Is Behavioral Interviewing Right for Your Business? Here's What to Consider

A good interview process is the key to finding the right hires for your small business. While many employers rely on traditional (and sometimes tired) interview questions, other formats like behavioral interviewing can yield more revealing responses from candidates.

Here’s how to use behavioral interviewing to find the right employees and make the best hiring decision the first time around.

What is behavioral interviewing?

A behavioral interview evaluates candidates through real-life situations they’ve experienced in past jobs, rather than assessing skills and professional background alone. Behavioral questions invite candidates to recall specific scenarios that reveal their thought processes, reasoning, and decision-making skills.

Rooted in the idea that past behaviors predict future performance, this approach uses open-ended questions about workplace situations to help employers anticipate how candidates may respond in similar situations once hired. A behavioral interview style can help weed out candidates who seem like a strong fit on paper but lack what the company needs in practice.

Advantages of using the behavioral interviewing method

From the candidates' perspective, behavioral interviewing offers a better understanding of the organization, the job description, and how they may fit into the role and overall company culture. It gives them the space to share more detailed responses that reflect their true working style, improving the overall experience and allowing for genuine connection.

For interviewers, behavioral interviewing helps employers better predict how candidates might respond to on-the-job challenges. It also helps mitigate bias during the interview process by focusing on behaviors rather than opinions and personal impressions.

In addition, this interview style helps prevent canned answers, as there’s less opportunity for candidates to rehearse responses in advance. Ultimately, this leads to a more natural, authentic, and revealing conversation.

How to conduct an interview for your business

Once you’ve identified suitable candidates and are ready to move forward with a behavioral interview, follow these steps to prepare for the conversation.

Prepare your questions ahead of time

Behavioral interviews only work if you ask the right questions. Here are some sample behavioral interview questions to help you get started:

• Tell me about a time when you disagreed with a co-worker about how to approach a work task or project. How did you move forward?
• Discuss a time when you missed a deadline or didn’t deliver satisfactory work. What did you learn, and how did that shape your approach going forward?
• Can you describe a time when you had an interpersonal issue with a co-worker? How did you overcome the situation, and how did it impact your work?

If you want to dig even deeper, consider asking industry-specific questions, which can yield even better results in the right setting. For example, for a customer-facing role, you might ask:

• Tell me about a time when you made a mistake while helping a customer. How did you handle it?
• Have you ever overpromised to a customer and had to course-correct? What did you do?
• Describe a time when you received customer feedback. How did you incorporate it?

[Read more: 8 Smart Questions to Ask When Interviewing Sales Candidates]

Conduct the interview effectively

Interviews can be stressful for candidates. Whether they’re nervous about making a good impression or worried about job security, it’s important to create a low-stress, comfortable environment. Start by providing clear information before the interview, such as parking instructions, timing, and check-in details. Once they arrive, greet them warmly and offer a beverage before you begin.

During the interview, be transparent about the role, your expectations, and what you can offer them. Review their materials beforehand, take notes as they speak, and ask appropriate follow-up questions to show candidates you're listening. The more comfortable candidates feel, the more authentically they’ll present themselves — and the more likely they’ll be to accept an offer if you extend one. 

Use the STAR system

The STAR method, invented by Development Dimensions International, encourages interviewees to reflect on and explain four things: the situation, task, action, and result. In an interview, this means prompting candidates to address the following elements:

• Situation/Task: Explain a situation or task where you needed to address a challenge or accomplish a specific goal.
• Action: Describe the steps you took and how you handled the situation.
• Result: Discuss what ultimately happened and what impact your actions had.

With STAR in mind, you can better understand the context, actions, and outcomes behind a candidate’s past experiences.

Know when to use assessments

Assessments can provide a standardized way for interviewers to test and compare candidates. For roles with specialized skills, administering work sample tests can help mitigate bias and enable fair comparisons among candidates by simulating actual workplace duties. Skills tests, which evaluate technical strengths or job-specific abilities, offer another opportunity for candidates to showcase their skills and prove they’re a good fit for the role.

