Theory of Hiring

Most business managers wouldn't consider going into a meeting unprepared. Yet many interview job candidates without planning ahead, hiring employees based on less-than-revealing interviews and hoping the employee will "work out."

Most job failures can be prevented by looking beyond the resumes and references and concentrating instead on identifying a candidate's work habits. Eighty-five percent of all job failures have to do with a lack of appropriate work habits, not technical skilss.
Most failed hiring decisions result from behavioral issues rather than anything else, a candidate's ability to perform well in a certain environment can best be gauged by delving into that person's past work habits and behaviors.

It's not enough to ask candidates what they did during their previous employment, but rather, how they did it.

These "behavior-based" questions place the interviewer in the role of an analyst; this method causes candidates to reveal aspects of their personalities obscured by other
interviewing techniques. Based on their answers, the interviewer gets a history of the candidate's ability to work with others or under pressure -- both key indicators of future success. One of the techniques we should use is to get candidates to relate to us very specific experiences in their work life that illustrate the skills that we're looking for.

To be a good interviewer means that you need to be a good communicator and a good listener, and you're not as effective an interviewer if you ask questions that will elicit only yes or no responses.

One example of a behavior-based question is asking the candidate to relate an incident in which he or she had a disagreement with a coworker. Rarely can job candidates outguess the interviewer when you ask them those kinds of questions. Candidates become practiced at interviewing,

What works for one person might not necessarily work for another. Interviewing is a little bit of science and a little bit of art.

The method of asking candidates open-ended questions is the most effective way to acquire accurate and telling information. Asking questions such as `what did you accomplish, allows you to look for specific patterns.