Behavioral questions are a standard part of the interview process. Pretty much anyone who goes in for an interview expects to be asked questions like “How do you handle challenges?”, “Tell me about a time you made a mistake,” or “Have you ever had to stand up to authority in the workplace?” These sorts of questions are a good way to get a sense of how a person might handle common workplace situations, but the answers can be somewhat unreliable.
The problem is that these questions are used so often that they are expected. Smart candidates come in with their answers ready to go for standard behavioral questions. As a result, the answers are often of little use for predicting how a person would actually act in a given situation.
Behavioral interviewing isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s an incomplete method for assessing a potential employee. That’s why our team uses pre-hire assessments alongside interviews to help clients get a holistic view of potential hires. Employee assessments provide a full view of a person’s values, core beliefs, and personal characteristics. These are things you can’t determine fully through an interview.
Identify Fit by Discovering Hidden Strengths and Vulnerabilities
Beyond a person’s skills and their past experiences, employee assessments provide information about a person’s strengths and vulnerabilities. Once these traits are identified, an employer can use targeted behavioral questions in a follow-up interview to determine whether an identified vulnerability is significant enough to keep the person from doing the job in question well.
With a pre-hire assessment in hand, our team can even help employers decide which behavioral questions to ask in order to determine whether a person will be a good fit with their organizations.
Pre-hire assessments combined with targeted behavioral questioning can significantly reduce the number of bad hires in any company, helping businesses keep morale high, maintain strong company culture, and thereby improve the bottom line. With the cost of bad hires as significant as they are – reaching into the millions every year — why not use every resource available to you to ensure that the people you bring onto your team are the best people for your business?
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