Here are my quick answers regarding the impact Behavioral Event Interviewing (BEI) has on improving quality of hire:

1. It helps if you narrowly define quality of hire as someone who possesses all of the skills and experience requirements listed on the job description.
2. It doesn’t help much if you define quality of hire as someone who consistently produces high-quality work, who works well with comparable teams, works extremely well with the hiring manager, is highly motivated to do the work required, and fits like a glove with your culture.
3. It definitely helps prevents hiring mistakes by minimizing emotionally-based errors.
4. While some type of structured interview process is necessary, it’s definitely not sufficient in terms of improving quality of hire. You need better sourcing and strong recruiters to see more top people before you can maximize quality of hire. In fact, BEI might exclude and/or turn off some of the best people, causing a decline in quality of hire.
5. There are probably other ways to increase assessment accuracy that have not been explored by the academics to the degree necessary.
6. If managers don’t use it, it doesn’t really matter.

Admittedly, I have a negative BEI bias, but I also totally support a fully-structured behavioral-like interview coupled with validated assessments as an essential component of any company’s end-to-end hiring process. I just don’t particularly think the basic out-of-the-box BEI solution is the right way to go. Part of my objection has to do with the necessary-but-not-sufficient problem mentioned above. I’m also concerned that it doesn’t do a good job of differentiating among the fully-qualified who would best fit into the culture and actual job situation (e.g., manager, task, team). It’s also difficult to use in the field. That’s why so many managers avoid it.

Over a 25-year period consisting of 5,000 interviews and 500 hires, I developed a work-around to all of these challenges. I called the process Performance-based Hiring and wrote about it in my book, Hire With Your Head (Wiley, 2007), now in its third-edition. Performance-based Hiring was not developed to compete with BEI, but rather to minimize hiring mistakes while maximizing the number of fully-qualified and high-performing candidates to choose from. Since we were in the business of placing people for a fee, we had other challenges to consider, too. Specifically:

1. We provided a one-year guarantee, so we had to be accurate more than 90% of the time.
2. We didn’t want to reduce our search fees, so we needed to produce top people.
3. We never wanted to negotiate the offer based on compensation, since this was always a deal breaker. So we modified the questioning to look for career gaps in the candidate’s background. Collectively, these gaps represented a career move for the candidates. As a result, the best candidates then went out of their way to convince us why they were worthy, taking compensation off the table. This could never happen using BEI. In fact, BEI might determine these candidates were under-qualified.
4. The traditional job description had to be dramatically altered, since great people don’t look at a list of skills, experiences, and responsibilities as a career move.

With these objectives and restraints in mind, here’s the comparison of BEI to Performance-based Hiring from an end-to-end perspective:

There are a lot of “not addressed” aspects under the BEI column. Assuming what’s left represents a valid comparison, this table alone tells the tale – BEI is a good process for eliminating mistakes, but not the best process for determining job fit and intrinsic motivation to do the work. Worse, it’s only a step in the hiring process, not a complete hiring process. Even worse, it might eliminate the best people before they even enter into the funnel. This is called sub-optimization and is a common problem when a sub-system is designed without consideration to the needs of the larger system. As a result, great people might be excluded who possess a slightly different mix of skills. Fast-track people would certainly be excluded since they have fewer of the skills and years required. And some of the best people with all of the qualifications might exclude themselves, since they don’t normally want to do same things again, or they’re turned off by the mechanical nature of the traditional BEI process.

If all this makes sense, we’ve made it super easy to learn more and test some of the comparisons for yourself. Here’s how:

1. Audit Module 1 of Recruiter Boot Camp Online on March 5^th. During this module we show how to prepare Performance Profiles as well as provide a quick overview of the process. We need to restrict this to managers, but This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it if you’d like to audit the course and tell us a little about your recruiting team.
2. Buy a copy of my book, Hire With Your Head. Performance-based Hiring is covered from A to Z. In addition, the book includes a validation report and a whitepaper from a top labor attorney describing the legal compliance issues.
3. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . As long as the group involved is big enough, we’re happy to walk you through a demonstration of converting a job description into a Performance Profile.
4. Here are a few podcasts that describe Performance-based Hiring, plus the location of the Sourcing Sweet Spot. This is the place where all of the greatest people hang out. Please don’t pass this link around, though – it’s very special.
5. Try using the One-question Performance-based Interview to measure drive and competency to do the work. This will give you a sense of how multiple behaviors can be extracted from one core question.
6. Join our Recruiter’s Wall network. You’ll have instant access to our recent webinars and be able to chime in on the discussions.

So while I advocate a structured behavioral interviewing and assessment process, I’m not convinced that what the major vendors offer are the best solutions. For one thing, they’re too cumbersome, so few hiring managers use them. Worse, they only cover a narrow aspect of the end-to-end hiring process. As a result of this narrow focus, the process can inadvertently exclude the best people you want to hire before they’re ever interviewed. While Performance-based Hiring certainly isn’t the only process out there, it does work exactly as described.

But check this last hyperbolic point out for yourself. There’s enough stuff available online including testimonials, case studies, and whitepapers that you could conduct your next search using the Performance-based Hiring principles on your own, just to see how it works. You just might discover that you can maximize the accuracy of your assessments and quality of hire at the same time.