As I am a current employee of a company that endorses Behavioral based Interviewing, I feel that I can comment on this. We are overwhelmed with great “Team Players” that have excellent personalities but don’t know squat about what it takes to perform the job at hand. While they can follow a process, they are, in general, incapable of understanding “the why” that has led to the process. The real issue at hand is that by the time they have learned some of the why, they have moved on to a different position, thinking they have mastered a given topic and profess themselves to be proficient. It would be interesting to hear how many other are suffering with similar Coworkers/ Supervisors. If any of you out there are H.R. reps please add some level of core technical expertise testing to whatever field you are in. BOTH ASPECTS are equally important.
On anther note, anyone who wants to do well on a Behaviorally Based interview needs only remember the S.T.A.R. method of answering questions. (Situation, Trouble, Action you took to resolve conflict, and most importantly Results) All of the BI interviewers I have run across eat this approach up. (I am three for three on interviews to jobs offered)
I am an HR Rep and am a supporter of behavioral based interviewing. My suggestion to raysirx would be to think of some behavior-based questions that are also relevant to your subject matter and propose them to your management/ HR. They may well appreciate the input if you bring it forward constructively. HR can’t realistically understand the job content of every area in a business, so they often rely on line management to judge subject matter knowledge. Maybe you can help strengthen that part of the process for your company.
You’re right, there are a lot of standard behavioral questions about teamwork, etc., that can be used for a lot of jobs. But behavioral interviewing is not limited to that. Let’s say you’re interviewing an automotive technician. You could ask him to describe the steps he went through to perform a state inspection at his last job. This would usually make it pretty obvious who really knew how to do this, and who was faking it. There’s probably a similar question or two related to your job.
In my experience, when you compare the answers from several candidates to the same set of behavioral questions, it is usually quite evident who knows what they are doing and who is just trying to come across that way. It’s amazing what people will tell you.
Over the years that I have been working there has always been some new way to interview potential workers for a position. It would seem that many of the techniques are based on something developed by psycohologist. I’ll probabaly set some folks off, but in my own experience of seeing it being practiced, psychology is more like a religion than it is like science. The same is true of the “methods” used to screen applicants by HR departments. The methods are merely some belief structure that is not backed by any legit scientific study. So what good is it? It seems that the HR folks think it is a useful tool. But then most of the HR people I’ve talked to over the years when it wasn’t a interview situation didn’t come off as one of the sharpest pencils in the box.
Let’s not forget the recent studies showing that most interviewers make their decision about the interviewee within 2 seconds of seeing that individual, and that the interview is basically a waste of time in many cases. This was backed up further by comparing the responses of interviewers who actually interviewed a candidate, to the responses of interviewers who only saw tapes of the first 5-10 seconds of those interviews… They correlated extremely highly.
I am a former HR Director and worked for many years as a Technical Recruiter and HR manager. For the last 15 years I have worked in the I.T. field; I now do software consulting.
In my experience, most HR departments do an appalling job of selecting job candidates. Putting some structure into the interview process could certainly help the situation if it is done properly. However, I have seen HR folks reject people for the most asinine reasons imaginable…such as the type of paper that the resume was printed on (back in the days when paper resumes were more common), how long the resume was, the body language of the interviewee, etc. Particularly for technical positions, I’ve found most HR departments to be more of a hindrance than a help, since they tend to key in on technical “buzzwords” without any understanding whatsoever as to what the relative significance of one buzzword over another might be. For technical positions, I believe that ALL resumes should be reviewed by the hiring manager first, not by HR. Few companies do this.
HR has long sufferered an identity crisis. The positioning of HR in the corporate organization tends to run to extremes…they are either God-like in their powers and authority, or the lowest man on the totem pole. As such, they are often not well integrated into the rest of the business and this only creates additional lack of perspective for the poor HR professionals trying to screen candidates. Generally, though, HR people welcome additional input from hiring managers.
So bring on the structured interviewing…it could certainly help. But please folks, don’t let your HR department do all the front-end candidate screening by themselves. The hiring managers need to be much more intimately involved in the process if they want to find and attract the best candidates.
I actually had to explain to an HR “professional” working AT A UNIVERSITY that my Bachelor of Arts in Biology was every bit as good for a lab tech position as a Bachelor of Science in Biology and that I had not spent the years just studying how to to draw bugs.
“But it says ‘arts’.”
Didn’t matter that I had a decade of experience in the field, it said “arts” at the end of my bachelors instead of “science”, so I must have been an “artist” merely posing as a would-be research assistant.
Then there was the place that blacklisted me because I had dared to speak directly to a professor before they went through and looked at my credentials (AFTER SITTING ON MY APPLICATION FOR THREE MONTHS!!!) My credentials were just fine, but I didn’t let them play gatekeeper, so they gave me a letter stating that I would not be hired there now or any time in the future, forever and ever, amen.
Human resource departments have become entrenched feodalities that have long ago forgotten what they are for. Now their procedures are more important than actually getting the best people for the job. Yes, I am employed now. Yes, I do “play well with others”. I’m the guy who gets assigned “brick wall” tasks that require some lateral problem-solving–working outside ordinary channels if needs be.
I have to agree with the OP and many of the jaded posters. When a game-player is doing the interviewing and the candidate is a game-player, they’ll get along just find and the cycle of pointless buzzwords continues.
All the top dogs at Enron and etc. did VERY WELL on the interview techniques throughout their careers.
You’re certain to set off some people, if they happen to wander in here and see your heresy. Thumb-twiddlers and navel-contemplators will lecture you without end about the deeply meaningful “scientific” importance of their dippy theories and notions and alleged measurements, and never admit that they can’t even define what it is they’re supposedly measuring. Sadly, such psychomumbo ranks so highly in current society (American, at least) that the psychomumblers are accorded the rank of high priests in everything from education to politics. Which explains the horrendously dismal state of our educational system (and our political arena, though the shamans and conjurors have pretty much always dominated that field anyway).
