The Effective Hiring Manager

4Behavioral Interviewing and Preparing Your Hiring Criteria

Before we can start interviewing, we have to know what it is we’re looking for. That means analyzing our job for behaviors, and creating interview questions.

You may be inclined to skip this portion of our guidance because, “I already have my interview questions.” Trust us—it is unlikely that the interview questions you are using are good enough, crisp enough, written down, in order, to meet our criteria of setting the bar high and an interview’s purpose being to say no. Worst case, you’ll only have to create a new set of questions once for each of your roles, and it will take 45 minutes each time—a worthwhile investment for the best interview you’ll ever create.

Looking Beyond Traits and Characteristics

The keystone of effective interviews is having great interview questions. But how are great interview questions created? What do we want to know?

This is where most managers go wrong. They say, “Well, I want smart, hard-working, nice, ethical, knowledgeable . . .” While no one can argue with such a conclusion, the problem here is that these traits and characteristics are insufficient. We have to be careful about questions regarding personality traits or internal characteristics that we associate with this job’s success. Why? While everyone who is good at the job has these traits and characteristics, there are also some people who have the traits and characteristics who could not do the job. That is, traits and characteristics ...