Behavioral Interviews

Personally I’m ambivalent about Behavioral Interviews (henceforth referred to as BI’s). I took a two-day class on BI once, so I’d like to think I know something about the subject. I have tried out BI’s myself in person, and I still try to throw in some type of BI question here and there in my interviews.

Still, I have doubts about an interview format that’s focused primarily or entirely on behavioral questions. It might be useful in jobs like sales or general management where the focus is on human interaction, negotiation, and building relationships. However I think it’s less effective when the key traits being sought are technical knowledge and analytical skills.

At the risk of gross simplification, a behavioral interview involves asking a candidate about situations from their past where they had:

1) a Goal,
2) an Impediment, then
3) took an Action, achieving
4) a Result.

The exact mechanics of the questions and answers may vary. Still, the idea is that if used properly, BI can be used to unearth the candidate’s competencies and interpersonal skills in ways that more traditional approaches cannot accomplish.

In reality though, BI answers can be meaningless. Either the candidate may not have good situations to recount, or they can simply make them up. During my BI training class we conducted mock interviews, and I made up most of my anecdotes on the spot by tweaking the details of real life experiences. It wasn’t difficult to do, and the anecdotes sounded pretty impressive.

Additionally, applying a BI template to technical situations does not always work well. Describing a nontrivial technical problem and its solution may require discussing complex technical issues in significant depth, which is not what BI was intended for.

My point is that BI is sometimes presented as a silver bullet to successful interviewing when that is simply not so, at least in the tech world. Conducting successful tech interviews requires a number of different tools, and BI is just one of them. The others include technical quizzing and whiteboard exercises, both of which are likely more effective at determining a candidate’s technical aptitude.