Lauder Beaumont Associates

The most popular type of interview in use today for executive level hires is the behavioural or competency based interview.  This type of interview assesses how a candidate behaved in the past as an indicator of how they will approach situations in the future.  This in turn is used for predicting performance and future success in a given role. But is past performance really a reliable indicator of success in a new role?

Logically, this seems like a good approach but is it really reliable?  The alarming rate of executive hire failure suggests that this approach is either not being applied effectively or that it doesn’t work.  So what are some of the pitfalls?  Where does this approach fall down?

Firstly, people are not robots.  Just because they behaved in a particular way in the past does not necessarily mean they will do it the same way again in the future, whether their approach was successful or not.   If people recognise their past behaviour didn’t achieve the results they hoped for, there’s every chance they will change their behaviour.  Is the candidate marked down because their behaviour didn’t get the result they were looking for or marked up because they recognised changes need to be made?–i.e. they learnt from past mistakes in order to improve (a valuable skill).

Are any two situations ever the same?  Does repeating behaviour in one situation mean that you will get the same successful outcome in another?   

I’ve seen many organisations looking enviously at competitor wins and decide that if they can poach their competitor’s sales superstar that it will transform their business.  Sometimes it does but just as many times the superstar sales performer headhunted from the competition fails as spectacularly as they succeeded in the past.  Did the sales person start behaving differently when he arrived at the new company?  No, there were just a different set of variables at the new company and the way the sales person behaved in the past just didn’t achieve the same result in the new company with a different set of circumstances.    

I think the biggest issue with the behavioural interview approach is that if the candidate is reasonably smart, the questions are easy to prepare for.  They know what’s coming.  Just think ‘STAR’ and apply it to every answer, candidates are coached. Situation, Task, Action, Result.  The approach is more likely to bag you an excellent interviewer rather than a top performer.

So is there a better way?  If we can’t rely on past behaviour and performance for future success, what can we do?  The answer is simple: stop looking to the past and look at the present.  Why not take real, present day problems and challenges and get the candidate to tell you how they would address these.  Give them real not theoretical situations. This will flush out candidates with smart answers and no substance.  It will stop you having to make tenuous links to situations your candidates have encountered in the past to your own situation.  It will significantly increase your chances of making a successful hire.