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Recruitment & Retention

Published May 2008

Provide Tools to Increase Behavioral Interviewing ROI

Tim Vigue, Lindsey Schantz, Donna McGee and Perry Alter

 

"You only live once — but if you work it right, once is enough."

The above quote from comedian and singer Joe E. Lewis could easily have been referencing the practice of behavioral interviewing: If you work it right, one coordinated set of behavioral interviews is enough to make a well-informed hiring decision. And well-informed hiring decisions translate into greater productivity, less turnover and a large ROI. The key, of course, lies in working it right.

Working it right means having good tools employees are trained to use correctly. When this occurs, the ROI can be substantial. Consider a company that trains 200 people to conduct behavioral interviews. If only half of them make one fewer hiring mistake each, and a hiring mistake costs $10,000 — a very conservative estimate — that's $1 million saved.

To be clear, this is not about blindly abiding by a set of rules for the sake of the technique. It is about applying the technique in order to help the organization reach its potential and accomplish its goals. Each better hiring decision should lead to incremental performance improvements throughout the organization.

It is largely accepted that behavioral interviews lead to better hiring decisions. Research conducted since the early 1980s has put to rest any lingering doubts by repeatedly demonstrating their ability to predict on-the-job performance.

To clarify, while some variability exists, there are a few common elements to behavioral interviewing including job analyses, articulately defined competencies, job-related questions, rating guidelines and consistent execution. But most importantly, behavioral interviewing will provide the greatest benefit to an organization if used correctly and consistently.

Some companies provide daylong development efforts to help employees learn and practice behavioral interviewing techniques. This clearly needs to continue. Without it, employees will not understand how to apply the techniques correctly. But using them in a way that secures the best results is getting harder in a business world in which pace continues to increase, leaving little time for preparation and careful execution. Organizations must find ways to make behavioral interviewing technique application easy.

Employee Development May Not Be Enough

If an organization's goal is to make behavioral interviewing a regular practice, education alone probably is not enough. First, education doesn't make it easy. Writing thoughtful behavioral interview questions from scratch and executing behavioral interviews can be hard for people who don't do it regularly.

Second, a long lag time often exists between when someone learns how to interview and when he or she must apply that learning.

Third, when confronted with 120 unanswered e-mails and voice mails from peers, bosses and customers, many managers will respond to these seemingly more pressing demands rather than prepare for an interview with a candidate he or she has never met and may never see again.
 
If organizations want people to apply what they have learned eagerly and well, they should provide tools that make it easy. Tools are defined as any job aid, software program or database that facilitates skill or process deployment.