Obama, McCain and Behavioral Interviewing

Ask any HR professional who's been in the job longer than six months to finish the sentence, "Past behavior..." and they'll pipe up with, ..."predicts future behavior." If you're not in HR, it doesn't matter. As a leader, you still get this concept. You've built teams and thought about succession. Behavior in one situation usually predicts behavior in a similar situation at a later time. Business people know this to hold true.

Historically, we've used past behavior to predict future behavior in all walks of life.

• Banks lend money more readily to people who've proven over time that they pay back their loans.
• Baseball pitchers feel much less confident facing a batter with a .333 batting average than one with a .220 average.
• The fastest and most productive factory workers are the ones chosen for special projects requiring speed and accuracy.

As interviewers in the workplace, we can expect past behavior to be repeated, especially if there's a high overlap between a candidate's past performance situation and our open position. For instance, if an open position requires handing customer complaints, we'd ask the candidate for examples of their past experience in handling customer complaints or similar conflict situations with friends or co-workers. We'd say something like,

• "Tell me about a time when you had to handle an angry customer's complaint. Describe the situation for me in detail."
• "What specific actions did you take -or not take- in that situation? What exactly was your role?"
• "What were the results or changes which occurred as a result of your actions?"

What if we're hiring for a sales position but, let's say, the applicant has never held a sales job. Any hope of assessing that person's sales ability? Sure. We'd just have to ask the applicant to tell us about situations in which they had to persuade others, sell their ideas to co-workers, or influence a group to do something. What was the scenario? What exactly did you do? What was the outcome?

It's ironic, isn't it, that we're about to "hire" a candidate for a soon-to-be-vacant position -- the most powerful position in the executive branch of our federal government, the leader of the free world -- and we don't use the same rigor in that interview process, when we know it's proven to produce better results over time.

Instead of asking presidential candidates to spontaneously answer the same type of behavioral questions we use for hiring commercial loan officers and graphic designers, we settle for the sound bites that their campaign committees carefully craft late at night in hotel rooms when the latest poll results roll in. 

What if we could ask presidential candidates these behavioral questions and they had to reply on the spot, the way our job applicants have to, every day:

• "Tell me about a time when you demonstrated creativity in solving a problem. What was the situation? Your role? The result?"
• "How do you relate with people who aren't like you and don't see the world the way you do? Give me a specific instance when that was true. What did you do? And the result?"
• "The role of Commander-in-Chief requires sound judgment in times of crisis. Tell me about the biggest crisis you ever faced, when your back was against the wall and you had to act. What did you do? What was the outcome?"

Whether we're adding one more telemarketer to our call center team or replacing the President of the United States, having a dual focus in the interview process is what seems to consistently reap the greatest success...looking to the past to predict the future.