The Effective Hiring Manager

5Creating Behavioral Interview Questions

Now that you know the behaviors that are most important, it’s time to develop behavioral interview questions that will allow you to assess candidates against them.

The most effective interview technique in the world today is to use behavioral interview questions. There are reams of data on the technique, comparing it to others. Until there’s a new way (AI, perhaps), you can’t call yourself a good or professional interviewer unless you’re asking behavioral questions.

The best example of behavioral interviewing today surprises many managers. It’s software developers being asked to write code or debug some code during a technical interview. While most of us don’t think of this as a behavioral interview, it is. It proceeds from the same premise: Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. If the primary behavior in the role is writing code, and you can actually assess that behavior, why wouldn’t you?

The same would apply to a role where using spreadsheets was a key factor. There are wide disparities in how people assess their own skills. Some people consider themselves experts in MS Excel, for instance, but can’t create a pivot table. Why not assess their behavior? We have heard surely a hundred anecdotes of managers doing so and finding “experts” who stare at some relatively simple Excel problem and can’t even begin to solve it.

This is not to say that every role lends itself to such a test. It is to make the point that such ...