Small Business Owners Should Use Behavioral Interview Questions
It is critical for small businesses to make the right hiring decisions. Their teams are smaller, each of their employees likely has customer-facing work, and mistakes come with a bigger impact (money, time, sanity). Small business owners have so much on their plate that it can be appealing to quickly hire someone you already know, or trust a friend’s recommendation without putting a candidate through a more rigorous process. Sometimes that works, but it takes years of experience, solid discretion and a willingness to closely train and work with the employee through on-the-job mistakes.
A vital element I advise every small business includes in their process is behavioral interview questions. Available hiring research suggests many small businesses still rely on informal or semi-structured interviews, while larger organizations are substantially more likely to use formal behavioral interviewing systems, including behavioral interview questions.
The industries who most commonly use behavioral interview questions today are:
Technology
Consulting
Finance & banking
Healthcare leadership/admin
Government
HR & recruiting
Project/program management
Sales
Customer success
Corporate operations
Marketing
UX/design
Education administration
I have a chapter (Chapter 1, unsurprisingly!) about behavioral interview questions and cover how to ask (and answer) them effectively in my book, The Self-Aware Interview. They came out of industrial and organizational psychologists from the 1970s who were looking for better evidence-based assessments. These types of interview questions are asking a candidate about a specific example of something they’ve done (e.g. “Tell me about your greatest professional achievement”). They’re also known as one of the most challenging types of interview questions, which is why I focus on them with my job-seeking candidates as well.
I believe these types of questions are best at getting to the heart of a candidate’s responses. They can uncover the human element of the work experience they’re talking about. Can they demonstrate humility, earning trust, building relationships, connecting with others, dealing with ambiguity? (Yes, all things you need humans for, not robots!) After working with a diverse range of folks in many different roles (in both white and blue collar environments), I know that these skills are often not teachable and especially at work in the fast-moving world we live in today.
Lots of people are looking for “the best behavioral interview questions”, but my belief is that the efficacy of the overarching question relies on the ability of the interviewer to ask the right follow up questions, develop a connection with the candidate and keep them talking. You can ask hard-hitting questions all day, but if you can’t identify a yellow flag that needs more context, or you shut down a conversation when you hear a red flag rather than following the breadcrumbs and testing your assumptions, you aren’t as good of an interviewer as you could be.
As a hiring coach, I recommend that small businesses, especially when beginning to hire for the first time, create thorough hiring processes that result in a positive outcome for both candidates and the small business. It takes some investment up front, but much less time later on in the process (time wasted later in the process feels more painful for all involved).
When I’m working with small businesses on setting up their hiring process, I recommend the following (at minimum):
Use of behavioral interview questions mapped to the company’s (and job description’s) values
Required Interview Training for Interviewers
Checks & Balances during the interview process to ensure candidate and company success
Use of a hiring matrix to enforce mapping a candidate to skills rather than comparing against other candidates (sometimes weighted for equity, if that’s a value of the business)
Wondering if your hiring process is set up correctly for your business’s success, or if you’re using behavioral interview questions effectively? Reach out to me and I’m happy to discuss further on a complimentary call.