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When you ask a child the classic question, “What did you learn in school today?” the reply is often not terribly informative. David S. Cohen, a former school principal who moved on to a second career advising organizations on interviewing and recruitment, says the parent would be wiser to think about what they want to find out and then ask an appropriate question. Perhaps it’s about bullies, how the teacher is dealing with your child or what is interesting in class.
“Describe a time during the day when you were scared” might reveal something about bullying. “Tell me about your high and low points of the day” or “tell me about the questions the teacher is asking” might also inform. Those are behavioural-style questions that not only can illuminate your child’s day at school but also when focused on careers, help you to move past pat answers in job interviews and better understand the candidate before you.
“Traditional interviews often elicit ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers along with an overview of what the person did. But rarely do interviewers learn how the candidate did what they did and the motivation beyond the ‘how,’” the Toronto-based consultant writes in his book Selecting the Best.
The hiring manager too often expects to know what he needs when he sees it, rather than defining it before the interview, making him or her more susceptible to the candidate’s chemistry or charm. Mr. Cohen says you need to know for the job you are looking at what the behaviours are that differentiate highly successful individuals from others.
When he consults with an organization, he builds the foundation by organizing focus groups to uncover cornerstone behaviours for success in the organization. That revolves around six clusters: Problem solving, decision-making and the acquisition of knowledge; communications; motivation; time management and self-organization; relationships to be successful in the role; and values and how their associated behaviours influence the other five clusters. Values are important, he says, because they don’t change or, if they do, it is a slow process over time. Values also apply equally to everyone.
Even if the organization hasn’t built as explicit a sense of values and behaviours as Mr. Cohen provides when consulting, he says individual managers facing a hiring situation still instinctively know the company’s authentic values because they live them every day. Managers then need to identify the five or six critical skills and knowledge required to start the job successfully. The next step is to determine the behaviours you want from the candidate that will match the skills and knowledge you need and the values the organization demands.
Interviews are best by a panel with questions structured in advance, everyone hearing the same answers. Situational questions will ask subjects about what they believe to be the right actions in a hypothetical situation. You should have already graded anticipated responses so you compare what you hear to what you have already decided points to effectiveness in the role. Behavioural questions ask subjects about their past actions in work, school or volunteerism and rate responses by comparing them to criteria determined for success on the job.
He uses both situational and behavioural questions in interviews, as both can help discover the candidate’s sources of motivation, but gives priority to behavioural. Situational questions encourage well-intentioned and hypothetical responses, whereas behavioural questions ground the conversation in what the candidate has actually done when real consequences were involved. Past behaviour can predict future behaviour if the past behaviour is recent and repeated. Follow-up questions probe deeper layers of the story not shared. He makes it clear that he will be following up on responses by asking the candidate about other people involved in the situation, which keeps the candidate honest.
“The logic for hiring for behaviours, especially the values that define the culture, comes from understanding that people are generally hired for their education, knowledge and experience(s). The employee is often promoted for their success, meaning results or innovation. Yet the cause for being fired is one’s behaviour,” he writes.
Writing behavioural questions start by knowing the competencies you are seeking and how they play out at work. The question is technically not a question but a request for information. It begins with one of these four phrasings: Tell me about…; share with us…; describe a time or situation…; or give us an example when you….
It should be impossible to answer with a yes or no. As well, you shouldn’t specifically mention the behaviour you are interested in and the correct answer. If you want to know if the candidate generally allows other people to finish speaking before responding, you must indirectly get into that general area. In that vein, don’t telegraph expected answers with this type of question: “At our company, we all work in teams as it is critical that we don’t have a silo mentality. Tell me about a time when you joined a team that you feel welcomed from the start.”
Prepare a consistent set of behavioural questions for the process, asking all candidates the same questions, to ensure fairness, structure and accuracy. “The goal is to prevent personal bias or gut feeling from derailing good hiring decisions. A structured behavioural response provides 75 per cent reliability in the information needed for an accurate hire, while a traditional interview offers a reliability of only about 14 per cent. That gap alone justifies the method,” he says.
Cannonballs
- Applying the heroic mode ideas of psychologist David Kantor to the executive suite, former Rotman dean of management Roger Martin says you will find three types of people: Fixers, primarily focused on overcoming whatever problems they encounter; survivors who endure in the face of trials and tribulations, such as Job in the Bible; and protectors, intent on shielding others from harm. CEOs he has encountered tend to be fixers and often need his help understanding the survivor-dominant and protector-dominant members of their teams. He also notes while there are not many protector-oriented CEOs in the private sector, they dominate in the not-for-profit sector.
- Software engineer Addy Osmani, a senior engineering leader at Google Chrome, argues most slow teams are actually misaligned teams as people build the wrong things or the right things in incompatible ways.
- Marketing consultant Mark Schaefer notes that nostalgia marketing is so resonant now that even startups with no brand heritage are using 1980s and 90s iconography and aesthetics to promote their products. Recent research found younger adults the loudest champions of this trend, with about 70 per cent of adults aged 18 to 34 showing an interest in heritage.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.