Conducting a Successful Interview

Think you know how to conduct an interview successfully? How are you sure?

Read below for information on an interviewing technique known as the behavioral descriptive interview technique (BDI) to help you conduct interviews that will help you hire the right person for any position.

BDI is an interviewing technique that helps you gauge a candidate’s ability to succeed in a position based on what the candidate has done in the past. This focuses on actual accomplishments, failures and actions that the candidate has done in his or her career, not what the job seeker says he or she will do.

The idea is that past actions will predict future actions. In other words, if someone made 100 cold calls a week for a previous employer, chances are he or she will do the same for you. If the candidate could barely squeak by each week with 25 cold calls, it’s highly likely that he or she will make about the same number of weekly calls while employed by you.

Before you start to interview, you’ll need to identify with clarity the core competencies and skills that are required to succeed in the position. You then craft your interview questions around these.

The idea is to take a look at a candidate’s accomplishments, not just his/her personality or demeanor.

As examples of the types of questions a hiring manager might ask are:

• Think back over your recent projects and tasks and find a situation that had you making the best use of your problem-solving skills. What was the situation and how did you come up with solutions to the problem? What was the result?
• Tell me about an instance where you feel you showed a great deal of initiative. What was the situation and what was the outcome?

The idea is to assess if there’s a good fit between the skills and ability and/or knowledge that you’re aiming to evaluate and the candidate’s response. You’ll judge the quality of the interviewee’s response by evaluating whether the example he or she gives is relevant, clear and concise, and had a positive outcome. You’ll also take a look at how much prompting you had to give the candidate (or did he or she need none?) and whether the job seeker addresses four areas: a specific example, the action he or she took, the outcome and the result of having a successful (or unsuccessful) outcome.

If you’d like help interviewing job candidates, Arrow Staffing can take the preliminary resume review and first interviews off your plate. We can screen resumes and conduct first interviews, presenting the candidates that best meet your criteria. If your business is located in the Inland Empire, contact us today.

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