The Flaws of Behavior-Based Interviewing -- YES, FLAWS!

Ok - if you know me, you know I'm a career Human Resources professional. Here's the story...

It was in the early 2000s when the world of work started to hear the faint marching of “Behavior Based Interviewing” (BBI) on the horizon, coming for us all. Then before long, every company was changing its interviewing format to ask questions like, “Describe a time when you had a difficult relationship with a customer that you couldn’t resolve and why?” and “Tell me about a project you worked on where you had a challenge influencing others.” 

Interviewees shuddered, because instead of coming in and just selling themselves, candidates were being asked to demonstrate their performance characteristics and discuss their work in ways that was dramatically different than the past.

Fast-forward to 2018…we’re slowly figuring it out. BBI has flaws!

Here’s my own personal story –

At one time, I had been involved in a consideration process for an HR leadership role. As we rounded the corner for face-to-face interviews, the hiring manager kept repeating, “You’ll be doing a BBI.” I couldn’t really understand why she kept reinforcing the idea of a “Behavior Based Interview” over and over again in conversation. It was almost as if she was doting about a new-found goldmine…either trying to impress me or warn me.

I went through the interview process and what I thought had been a successful interview process with leadership ended up being a “no-go.” The team were young, up-and-coming professionals whose interview style was clunky and inexperienced, especially from the HR perspective. They had been provided a list of very wordy, BBI questions that they stumbled over in real-time, often re-starting sentences someone wrote in complex grammar. In two instances, the questions were so complex, specific, and pointed that it wasn’t easy to come up with related examples. I admitted to the team in the moment that an example didn’t come to mind, but I proceeded to share my working philosophy to address the heart of the question. In the moment, they said things like, “Good answer,” and “That’s perfect.” But the feedback from the hiring manager afterward was that “I struggled to answer the questions.” As a Career Coach and someone who teaches the art of interviewing, that ran me hot below the collar, because the one thing I have never done in the interview room was “struggle!” 

If you’ve done BBI for any length of time, you have realized either overtly or covertly that there are issues with this format of interviewing.

·     It relies on candidates having a good memory

·     The questions deliver the best advantage to those with lots of experiences

·     It relies on candidates having a memory of a very specific instance in time and the longer one takes to answer these questions the worse the candidate impression

·     The premise of the question presupposes that a specific case in point actually exists

·     You run the risk of missing a great candidate, because they didn’t think well on their feet on one given day

·     The candidate who is the “smoothest” talker can get a job and end up not being a true contributor/performer

All of those are RISKS! Right away, most HR pros might be saying, “Gosh, that’s true…what about people who have some mild memory-loss issues? Are we insisting that to be hirable, our interview process requires good memory of facts from the past? Is this discriminatory to people who have long career histories?” The list of concerns runs long.

During the BBI candidates have a few choices –

1.    Think for a few moments and come up with a specific, related example

2.    Admit that they cannot come up with an example, creating an awkward moment

3.    Lie and come up with a fictitious story to cover the question

Literally, THOSE are the choices! In my interview, as mentioned before, I did #2. That landed me in the “struggling to answer” category! Wooossaaaahhhh! I’m still not over that!

As a seasoned interviewer, I know that when #1 and #2 are not an option, people lie (#3).  A few follow-up questions either establishes a solid answer or unveils the uncomfortable truth. 

People lie on BBI questions all the time. We put candidates in an awkward situation, increasing the probability of an untruthful answer when the questions are not structured to give flexibility and still demonstrate character and abilities.

Solution? Maybe instead of putting the CANDIDATE on the spot to come up with real-world scenarios, what if – and I know this is a foreign idea – what if, the EMPLOYER generated real scenarios from daily business activities to judge fit for the culture and for the work?  Suddenly, I think we’d sense why this can be sometimes difficult for the candidate. But since HR/Recruiting is in control of the interviewing process, we have all the time on our side to generate these “better solution” questions!

Also, it might recommend Carol Quinn’s Motivation Based Interviewing, as a way to offset the BBI format! Good luck!