Tell Me About A Time When Your Interview Technique Was Actually Useful
A Newsletter from Jake Tuber
Tell me about a time when you were asked an overly-specific question about something that may or may not have happened, and you were expected to immediately recall the situation (if it happened) and speak to it eloquently?
This is Behavioral Interviewing. The technique has been historically lauded as a more valid and reliable option than the generic unstructured interview.
But I’m not a big fan.
For one, Behavioral Interviewing has a Goldilocks Problem: It’s valuable insofar as the past is uniquely similar to the future. Threading that needle is rare. In practice, behavioral questions tend to either be so specific (e.g. “tell me about a time when you had to fire an employee whom you personally thought of as a friend?”) that candidates struggle to recall a past experience that actually addresses the nuance of the question, or the questions are so general (e.g. “tell me about a time when you had a disagreement with a colleague?”) that their answers can’t possibly forecast the future.
Second, behavioral interviews rely heavily on the accuracy of human memory – a notoriously unreliable phenomenon. The past is a useful predictor of the future… but that assumes we can assess what actually happened. Candidates may not have an accurate or objective memory, especially if the questions address emotionally-rich experiences. This doesn’t mean candidates are lying – they may be telling you what they remember! But we reconstruct our memories much more than we realize.
Because of these shortcomings, some prefer Situational Interviewing.
Like Behavioral Interviews, Situational Interviews ask scenario-based questions. But instead of asking candidates to recall the past, Situational Interview Questions ask candidates to imagine a given scenario and explain what they would do (e.g. “how would you approach a situation where you had to fire an employee whom you personally considered a friend?”).
The upside to this approach is pretty self evident:
You can still get a Behavioral Interview answer without limiting the candidate! Candidates are free to recall a previous similar situation, but they can always answer the question as a hypothetical.
Similarly, there’s no risk of artificially retrofitting or embellishing the past just to come up with an answer to a strict Behavioral Question.
Situational Questions demand thoughtfulness rather than memory recall, so you get to see how they think. Where does their mind go first? What contextual aspects of the hypothetical do they consider and what do they leave out? How well can they critique their own thoughts?
Situational Interviews seem like the perfect remedy to the shortcomings of strict Behavioral Interviewing, so why not just go all in on the Situational technique?
The research says not so fast. Without rehashing all of the findings, there’s evidence that Behavioral Interview Questions may be more predictive of future performance, primarily because Behavioral Questions serve as better proxies for determining cognitive ability, which is generally predictive of job performance.
But a well-cited paper from Krajewski et al. (2006) offers that Behavior Interviews may not simply have superior predictive validity. Rather, it may be that Behavioral and Situational Interview Questions are each better at assessing different factors. In their conclusion, they offer that: “SI questions may be best suited to soliciting examples of applicants’ likely work styles or evaluating whether their work values and preferences match those of the hiring company. On the other hand, [Behavioral Interviews] may be better at tapping applicants’ performance of job-related behaviors, the extent to which they possess managerially relevant personality traits and cognitive ability” (p.427).
Because of this, I have been experimenting with a new approach that I refer to as Situational-Behavioral Interview Technique. Originally, I termed it the Behavioral-Situational Interview Technique, but reversed the order… you can guess why…
Here, the goal is to offer up the opportunity for a retrospective (Behavioral) answer if possible, but allow for hypothetical (Situational) responses. Because of this, they tend to be double-barrel questions, which are to be avoided when conducting research but may be quite useful in interviews. Situational-Behavioral Questions look like this:
“Imagine you have scheduled a team dinner to reward your team for their recent performance. However, you find out that your employees really don’t care about the dinner, don’t want to go and may think that you are using the dinner as a form of ingratiation tactic. What, if anything, would you do? More importantly, have you encountered a situation where you learned your employees were rolling their eyes at something they had to do?” (modified from an example provided by Krajewski et al, 2006, p.419).
No, it’s not rocket science. It’s just a simple way to try and get the best of both worlds.
If you’re taking this approach, I also recommend sending the candidates a little bit of a primer about 24 hours before the interview. This way, if there is a robust past-looking Behavioral Interview answer, it might float to the surface more readily.
One day prior to the interview, I might send an email that includes the following:
“During our interview tomorrow, I will plan to ask questions about past experiences you may have had and how you might approach scenarios in the future. To begin, I’ll plan to ask you about circumstances where employees may not have been interested in an approach you’ve taken, difficult conversations you might have as a manager, and advocating for an unpopular idea or decision.”
This little primer gives candidates the opportunity to arrive with past experiences in mind and more able to discuss a hypothetical situation with a level of specificity that makes the conversation more productive.
If your goal is to try and understand how they will act if they join your organization, then you want to take advantage of questions that help you analyze their past experiences as well as their espoused approach to handling situations that may arise. The hybrid Situational-Behavioral Interview Technique is a decent attempt to get you both.