The Hidden Limits of Traditional Interviews (and How to Fix It)

I used to be terrible at conducting interviews and evaluating candidates.

I started my career by doing what seemed logical. I’d walk a candidate through a problem I’d need solved and then ask them how they would solve it. We’d then (more or less) hire the person who gave the best answer.

The result was a total disaster. It turns out that this “scenario-based” approach to interviewing was extraordinarily ineffective.

Discovering Behavioral Interviewing

At some point, someone way up the ladder noticed these issues and mandated our team complete a multi-day interview training workshop. It was there that I first learned how to conduct the traditional behavioral-style interview. That changed the trajectory of my career.

The core premise of behavioral-style interviews is incredibly simple i.e. that past performance is the single best predictor of future performance. Therefore the best way to assess a candidate is to probe the relevant parts of their past experience. Instead of asking a candidate what they would do, we instead ask them what they did do.

So let’s see the difference in action. Say you want to understand if a candidate is capable of cutting your skyrocketing lead generation costs:

Scenario: “Let’s say you face a situation where your cost per lead has skyrocketed. How would you fix this problem?”

Behavioral: “Could you tell me about a time when you saw the cost per lead skyrocket and walk me through how you fixed the issue?”

I want to be clear that the questions themselves aren’t a magic bullet. There is a whole process for how to identify needs, ensure consistency, ask follow-ups, and parse those answers. But once I shifted towards this approach, I became much better at hiring.

When Behavioral Questions Fall Short

I was now reliably avoiding costly mistakes, but I also began to notice real limits of the behavioral approach. I was hiring more senior leaders, and there was more weight on competencies such as “strategic thinking.”

Initially I tried to shoehorn the assessment of strategic thinking into a behavioral-style format. But it didn’t work. The problem was that behavioral questions were better at assessing actions rather than the underlying thoughts or feelings that drove those actions.

I ended up expressing this frustration to our Head of Product, and he suggested that I start asking a different question:

“Walk me through the current strategy of your company. What do you agree with or disagree with?”

This question was a game-changer. I could now directly probe a candidate’s strategic capacity. To what degree could they articulate the strategy of a company at the highest level? To what degree could they lay out the trade-offs of various approaches and defend their recommendation? To what extent were they contrarian, and to what extent were they contrarian in productive ways?

This approach was revealing for the same reason that behavioral questions were revealing. Both types of questions tapped a candidate’s lived experience. So the answers were specific and different in useful ways. I soon realized that this wasn’t just a special question, but rather it was a class of questions that didn’t fit cleanly into existing taxonomies (I checked with GPT to confirm!).

The Reflective Question

Behavioral questions anchor us in the what and how of a candidate’s past actions. A candidate’s values, needs, motivations, and cognitive maturity are embedded in these answers. But these underlying drivers are in the background and the action is in the foreground. Especially as you start interviewing candidates for higher-level roles, there is enormous value in inverting that focus at key points in an interview.

Here are a few example questions that fit this “reflective” style of questioning:

• “What aspects of your current job energize you—and which aspects drain you?”
• “What was the most impactful feedback you’ve received? What resonated, and what felt off-base?”
• “If you could redesign your current role, what responsibilities would you add or remove to maximize your impact, and why?”
• “What’s a professional habit or mindset you’ve had to unlearn in recent years, and how did that shift impact your work?”
• “Looking back on a recent success, what motivations, habits, or mindsets do you believe contributed most to that outcome?”
• “Reflect on the most impactful team you’ve been a part of. What specific dynamics made it work so well, and how did you personally contribute to that?”
• “Consider how you’ve evolved over the last two years. What new capabilities or perspectives have you developed, and what sparked those changes?”
• “Looking ahead, what emerging trends or challenges do you feel most compelled to engage with in your field, and why?”
• “If you could remove one responsibility from your current job to free up time for higher-impact work, what would it be and why?”
• “Reflect on a mentor or role model you admire, what specific traits have you tried to adopt, and where have you found it challenging?”

The core premise of behavioral interviews is correct i.e. it’s easier to hire when you invite candidates to engage with their real experiences. By also incorporating reflective style questions, you’ll get clearer insights, make better decisions, build stronger teams, and help your organization be more successful.