How Behavioral interviewing is different from Traditional interviewing?

Most people are fully aware of how difficult, time- consuming, and frustrating job hunting can be. What most people do not realize is how challenging that finding the right person to fit an open position can be.

Interviewers are faced with the responsibility of finding the right person to work not only for but within the company. Failure to do so can result in an unnecessary disruption to the workplace or in damaging the productivity and eventually the company’s bottom line.

Being able to tell who is right and who is wrong is a difficult task at best. Some employers will swear by one method of interviewing while many will say that another is better. In the end the trick is finding what works best for your particular organization.

There are two methods that are commonly used by employers when it comes to interviewing—the traditional kind of interview of a behavior based one. While the two differ greatly the idea is still the same—to find who can help the company make more money.

Behavioral interviewing is a method by which the interviewer asks questions geared towards gauging a candidate’s competency in regards to the position they are being interviewed for. Questions are meant to get the applicant talking about how they have acted in previous situations that may be similar to what they may encounter working for the interviewer’s company.

Traditional interviews often ask similar type questions, but the difference in regards to behavioral interviewing is in the follow up questions that the interviewer asks. This definitely requires the interviewer to be well versed in not only what the company does, but in the art behind interview questions and how to dissect prepared answers to get to the actions and behavior of the applicant.

The purpose of any interview is in gauging who may be the best and most capable employee to join your company. Traditional interviewing typically does this by asking safe questions which just about every applicant has prepared solid answers for such as ‘what are your strengths/ weaknesses?’ and the ever popular ‘tell me about yourself.’

Behavioral interviewing has a deeper purpose than the traditional style of interviewing. It wants to paint a picture of who you may be by painting a picture of who you have been in the past. Its objective is to delve deeper than a traditional interview; to evaluate an applicant’s potential for success by gaining a better understanding of who they are.

Character traits can be hard to judge whenever a person is making an effort to put their best foot forward, like in an interview. Traditional questions do not always get to the heart of who a person is since they can just say what they know you want to hear. However, a skilled and trained interviewer can probe deeper into the personality of a person with the right interview questions. When the questions start to inquire as to how an applicant felt or what they were thinking in a given situation there answers will be consistent and transparent or veiled and varied. Veiled and varied answers show that the applicant is trying to think up the right answer rather than be honest about what they think and who they are.

Traditional questions give the applicant to say that they are competent and proficient in the skills necessary to do the job they are interviewing for. However, if they research the job beforehand it is not hard to come up with the right answer to that kind of question. To really test an applicant’s competency and proficiency in certain tasks, a good interviewer will ask behavior based questions that will ask the person to illustrate their prior use of those skills.

No one likes to constantly be engages in interviewing applicant after applicant to do a job; it takes up time that could be otherwise used in a more productive manner. The cost of bad hire has been shown to be as much as 3.2 times the cost of the person’s salary. With other studies showing that as many as 40 percent of new executives fail within the first eighteen months of being hired, the more of a predictor of performance you can get the better.

All though not perfect, behavioral interviewing questions have shown to be as much as a 55 percent indicator of future performance as traditional questions.