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Strategic Interviewing

By Harvey Schachter

"What is your strength or weakness?"

"Where do you want to be five years from now?"

"What is your ideal job?"

Those are typical questions these days in job interviews, with behavioural interviewing the rage. But they're ineffective questions, according to the authors of Strategic Interviewing.

"Focusing on behaviour is not enough if the behaviours you focus on are not the predictors of success on the job," argue Richard Camp, Mary Vielhaber, and Jack Simonetti, who teach strategic interviewing at the University of Michigan Business School.

Focus on Barriers to Success

The key, they stress, is to study the barriers to success in the job – and determine what are the traits that will help to overcome those obstacles.

A fabulous salesperson in collegial environments, for example, might be a flop in a fractious workplace, because he doesn't have the right skills. Similarly, a manager who excels in start-ups might be a real loser with an older company.

After defining goals for the job, barriers that need to be overcome, and the competencies required to succeed, employers must determine what questions they can ask applicants to determine their ability to do well in the post.

Too often, generic questions are asked. Those allow the interview subject to take control of the interview – an example is the question on where you want to be in five year's time -- leading it in directions helpful to him or her but not necessarily helping the employer to determine the likelihood of job success.

In other cases, the questions simply aren't useful in distinguishing between candidates. For example, they note that "often good and poor workers complete routine paperwork. Why focus on the ability to handle this type of situation, when the competency requirement does not separate the effective from the ineffective worker?"

Objective Standards

Besides figuring out suitable questions, the interviewers need to figure out the right answers to the questions – before they ask them. "Although it is necessary to compare each candidate to make a hiring decision, the best way to do so is to compare each candidate to an objective standard or answer determined by the interviewer prior to asking the questions," the authors state.

The standard helps the interviewers to focus their probing. It also identifies areas for development should the applicant be picked. "This can also lead to early coaching and initial training that addresses performance problems before they occur," the authors state.

Allow Enough Time

They also warn companies to make sure that they carve out sufficient time in interviews to actually determine the employees' strengths. Generally, too much time is taken expounding the virtues of the company or providing information about the job, so that in the standard one-hour job interview only about twenty minutes to half an hour is left for measuring the applicant's suitability. Yet often, five or more competencies are being judged in that time.

Worse, if several people interview the applicant, much of the stuff is repeated – except the different interviewers will have different takes on the company's virtues and the nature of the specific job, leaving an impression of an uncoordinated company with applicants. The authors advise scripting the job interview or interviews to limit repetition and focus the maximum attention on systematically judging the applicant's ability to perform well in the job.

The book turns a lot of conventional thinking on job interviewing upside down and offers a useful system to consider in improving your own efforts.

Strategic Interviewing
By Richard Camp, Mary Vielhaber, Jack Simonetti
Jossey-Bass, 181 page, $37.50