Are you hiring the best person for the job?

Is it time to upgrade your competency or behavioural questions to performance-based interviews?

By Stephen Jackson

For many organizations, interviews are the only or most important selection tool used to make selection decisions. But many companies that rely heavily on the interview for their selection decisions may not realize that some types of structured behavioural and competency interviews can be problematic and may result in missing out on hiring the best person for the job. It’s important to understand the limitations of these types of interviews and how you can effortlessly overcome and "upgrade" them by using performance-based interviews.

Structured interviews are a dramatic improvement over unstructured interviews

Structured and competency interviews with behaviourally-anchored rating scales were introduced years ago and were a vast improvement over the infamous unstructured interview. They were designed to ask and rate each applicant using the same questions and set behavioural responses. This made structured behavioural and competency interviews more defensible than unstructured interviews and minimized or eliminated many types of biases (e.g., contrast effect: where applicants are compared to the person who was interviewed prior to them; first impression effect: where a "gut instinct" decision is made in the first two minutes of the interview; etc.). Structured behavioural and competency interviews were indeed a vast improvement over the dark ages of the unstructured interview because the questions asked were often much more relevant to the job and this frequently resulted in better employees but not always the best.

Problems with structured and competency interviews

At first glance, structured or competency interviews seem pretty thorough. Unfortunately, applicants can now obtain these types of questions and answers from a variety of sources. For example, an online Internet search for "behavioural interviews" will quickly produce many behavioural questions and ideal responses. And almost every bookstore is well stocked with a variety of books that provide questions and answers to behavioural and competency interviews. As well, many career counselling centres also teach applicants how to respond to these questions and I have even seen the odd article with a quick "how-to" instructional focus on behavioural or competency questions. So clearly, widespread use has led to widespread availability of these materials. And this has led to a wave of well-prepared applicants who may in fact, not hold all of the true knowledge and skills/abilities required on the job but are good at recognizing competency questions and responding with memorized stock answers.

Behavioural and competency-based questions are time-consuming to develop

The reason questions and answers have become so widespread may indeed be due in part to a common complaint I hear from HR professionals: the proper development of structured or competency interview questions can be very time-consuming and this can lead to increased selection cycle time or hiring delays. Thus, once a question is developed, it is often " recycled" for a wide variety of related jobs, with little or no modification. After all, behavioural and competency questions are usually targeted to the transferable skills and traits that make up 75 per cent of each job. Applicants can and do memorize the correct responses to these types of questions because in the end, there aren’t really that many different questions (e.g., decision making, problem solving, time management, conflict resolution, team work, communication, initiative, etc.)! And this seriously impacts the validity of your interview as well as the success of your new recruit when these individuals have just memorized the "right" answers.

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This article copyright © Stephen Jackson. All rights reserved.

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