However, not all qualities or soft skills can be demonstrated in a task-based assessment. Personality tests can provide a deeper look into the candidate to see how they’d fit with the existing workplace culture. Here are some personality tests worth exploring:

• The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This question-based test divides people into 16 categories based on tendencies like “extraversion” versus “introversion” and “thinking” versus “feeling,” helping identify how candidates work in groups.
• The DiSC Behavior Inventory. One of the oldest personality tests, dating back to 1928, DiSC sorts candidates into four primary types: dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness.
• The SHL Occupational Personality Questionnaire. With 104 questions, it measures 32 personality characteristics across three categories: relationships with people, thinking style and feelings, and emotions.
• The Predictive Index. This test includes two parts — a cognitive assessment and a behavioral assessment — to evaluate learning ability and key personality characteristics.
• The Caliper Profile. This test evaluates how a candidate’s personality aligns with different job-related behaviors and performance standards.
• The Hogan Personality Inventory. Comprising 206 true-or-false questions, this test explores how candidates would likely behave in different situations.
• Athena Assessment. In under 20 minutes, this test uses an advanced algorithm to evaluate a candidate's judgment.
• Berke Assessment. Customized to your role, this test measures seven personality traits and four cognitive traits to determine culture fit.

If you choose to administer a skills-based or personality test as part of your interview process, ensure it's relevant, easy to navigate, and engaging for the candidate, or you may risk discouraging strong applicants.

[Read more: 5 Alternatives to the Myers-Briggs Personality Test]

Develop structured scoring to compare candidates objectively

A structured rating system helps teams evaluate candidates fairly by using a standardized approach. This system can be as simple as having hiring managers score candidates' answers on a scale of 1 to 5 based on how strongly they demonstrate a particular skill. Or you can customize it to the level of detail your hiring process requires.

Structured scoring becomes even more critical when multiple interviewers are involved. Having a clear rubric ensures that interviewers evaluate using the same parameters, rather than relying on arbitrary impressions influenced by potential bias or personal preference. It also ensures that when interviewers notice behaviors or interpret moments differently, those observations are reflected consistently within the same scoring system.

Is behavioral interviewing right for your business?

The right interview approach depends entirely on your business, the role candidates are applying for, and the type of information you hope to learn from them. The behavioral approach, while valuable, is just one of many interview methods. Alternative approaches include:

• Structured interviews. Often considered the traditional format, structured interviews focus on a candidate’s résumé, experience, and strengths and weaknesses.
• Unstructured interviews. A free-flowing conversation with no standardized questions, this approach allows for open discussions but makes candidate comparisons harder without bias.
• Case interviews. Popular among tech companies and consulting firms, case interviews assess a candidate’s skills by asking them to solve business problems.
• Group interviews. Useful for roles like internships and sales jobs, group interviews evaluate how candidates interact and collaborate as they work through team challenges together.

Choosing the interview format that aligns with your goals ensures you gather the correct information from candidates to make an informed hiring decision.

Mistakes to avoid when conducting your interviews

Regardless of the format, job interviews can fall short if you’re not careful to avoid these common missteps:

• Staying surface-level. Don’t be afraid to dig deeper and ask candidates to elaborate on their answers. Probing further often reveals the context, motivations, and personality traits you might miss with a quick or surface-level response.
• Asking leading questions. Frame questions neutrally to avoid encouraging answers based on what candidates think you want to hear. Try breaking questions into parts, such as asking about a problematic situation first, then separately asking how they overcame it. This approach can help elicit a more genuine response rather than an overly polished tale of achievement.
• Teetering on legality with your questions. During an interview, casual conversation must stay professional and compliant. Avoid questions related to gender, age, race, religion, disability, or other protected characteristics. If a topic isn’t directly relevant to the job, it’s best to skip it to protect both your candidate experience and your business.

Keep these pitfalls in mind to ensure you conduct fair, compliant, and productive interviews.

Important things to do after the interview

How you handle the post-interview process will be just as important as what you do during it. Once the interview has ended, make an effort to debrief as a team and discuss your thoughts openly.

Aim to make a fair, evidence-based decision by evaluating the candidate’s skills and responses and determining how they would fit with both your work culture and the position. If you’ve found a suitable candidate you’d like to move forward with, check their references, if supplied.

The post-interview process shouldn’t be limited to a single interview. Ensure you have a standardized process in place following every interview. This guarantees all interviewees have the same experience, regardless of who conducts the interview or when it takes place.

[Read more: A Guide to Hiring Top Talent for Your Small Business]

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