Using competency based questions is the best way to protect yourself against claim, from unsuccessful candidates, that the questions in the interview, no matter how innocently asked, were designed to illegally exclude them.

One last comment…every hiring decision is a gut decision..the only option we have is whether our gut is fully informed or not. Accurate job data and accurate candidate data leads to a “full” gut.

Thank you for an excellent primer on the subject of BI/competency interviews. As others have implied in their comments, there really is little point in interviewing if one does not interview for competencies matching the job description.

However, I somewhat disagree somewhat with your conclusions regarding the advantages of multiple interviewers, i.e. “the outcome ceases to be an individual manager’s choice and instead becomes a consensus”. While that is true in a perfect world, or maybe even in one where all interviewers are incredibly adept and skilled in the processes involved, in the real world it is not nearly as reliable as one might think. Too often, the multiple interviewer process, especially when it involves larger groups (5+), becomes a way of shifting blame for bad hires, and diminishing the responsibility for the hiring decision, and ultimately the success of the hire, from the individual manager to the group. The “group” has far less to do with the development of the person hired than does the manager, yet the manager’s responsibility for the hire is spread across the group.

The process of involving larger numbers of people in the interview process creates a responsibility shift, and can reduce the “buy-in” of the individual manager for the new hire’s success. I understand that your group must take very specific interview notes, and use those to justify scores and recommendations, and do applaud your attention to detail. However, if an interviewer really “likes” a candidate, it is a no-brainer to come up with valid comments from the interview to support the score or recommendation. Likewise for negative recommendations.

The greater the number of interviewers, the far greater the likelihood that personality differences, gamesmanship, politics, and prejudice in many possible forms will come into play. Again, specific comments and behaviors from the interview notes are not that difficult to come up with.

If one is going to use multiple interviewers, I recommend that it never exceed four participants, and that those participants be chosen very carefully. In addition to the position manager, the group should include that person’s manager/director, an HR individual of at least supervisor standing, and a technical person, if that is appropriate. The position manager should also get 50% of the weight of the decision in their recommendation. That enforces that person’s level of responsibility, and increases their buy-in to making the hire a success. It is essential that the person who is going to be responsible for developing the skills of the new hire have the greatest influence in the decision. Otherwise, the group is laying the groundwork for apathy in the development of the candidate.

Worst case group hiring scenario??? Inviting peer-level, or subordinate-level, employees to interview the candidate. No amount of oversight is going to be able to sort out the potential personality and prejudicial issues that come to bear in that process.

Since then, two developments may interest you and ERE readers. First, we can now quantify the financial benefits that accrue from competency-based selection, even when it forms part of a multiple step hiring process. In multi-unit retail at the store manager level (where there are P&L statements attached to each performer), the average annual performance savings per hire (the increase in store profit attributable to making competency-based hiring decisions) ranges from $18K for a national convenience store chain to $22K for a coffee store chain to $30K for a chain of tire stores. And these results were audited for the first two instances. We have developed Talent Curve simulation software to detail the proportions of: Stars, Achievers, Keepers, Problems, and Mistakes (the Talent Curve) that a given existing hiring process makes, and how that will be improved after implementing competency-based hiring. Then the well established Utility Equation transforms the talent curves into the performance value per hire.

The second development concerns closing the gap between the promise of behavioral interviewing seen in the research and the reality once it gets practiced in the field. In research, most everyone asks the recommended behavioral questions, probes to re-direct candidates back on track when they stray, and takes good notes. When the doors close out in the field, I noticed in hundreds of closely observed behavioral interviews that if candidates responded with behavioral answers to the first two behavioral questions asked, the rest of the interview went smoothly and the interviewer had a solid set of performance examples to rate. If candidates managed to slip away from the first one or two behavioral questions asked, they learned from that experience that they did not need to answer the tough questions with precise answers. They could slip away, providing an opinion or a generality instead of a clear performance example. In the field, interviewers often don’t take notes or take notes that are illegible even to themselves more than a hour after the interview.

Getting the interview started online shrinks the gap. An automated online coach ALWAYS goes for specific, detailed, behavioral answers. It scans initial answer drafts for phrases that suggest a non-behavioral answer, giving the candidate a chance to reveal the behavioral detail needed to evaluate the candidate’s performance. Beyond coaching candidates to stay cleanly on the behavioral track and capturing detailed, legible notes to each question, an online behavioral interview has two other major positives. First, with the benefit of conducting 150,000 online interviews over the past 5 years, we have learned how to coax the specific answer details, a bit at a time, from candidates who would be intimidated by a simple question followed by a blank text box. Second, our online interview collects automated confirmations from credible third parties with no labor cost on the part of the employer. So this online alternative to starting competency-based interviews not only improves behavioral interviewing to make best practices more common in the field, it collects third party confirmation of the candidate’s performance claims.

It would be great if other readers to Timothy’s article and this comment added further enhancements to competency-based selection that they have come across.

I’ve seen that many organisations (surprisingly) do not apply a consistent structure like this (BI-based or not), partly due to a lack of awareness/understanding on their part. That’s why I thought a broad introduction might prove useful to individuals who want to introduce objectivity to their hiring, but are unsure how to go about doing it.

Once a recruiter knows what competencies fit the job, he or she has to test (aka interview) each applicant to determine whether the applicant has them. Behavioral interviewing is just one testing technique (i.e., BI is based on the theory if XYZ competency is required for the future job, a successful applicant should probably be able to tell stories about its successful application in past jobs).

So, I ask…if you are not interviewing (i.e., verbally testing) the applicant in the hopes of determining specific competencies for a specific job, then what exactly is the purpose of the interview?