By Amit Sharma

 

Have you ever been in an interview panel for interviewing an applicant with some prior work experience? If you have, then you realize how different (and sometimes difficult) is it to evaluate an experienced candidate and decide if he/she is the right person for the job. 

 

Not all of us who sit in the interview panel are trained HR Professionals. So, the basic assumptions while forming an interview panel is that the department heads try to find out if the candidate has the required job knowledge and the HR professional look into the other soft skills or key competencies. And in order to determine the job knowledge and skills we normally try to fire hypothetical questions along with other questions based on applicant’s CV (biographical questions). 

 

Let’s see how a typical traditional interviewers frame questions that is assumed to identify the level of the competencies in the incumbent. The competency or skill that is being evaluated is ‘People Management’. 

 

The interview is conducted for the Branch Manager of a Bank. 

• How will you deal with a difficult staff having some behavioral problem? 

• How will you convince a valuable customer who is withdrawing all him money from the Bank just because one of your front line staff didn’t give him enough respect while conducting a transaction? 

• What will you do if you have a very good performer who wants to move to another bank in pursuit of better opportunity? 

 

This is snapshot of interview 1.0 or a typical traditional interview. 

 

Such hypothetical questions normally keep the interviewee in difficult positions and to some extend he/she may honestly reply what they would likely do. However, smart people with good communication skills are more likely to be selected if we only use such situational questions and that they might not always be the people we want for the job. A good interviewee can easily prepare such interviews and create a ‘best’ situation. Then what else can be done to avoid people who are good communicator but may not necessarily meet our expectation in terms of knowledge and competencies? 

 

The answer to this problem is interview 2.0 or ‘Criteria Based Interviewing’ or CBI in short. This technique is definitely a step ahead of traditional interviewing techniques and will take us to the next level in selection process if carefully used. 

 

What is it that makes CBI a more reliable interviewing technique in order to select a better candidate? Let us first go back to the same interview scenario and ask some CBI questions. 

 

Interviewer: Did you ever work in a diverse team? Or did you work in a team where some of the members were always different than what you had initially thought of? 

Applicant: Yes. I have. The most recent one included a very different and difficult guy. 

Interviewer: What was the problem? What did you do? ......... 

Applicant: I………….. 

Interviewer: How? When? ……(more follow up questions) 

 

So, the main idea behind the CBI is that it assumes 

a. That it would be difficult for applicant to ‘create stories’ when they share experience from the past and interviewer digs down further through follow up questions. 

b. Past behavior normally predicts what he/ she will do in future if similar situation arises. 

 

The principle of the CBI is that one’s past behavior and performance is the best indicator of their future behavior and performance. If we implement CBI, the interviewer will explore the past and will guide the interviewee to speak his/her mind by explaining what they did in the past. 

 

The crucial preparations that need to be done before the interview is to identify which competencies are key to the job. And during the interview process the main task for interviewer is to listen actively and ask follow up questions so that the interviewee doesn’t get time to create ‘best’ stories. 

 

Let us give this a try and see how well it works.

 

(Writer is head of HR at Janata Bank Nepal)