Behavioral Interviews vs. Traditional: What Makes Them Better and What Questions Work Best?

KiranKang
I have to do a report on Behavioral Interviews and understand that it's an instrument to assess how a candidate's past performance can predict their future performance on the job. Besides the fact that it is more predictive of a candidate's job performance than a traditional interview, what do you think sets this apart from traditional interviews? Do you think they are better than traditional interviews? What do you think are "bad" behavioral interview questions? What do you think are "good" behavioral interview questions? Your help will be much appreciated. Thanks!
thesysthink
Hi Kiran.

'Behavioral' interviews are aimed at probing the behavior of a person. Well, the obvious question is, what's behavior? It's probably a mixed effect of a person’s genotype (the properties inherited from genes) and phenotype (properties derived from the environment). When dealing with the organizational system, many variables can alter your behavior, such as when you are talking with your friend in the presence or absence of your boss.

Probably that's an oversimplification. It's a matter that mostly organizational psychologists deal with. To answer your query—yes, it's definitely better than normal interviews in some aspects, as they are meant to 'probe' certain identified areas and not others. To find a better result, you probably would want to do a comprehensive structural probing (and unfortunately, your resources will not permit you).

Hence, we are still going with normal interviews in our daily life to save costs and money.

As such, there are no bad or good questions in interviews; everything is planned and structured. For example, if you are using a 'funneling' structure—i.e., starting with a variety of topics and then slowly proceeding with specific ones—that may not work with a 'diamond' structure, which starts from specific points, touches a variety of points, and then returns to some other (predefined) point.

This is an art, and psychologists strive to gain mastery over it.

Probably I could not satisfy your query (because the question is general in nature and not indicating any special reference in which a behavioral interview is to be used).
If you are knowledgeable about any fact, resource or experience related to this topic - please add your views. For articles and copyrighted material please only cite the original source link. Each contribution will make this page a resource useful for everyone. Join To Contribute