Behavior-event interviewing for strengths?

A friend of mine brought the concepts of “Behavioral Event Interviewing (BEI)” or “Behavioral-based Interviewing” to my attention. I confess I have never heard these terms before, although the concept itself was not new to me. The concept is well explained by Tamara E. Holmes in an article that you can find for free on the NFIB (“The Voice of Small Business”!!) website: http://www.nfib.com/object/IO_16988.html

“Under the technique's premise, it is not enough to know that a prospective employee is fluent in Spanish. Instead, you would want to find out how the person has used his or her bilingual capabilities in the past.

The premise behind behavioral-event interviewing is that past behavior predicts future performance. Just as a credit report is used to predict how a loan applicant will handle money in the future, examples of past accomplishments and behaviors can help hiring managers get an idea of how a potential employee will perform in the future.

Unlike interviewing techniques that focus on hypothetical situations and ask applicants what they would do in a given situation, behavioral event interviewing focuses on what applicants have done. The danger of using hypothetical situations to gauge an applicant's ability to handle the job is that the applicant is better able to give the answers he or she thinks you want to hear. Also, applicants might want to believe that they would act in a certain manner when, in reality, they would not.

When coming up with questions for the interview, consider the way each is phrased. You'll want to use open-ended questions that require more than a "yes" or "no" answer.

For example, starting a question off with the phrase "Tell me about a time when…" prompts the applicant not only to describe a situation that fits your criteria, but also to walk you through the resolution of the situation. Such a discourse not only allows you to hear about the situation, but it forces the applicant to talk more. As a result, you're better able to gauge his or her communication skills, which can also help you make your hiring decision."

Indeed, these recommendations are very similar to the interviewing tips in “First Break All The Rules “ on page 215 ff. (“The Art of Interviewing for Talent”).

I find it interesting that the concepts of a behavioral-based interviews can be applied to a strengths-based interview. I am not a psychologist, but I understand that personality and behavior are two different concepts: while personality does not change a lot once we are adults, our behavior can change. Of course, our behavior is very much influenced by our personality, but I always got the feeling the “behaviorists” tend to be those who say that “managers are made, not born”, while the personality folks rather tend to say “managers are born, not made.” And it is my understanding that talents are an aspect of our personality. How good can it be then to use behavioral-based interviewing to find strengths?

My friend who is an experienced "Talent Manager" working for a large company in the US says:

"Strengths are personality based, and the issue is they have not found a correlation between personality and sales ability or high performance outcomes in teams in competitive environments. But yes, behaviors do make a difference to performance. So the Strengths people have turned the strengths into behaviors that relate to your industry for you (I think). So it is a bit muddled, but might work! I just come from a business and academic background and prefer not to have my work based on a foundation of strengths or personality. However, there is a school of thought that believes personality predicts performance. The most well known person is Hogan, and Hogan Assessment Systems."

This seems to be a very interesting but also controversial field. If you want to learn more about this, I suggest you google "behavioral-based interviewing", because there is a lot of interesting information out there. There are also a few good books in Amazon. Check out also the following document:

http://www.asisvcs.com/bellsouth/pdf/710057.pdf

Dear Bloggers, if you know more about this, have experience or know interesting website, please put them in a comment to this post!