Welcome to the new world of performance-based selection

Performance-based interviews have consistently identified top performing applicants for a wide variety jobs including entry level, clerical, service, technical, medical, professional as well as senior and executive management. The use of performance-based interviews also speeds up the selection process (especially when used in conjunction with Micro Assessments which are essentially written performance-based pre-interviews that can be e-mailed to applicants across the country or around the globe and thereby, dramatically improve the quality of applicants and reduce the number of applicants who will be interviewed resulting in additional cost savings). Final selection decisions can usually be reached within one week (sometimes even one day). And this saves companies thousands of dollars in staff time. The only pre-requisites for successful performance-based interviews are complete understanding of the essential qualifications of the job vacancy and interviewer training to ensure the interview and rating scale are correctly administered (but this is very easy and quick to do).

Again, some hiring professionals and managers may initially be reluctant to change to performance-based interviews because they have invested significant time and money in competency or behavioural interviews or they don’t want to admit that the existing hiring process takes too long and doesn’t always result in top performers. But the change will be painless and the results, dramatic. In fact, performance-based interviewing is probably the most powerful and cost-effective approach currently available with advantages including reducing turnover by 20 per cent, reducing selection costs by approximately 40 per cent, reducing the number of interviews by up to 75 per cent and significantly improved quality and productivity of new employees (i.e., a true top performer is identified almost each and every time). So if you are currently using behavioural or competency interviews, you may want to "upgrade" to performance-based interviews in order to hire the " best" employees.

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