If you’ve ever conducted an interview before are likely to be familiar with Behavioural Interviewing techniques.
Developed in the 1970s, Behavioural Interviewing is based on the principle that the best indicator of future behaviour is past behaviour.
Behavioural questioning is a line of investigation that delves into your candidate’s past experiences in their previous roles.
Behavioural Questions sound like this:
- Tell me about a time when you’ve experienced conflict or tension between yourself and another team member in the past, what did you do?
- Tell me about a time you had conflicting deadlines, what did you do?
There is absolutely no doubt that Behavioural Interviewing techniques revolutionised hiring and are still effective today. But over the decades, researchers and hiring experts have discovered new techniques that dig deeper and result in better hires.
Today, we will look at Performance-based Interviewing.
Performance-based interviewing helps employers investigate how their potential hire is likely to perform in a real-life or hypothetical situation than is likely to emerge in their unique workplace.
For example: Let’s say you are a digital marketing agency. You boast a range of loyal clients. You are looking to hire an Account Manager to join your growing team, to deliver greater support to your clients. Before you start your interviews, take a moment to think about future situations your new hire needs to know how to handle. Real or hypothetical, ask yourself what situations might be on the horizon in the next 12 to 24 months that your new team member needs to sail through.
These scenarios might include:
- Rescuing the potential loss of one of your major clients to a competitor
- Expanding your client’s utilisation of your services into other areas of your service provision
- Identifying and onboarding new clients
Once you’ve pinned down your future/hypothetical situations, craft an interview question around those scenarios.
This way you can dive right in and understand your potential hire’s approach.
Here is how the potential scenarios we listed out above, look when covert them into Performance-Based interview questions.
- We are always working to ensure we are working to prevent client attrition. Hypothetically, let’s say in your first three months of employment, you note a downward trend in our pipeline and suspect we may be losing clients to one of our competitors. How would you handle this situation?
- A number of our clients have been with us for over five years, with the same year on year revenues. What strategies would you consider to encourage our client’s to increase their annual spend with us?
- As you know, we are very particular about ensuring we work with the right kind of clients. How would you go about identifying and on-boarding new clients, and ensuring that we are on-boarding only those clients who really do fit our service provision profiles?
Simple right?
If you listen closely to your Candidate, these questions will reveal much more information about how they are likely to handle future situations that might emerge for your business. And based on that data, you have more information from which you can decide if they are a good fit for you.
Predicting performance, instead of just uncovering past behaviours, ensures you’ll find the perfect candidate for the job. This is an easy and cost-free technique that you can apply today.
