Candidate Preparation

Creating and Customizing Behavioral Questions

So how do you create great behavioral interview questions to help you assess and select the right candidate? To help you get started, we have attached a handbook of behavioral interview questions for your convenience. This handbook contains behavioral questions to assess the most common job required competencies like problem solving, communication, conflict resolution and so forth. However, if you want to get the most out of your questions, you must customize the questions for your specific job order and client. So how you customize and target your behavioral questions? Well start with your job description and posting.

“The answer you get depends on the question you ask”

Simply refer to the job description that you’ve already created. Based on the prioritized job and hiring requirements, create your customized behavioral question. I will illustrate with an example below of just how easy it is to create your own customized behavioral interview questions. The assumption here is that you have already created an up-to-date and prioritized job description and posting.

Example:

Suppose your a client asked you to hire an accountant. Based on your discussions with the hiring manager and your analysis of the job, you have identified that the main responsibility is to “perform accounts reconciliation” and the main soft skill are “detail orientation, analytical and problem solving”.

Step 1: Identify a prioritized responsibility from the job posting:

“Perform accounts reconciliation to the general ledger… reconciling various balance sheet accounts to subsystems”

Step 2: Identify a prioritized soft skill identified on job posting:

“Detailed oriented, analytical and proven problem solver”

Step 3:

Find an appropriate behavioral question to assess the competency of problem solving and detailed orientation. You may use one of your own or one outlined in our behavioral questions manual.

“Tell me about a time when you identified a problem before anyone else or your superiors?”

Step 4:

Drawing on your job documents, blend or “contextualize” your behavioral question with your prioritized job function and requirements.

“When reconciling various balance sheet accounts to subsystems: Tell me about a time when you noticed a source of potential loss for a company or identified an undetected financial error before anyone else. What did you do about it?”

You can see that the question created above, assesses the most important competency as identified by the hiring manager (detail orientation, problem solving) through the most important job responsibility again as identified by the hiring manager (accounts reconciliation). By following these steps when creating your job interview questions, you ensure you ask the right question to get the right answer to find the right candidate. And best of all, you use your time wisely by asking the most important questions.

___________________________________________________________________________

EmployPrep software allows you to quickly create a resource page for your candidates to match your website look and feel. Click on continue in demo below to find out how EmployPrep can help you.

No related posts.