When Nietzsche pronounced God dead, he didn’t tell us that Freud was already conjuring up the great god Psychotwaddle to replace Him.
With a mail-order degree in some phony “science” like psychometrics, and the right agent, someone could probably write a best-selling book and found a whole new HR approach “proving” that a good “scientific” way to measure prospective employees is to burn incense, shake a chicken-bone rattle, and read the entrails of a goat. It’s no wackier than the myriad other, ever-shifting, popular procedures dictated by the newest flavor-of-the-month psychomethodology. (Of course, then PETA would howl for blood. Hmmm. . . Maybe if we could get the PETA wackos and the psychoyoyos to knock each other off. . . . Nah, never happen. They have too much in common. sigh)
The job I just got (I’ve worked there a month) had a behavoral interview, and I found it to be kind of off-putting, actually. I actually thought that I had blown the interview, since they had only asked me four questions, and weren’t interested at all in answering my questions or finding out anything about me. It did seem like a game…but, all the interviews I went on did to some extent.
I didn’t know that this was a corporate fad, but it doesn’t surprise me.
I work for a very large corporation, and no, I won’t tell which one. When we have interviewed for technical positions in my department, the direct manager and whoever else he needs to determine the competence and “fit” of the candidate are the ones doing the important interviews. Once we decided who we wanted, HR goes through the process of checking credentials, references, residency status and so on. Works pretty well. HR does not get involved at all in determining if the candidate really knows the technology we need, or if he/she will work well in the team that has the vacancy.
I’ve hired in three large companies, and my experienc has matched that of MLS. HR people may do a very preliminary screening on the carloads of resumes we get, but they almost always err on the side of sending more than required. When people contact me directly, there is never a problem. They are also very helpful in handling the part of the interview about benefits, etc., doing the screening, and helping to negotiate salary and sign-on bonus (back in the good old days when such things existed.)
For kaylasdad99 - I trust you’ve never gotten a job at a place where you wish you hadn’t. The questions people ask are very important in evaluating a place. If someone I was being interviewed by who is supposedly an expert asked me clueless questions, I’d have real issues. If they refused to answer my questions I’d have even bigger ones.
Voyager stated that “I’ve hired in three large companies, and my experienc has matched that of MLS. HR people may do a very preliminary screening on the carloads of resumes we get, but they almost always err on the side of sending more than required.”
The problem from my perspective (as I stated in my earlier post) is that HR is not qualified to do the pre-screening for technical positions. The question as I see it is not whether or not you are getting lots of resumes, but whether or not you are getting the RIGHT ones and the BEST ones. My fear (and I think it’s a valid one based on my work as an HR Director) is that truly good candidates might never reach you because the “buzzword match” was not exact, or because the HR folks had some goofy bias against the way the resume was written. When times are tough and there are plenty of candidates available, you can probably find lots of stellar candidates. When the labor market tightens and talent is scarce, the role that HR plays becomes an issue of much greater consequence.
When I was looking to hire someone during the boom, I worked with our HR recruiting person to adjust the buzzword criteria. We started with very loose criteria, and narrowed in as I examined resumes.
I worked at one place where all the resumes were on line, and you got to enter buzzwords yourself. I don’t think it worked any better - though this is partly because you could search only from one, secure, terminal, not from your desk.
I’ve never been aware of HR people rejecting resumes because of formatting, and I’ve seen some pretty miserably formatted ones that got through. I’ve heard stories of HR people zealously guarding hiring managers from candidates, but I’ve never experienced it personally. In my specialty, the buzzwords are pretty well known, and I’d wonder about someone not clever enough to include them.
Job hunters are not the only people having to deal with buzzwords - I’ve heard that authors are encouraged to use long titles and subtitles for their books to increase the chances of a match on an amazon.com search.
rfs, the process my company uses is that HR does NOT make any technical judgements; those are made by the leader(s) of the actual team where the vacancy is. But HR frees us from the tedium of the reference and credentials checking. In fact, HR does not even GET most resumes until we’ve decided who we think we want, and determine that the person is available at the salary we have to offer. Then we pass the info along to HR and if all checks out, then HR makes the official offer and takes care of all the legalities. Works pretty well for us.
My suggestion would be that one be careful about drawing great conclusions from personal anecdotes/encounters.
Yes, there are a lot of incompetent interviewers out there. Yes, there are a lot of people who make up their minds in the first two seconds (and, as discussed in the Staff Report, that’s an invitation to disaster, since such decision-making often includes such factors as racial bias.) Yes, there are lots of con-artists who can fool interviewers. Yes, there are lots of HR professionals who are dumber than toast – there are lots of doctors, lawyers, politicians, etc who are dumber than toast, too, and probably about the same proportion as for HR professionals. HR is not immune.
The point is that interviewing is a tool. Like any tool, it is only as good as the person wielding it. It can be extremely helpful (as the example Harriet provided, or it can be pretty useless (as discussed by Flyfisher and others.)
From a statistical perspective, structured interviewing used competently tends to be a pretty reasonable approach.
All of you who are condemning the process, I ask: what would you put in its place? The fact that many companies and many individuals are too stupid to use the tool correctly doesn’t condemn tool. Heck, lots of people drop hammers on their toes, but that doesn’t mean it’s the fault of the hammer. And that doesn’t mean that carpenters are clumsy, either.
Re Dr Cobweb:
Psychotwaddle? What a GREAT word!!!
Not only a perfect description of the general state of the situation today, but it perfectly sums up anything that issues from Dr.Phil’s mouth.
