The Effective Hiring Manager

19How to Probe Behavioral Interview Answers

The question we hear most frequently from managers is “What questions should I ask?” This is a fine question—and that’s why we license our Interview Creation Tool. But it’s not the best question.

The best question is How do I evaluate answers? Most of us do this poorly for all kinds of reasons. We over-rely on our guts. We haven’t prepared well enough to know what we are truly looking for. We believe “We’ll know it when we see it.” We like answers that sound like our answers. And on and on.

But let’s go back to first principles. What are we looking for? A person who can do our job well. What is the raw material that allows someone to do a job? Behaviors.

So we prepare behavioral interview questions, and then we ask them. And then, unfortunately, candidates don’t answer with behaviors! They have reasons, for example, most can’t imagine they have enough time to go through all of their behaviors in something like a project they’re discussing. They’re right. Also, many candidates have not professionally prepared for a behavioral interview by knowing how to highlight their behaviors as they describe one of their accomplishments.

What this means is we have to ask our questions, listen to the answers, and then probe for behavioral details.

This is not to say that any time in any answer we’re going to probe for more information on anything the candidate did. It would take too long. (We hope you’re seeing that as full an evaluation as we’re ...