Behavioral Interviewing
Behavioral Interviewing is a teachable skill that will turn your team into a more effective and scalable recruiting engine. Often, interviews focus on what a person knows. Unfortunately there is a gap between what a person knows and what he or she does. Behavioral interviewing is a key skill that should be adopted by at least a subset of your organization, so that the missing key strategic skills identified in your gaps analysis can be brought into your team. There are two main parts to implementation: (1) determine the right set of skills for each position, (2) learn how to ask open ended questions for specific experience in the candidate's history, and continue to press for more details if the candidate does not provide them.
We can help you identify the gaps and the key skills required for various positions, and we can train your team to use these techniques.
Challenge: A client had to grow adding one person a week for 6 months.
Action: The key skills were identified for each of the new hires; this was a list of 6 technical skills and 6 behaviors. Typical behaviors were leadership, communication, persistence, planning, political savvy, and tolerance of ambiguity. For each interview, each of the skills/behaviors were assessed by two people. The objective is to rate each skill on a very unambiguous scale, each of which is preceded by "evidence shows"... [does not have skill, weak in skill, has skill, excels at skill, insufficient evidence]. In the end each candidate got a scorecard for each skill to be analyzed., and candidates can very quickly be compared. If there was outlying data, we went back to the interviewer to try to determine if it was the candidate or the interviewer, and in the end make risk based decisions based on the data.
Result: We made a few hires that didn't fit, below 5% or so that we felt was quite good considering the numbers we had to hire.