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.