Ask The Right Questions the First Time and Reduce Rehiring Costs
The interview is your most important recruitment tool in selecting the people who will ultimately determine your organization’s success. A poorly conducted interview can result in hiring the wrong employees, leading to high turnover rates and expensive rehiring costs. So why are Behavioral Interview Techniques important?
Everyone involved in the hiring process—human resource professionals, directors, generalists, employment specialists, and company leaders, including directors, managers, and front-line supervisors—needs to understand the ins and outs of behavioral interviewing. Every step of the hiring process—including recruitment, screening and interviewing—will benefit when a company’s combined resources support behavioral interviewing.
Behavioral Interview Techniques
Behavioral interviewing isn’t a new concept. This multi-dimensional approach to weeding out bad candidates has spanned a few decades. The premise is based on the adage that history repeats itself. If you know how an individual handled situations in the past, you can predict how he or she will handle them in the future. Where traditional interview questions probe candidates to explain their prior job duties, a behavioral interview question takes that further by asking details about how they handled a stressful situation, solved a challenging problem, or made a difficult decision.
Traditional interviewing typically focuses on hypothetical questions rather than revealing the candidate’s real past behavior. Behavioral interviewing techniques, however, can require candidates to respond with specific examples rather than generalized responses. In essence, you can learn what your candidates will do if they are hired!
The Cost of Bad Hires Adds Up and Up
By some estimates, it can cost your company two times the employee’s salary to replace them. Traditional interviewing typically predicts future employee success only 10 percent of the time, but behavioral based interviewing can improve that rate by over 500 percent. Statistics show that candidates are five times more likely to succeed in their new workplace if they are interviewed using behaviorally-based questions during the interview.
Why does it matter? An infographic posted on recruiterbox.com displays a breakdown of hiring costs, which include agency advertising fees, recruiter salary and benefits, employee relocation costs, sign-on bonuses, employee referral bonuses, third-party recruiter fees, and travel expenses for applicants and staff. Also included are some ramifications to a bad hire, including:
- Less productivity
- Lost time to train and recruit another worker
- Cost to recruit and train another worker
- Employee morale negatively affected
- Negative impact on client solutions
So every bad hire costs your company money, which in the long run could be saved by better interview techniques. But you can’t just pluck random interview questions from the Internet. To find the right candidate for your company’s culture, you need to craft behaviorally-anchored interview questions tailored to your organization. In doing so, you need to know how to identify job related behavioral competencies as well as legally problematic questions
(This post first appeared in a ProfEd blog)
By Amy P
