Are behavioral interviews pointless?
Many job applicants start looking at all the info online about how to prepare for a behavioral interview (there’s a lot of it) and get frustrated. They start thinking “Are behavioral interview questions a complete waste of time?”
Does this sound like you? Do you ever feel like behavioral interviews are pointless?
I understand your frustration. I can see why you would think, “I hate behavioral interview questions.”
Behavioral interviews aren’t pointless
They’re just flawed. I don’t think that behavioral interviews are pointless, but I’ve seen that the winner of the behavioral interview game is often the one who prepares harder, gets outside help, and is a naturally gifted communicator. This isn’t necessarily the person who would be best at the job.
The losers of the game are often engineer types, because they prefer to use a minimum of words to get their message across, and sales types, because they spin words without substance or structure.
The company can end up hiring the candidate who’s the best talker, not the best subject matter expert.
Of course, that doesn’t always happen. But I can see how you might feel like the system makes no sense, that behavioral interviews are a waste of time, once you start preparing for one of these interviews.
Companies use behavioral questions because they reveal your experience
Behavioral questions are the type of questions that ask you to recall and analyze an incident from your past professional life. They usually start with "Tell me about a time you had to ... "
If I wanted to find out whether a potential hire knew how to use Excel pivot tables, I would ask for a story about when they had used them. If you listening to five different stories about the same subject, it’s easy to tell who knows more about it.
Using Excel, not talking about using Excel
The reason behavioral interview questions don’t work
But, in my experience working with clients, I can see that it is often the best communicator who tells the best story, not the person who is the expert in the topic. If you want to hire someone to work with pivot tables, do you want them to be able to talk about pivot tables, or be able to use them?
That’s the flaw in the system. Behavioral interviews aren’t really testing your experience, they’re testing your ability to tell a story about a topic. I think this is what people mean when they say “I hate behavioral interviews.” They’re sensing the disconnect between what these interviews say they do and what they actually do.
I can write an amazing story about pretty much anything, but if I write a story about climbing Mount Everest it doesn’t mean I can actually climb a mountain. It means I’m a great fiction writer. Companies want to hire for X, but they’re actually hiring people who can talk about doing X.
This flaw has always been clear to me because my job is to coach job candidates to interview well. And also because I was an English major and then in corporate communications – talk about being someone who knows how to talk or write about something instead of doing it.
Interviewing is a game
The truth is that job interviews are a game. If you’re feeling frustrated enough to read this article, you’ve probably realized that already. The real question is, are you going to play the game?
You can win the game without liking it and even without wanting to play if you’re so good at your job that you don’t have to be a stellar communicator to be a desirable candidate. Some of us are that outstanding.
The rest of us need to accept the game, learn the rules, and play to win (if winning equals getting the job).
Motivational speech
I should write a paragraph about how to win at the behavioral interview game, but I’ve written thousands of paragraphs about behavioral interviews already. If you agree that they’re a game and you want to play, you can read some of my other articles or work with me.