This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Who" by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What are the benefits of behavior-based interviews? How do you get to know a candidate more in an interview?
A behavior-based interview lets you identify a candidate’s behavioral tendencies. Understanding how a candidate has behaved in the past helps you predict how they may behave in the future at your company.
Let’s look at how to conduct this type of interview to get all the information you need.
Identifying Behavioral Tendencies Through an Interview
In Who, Geoff Smart and Randy Street refer to a behavior-based interview as a “sequential interview,” and walk you through the process as an interviewer.
To identify a candidate’s behavioral tendencies, the authors recommend discussing each job the candidate has held in the last 15 years in sequential order. Analyzing this long period of time lets you identify the candidate’s behaviors that remain the same over the years and are likely to continue if you hire them. Also, discussing the candidate’s history sequentially is easier for both of you: The candidate can share their experiences in a simple narrative order, rather than trying to remember things out of order, and you can see how their behavioral tendencies and career progressed, which helps you understand their likely future trajectory.
(Shortform note: The authors say to use this method for every candidate, but what if a candidate has little work experience? What can you do if you can’t analyze a long work history like Smart and Street suggest? Some hiring experts suggest adjusting your questions to fit the experience they do have and focusing on their interests. This information is less directly related than work history but can still help you determine a person’s suitability. For instance, you may ask a candidate to describe their past hobbies and activities. If they’ve taken computer science classes and participated in hackathons, that shows an interest in software development that could make them a valuable employee, even if they lack software engineering experience.)
| Can You Identify Behavioral Tendencies In a Non-Sequential Interview? Some business experts say you can use non-sequential behavioral interviewing to identify candidates’ behavioral tendencies, too. In this method, you ask the candidate to tell you about a particular experience and extrapolate their behavioral tendencies from how they behaved in that example. An added benefit of this method is that the example a candidate shares can help you understand how they think and what they find difficult. For example, you may ask the candidate to describe a time they had to get out of their comfort zone. If they give an example of pitching projects to investors, you can deduce that they may find communication difficult. Other hiring experts prefer non-sequential interviews because discussing a candidate’s history sequentially is too easy. It’s easy to become a passive listener when hearing a story, they say, instead of assessing the candidate’s suitability for the role. This is arguably even more true when hearing a long story, like one that covers the past 15 years. They recommend focusing on relevant information by asking what skills and knowledge the candidate currently uses at work and then discussing how they developed those skills and knowledge. There is a potential problem with these non-sequential methods, however: cherry-picking. Since the candidate only shares isolated examples of their performance, they could choose examples that make them look good while disguising their real behavioral tendencies. For example, if the candidate tells you about a time they successfully pitched a project, you may think they do so regularly when their success is actually an outlier. |
We’ve consolidated the authors’ advice into two main behavioral tendencies you should look for in a strong candidate:
Tendency #1: Meets Employer Expectations
According to the authors, identifying whether the candidate has regularly met previous employers’ expectations can help you judge whether they’ll meet your own. To identify this tendency, first ask why the candidate was hired for each role. This helps you understand what their previous employers expected from them. Then, discuss their successes and struggles in each role to see to what extent they met those expectations.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Geoff Smart and Randy Street's "Who" at Shortform.
Here's what you'll find in our full Who summary:
- Why the key to business success is having an effective hiring process
- The 4-step hiring process you should be following
- The two behavioral tendencies to look out for in candidates
