Hiring
Why Behavioral Interviews Should Be Part of Your Hiring Process
Explore the power of behavioral interviews and why they should play a pivotal role in your hiring process. Enhance your talent acquisition.
Hiring
Explore the power of behavioral interviews and why they should play a pivotal role in your hiring process. Enhance your talent acquisition.
Marcos Lopez
HR Consultant
26 of October, 2023
So you have a position to fill and you’ve gotten a stack of resumes from interested candidates. That’s great, but how do you determine who is actually the best fit for the role? Resumes only tell part of the story.
The truth is, the most qualified candidate on paper may not actually be the best person for the job. That’s why behavioral interviews should be an important part of your recruitment process.
Behavioral interviews focus on how candidates have handled situations in the past to determine how they might perform in your role. By asking targeted questions about previous experiences, you’ll get insight into key soft skills like how they communicate, think on their feet, resolve conflicts, and motivate others.
You’ll uncover strengths and weaknesses that a traditional interview may miss. While resumes are helpful for understanding credentials, behavioral interviews help ensure you find someone not just with the right skills but also the right mindset and work style for your team.
A behavioral interview is based on the premise that past behavior is the best predictor of future performance. Rather than asking hypothetical questions, the interviewer will ask you to describe specific situations you have encountered in your previous jobs and how you handled them.
For example, instead of asking you “How would you deal with a difficult client?”, the interviewer may say: “Describe a time when you had to handle an upset client. What was the situation and what did you do?” The idea is to get a sense of how you actually behave in real-world situations.
To prepare for a behavioral interview, review your work experiences and be ready to provide detailed examples of situations where you demonstrated key skills and abilities that would be relevant for the role. Think about challenges you faced, actions you took, and results you achieved. Focus on your strengths, values, and motivations.
Why should you incorporate behavioral interviews into your hiring process? They provide insight into a candidate’s soft skills, work style, and potential culture fit. Answers based on real examples are harder to fake. Behavioral interviews also tend to reduce biases as they focus on actual experiences and outcomes.
Using a tool like Sesame’s recruitment software can help streamline your behavioral interview process. Sesame’s platform allows you to create customized behavioral interview templates with relevant questions for each role. You can then evaluate candidate responses, compare them side by side, and make a more data-driven hiring decision.
In summary, behavioral interviews should absolutely be part of your hiring toolkit. When done right, they can help ensure you find candidates who will thrive and excel in your organization.
Once you’ve identified promising candidates based on their resumes and cover letters, it’s time to dig deeper. Behavioral interviews are designed to discover how candidates actually behaved in specific situations relevant to the open role.
To conduct an effective behavioral interview:
Behavioral interviews, when done well, provide valuable insight into how candidates are likely to handle real-life work situations. Made a part of your hiring process, they can help ensure you find the right match for your opening.
Behavioral interviews should absolutely be part of your hiring process. Why? Because they give you insight into how a candidate will actually perform in the role.
Traditional interviews focus on asking candidates hypothetical questions about what they would do in a given situation. Behavioral interviews, on the other hand, focus on asking candidates about specific examples of what they did in past work experiences. This approach is based on the belief that past behavior and performance predicts future behavior and performance.
For example, instead of asking a candidate “How would you handle a difficult customer?” in a behavioral interview you would ask, “Tell me about a time you had to deal with a difficult customer. What was the situation and how did you handle it?” The candidate’s actual experiences and examples will reveal their skills, strengths and potential shortcomings for the role.
Some key benefits of using behavioral interviews:
Behavioral interviewing, especially when combined with the right interview questions, is one of the most effective ways to evaluate candidates and make a great hire. The insights you gain into a candidate’s experience, skills and potential performance will allow you to find the right match for your open role.
The bottom line is that behavioral interviews can be a game changer for your hiring process. When done right, they give you an authentic view into how candidates think on their feet and navigate challenging situations.
You’ll get insight into qualities like problem-solving skills, adaptability, and collaboration that are hard to gage from a standard interview alone. While it does take time and practice to master, implementing behavioral interviews into your recruiting is well worth the investment.
Your company culture and performance will thrive when you have the right people in the right roles. So start crafting those behavioral questions, get ready to take some meaningful notes, and find the perfect candidates that will help your business soar.