don't lead your candidates to the answer; let them explain it fully to you. In the case of the project manager position used before, instead of asking a candidate to give an example of a specific behavior, ask them to describe in detail a major accomplishment aligned with a specific job requirement. Follow-up questions then require the interviewer to delve deeper and get to the core values of what drove them to that success. Ask the candidate to describe when and why they took the initiative, solved a complex, multi-layered problem that they found wasn't being addressed correctly, or implemented a new idea. This performance-based interview style spotlights performance rather than the means by which an objective was achieved. Properly assessing for internal fit is then made easier using performance-based, 'why'-centric questions by comparing based on criteria such as complexity, comprehensiveness, scope, and scale, among others. Instead of focusing on the fact that Candidate X and Y had similar accomplishments, we focus on how Candidate Y differentiated themselves because of the complexity and scope of the project, which incorporated the team and delivered a better result than Candidate X, who worked alone.

Understanding the behaviors leading to accomplishments enables you to make a more informed decision by understanding the 'how,' 'what,' and most importantly, 'why.' This better aligns the perception or understanding of the job to the job reality and adds additional ways to grade/differentiate candidates.

Increased understanding is needed on the part of the hiring manager, along with strong cross-departmental communication to ensure success. The hiring manager needs to fully understand and feel empowered to know what each job requirement listed is, how it is actually used on the job, and the differentiation between a 10x employee and an average employee in that role. How are the job expectations actually used on the job? Further clarifying the job requirements can make it easier to identify the relevant talent best aligned to the job requirements. 'A Strong Brand Representative [of our company]' may actually mean 'Someone who can complete the onboarding quickly with limited help.'

Without understanding the job and having full clarification of the job requirements themselves, it is easy to recognize the shortcomings in the behavioral interview. Using data analytics, a company can identify key traits like behaviors and skills that have been identified and observe how these different traits are leveraged to accomplish projects, whether they are more relevant or leaning toward outdated, and what accolades are best aligned with job needs. Another weakness of behavioral questions is that they don't provide data to evaluate these traits.

You don't hire skilled people and motivate them. Motivation can't be taught. However, you can use better questioning and data-driven insights to find skilled employees who are motivated. When comparing the results between behavioral-based and performance-based questions, the latter is a much better predictor of future success. This isn't to say that behavioral questions don't have their place or cannot be improved upon. What we find is that leveraging 'why'-centric performance questions enables you to attract and build a stronger internal talent pool, increasing your quality of hire and retention.

About the Author: In today’s world with an increasingly competitive talent landscape and the overwhelming amount of data in our digital age it is hard for organizations to stand out through all the noise. Leveraging technology & digital media creatively is the ultimate differentiation in attracting top talent. It is my sole goal that I aggressively pursue that I make people my client's ultimate competitive advantage. To do so I share strategic industry trends and talent intelligence to help build unique road-maps to develop their #TalentBrand and #EmployerBrand to stand out and compete against large established corporations. Because the innate power of information, I leverage #SocialMedia and #SocialSelling to help bring value to my client’s everyday lives. Some topics that I share are: #TalentAcquisition, #SocialRecruiting, #EmployeeAdvocacy, #HRTech, #AI, and #TalentInsights to impact those around me in a meaningful and positive way.

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