Kairospl

April 27, 2010

I am holding a public workshop on “Competency-Based Behavioural Interview at the Evergreen Laurel Hotel, Penang from May 19-20, 2010. For more details, will you please contact me at: ckkhoo@kairospl.com?

Below is an article by Martin Haworth (business and management coach) on Competency-Based Behavioural Interviewing:

A common type of job interview nowadays is the behavioral interview or behavioral event interview. This type of interview is also referred to as a ‘competency based interview’ and is based on the assumption that a job candidate’s previous behaviors at work are the best indicators of future performance. In behavioral interviews, the interviewer asks candidates to recall specific instances where the candidate was faced with a set of circumstances, and asks them to describe how they reacted.

Some typical behavioral interview questions that you might expect to hear: 

• “Tell me about a project you worked on where the requirements changed half way through. What did you do to keep on track?”
• “Tell me about a specific instance when you took the lead role on a project. What did you do?”
• “Describe the worst project you worked on and how you maintained your discipline.”
• “Describe a time you had to work with someone you didn’t get on with.”
• “Tell me about a time when you had to make an unpopular decision, and how you managed to make it work.”
• “Give us an example of something you have done that made an improvement in the workplace.”
• “What happened the last time you were late meeting a deadline?”

Because a bad hiring decision can be extremely expensive for any business in terms of having to re-hire, wasted training costs and the effects on other employees, selection techniques of this nature, using a behavioral interview have a better track record of identifying the best candidate than the traditional interview everyone is familiar with.

Competency based interviews are the same as a behavioral interview and are intended to get the best from you, the candidate, whilst also fulfilling the needs of the organisation to get the very best person for the job. There are some easy steps to make the most of yourself and have a much better chance of success. 

• Prepare well, but keep it sensible
  As long as you know the job you are going for, ask for details of what you will be measured against. Ask for a set of competencies. Ask for a job description. This sets you up to succeed, not just because you are better informed, but also because you have asked – which will impress the decision-makers, before you even get there!
• Get Creative
  Here is the time to use your own experiences to create ‘stories’ which you can use in the actual interview. These ‘stories’ are real scenarios that you have been a part of, which over a period of days and weeks beforehand, you write up. Maybe you will have 20+ initial ideas.
• Leverage!
  Take the very best scenarios and write them out, bullet points first. Then flesh them out, whilst referring carefully to the competencies you’ve been given. It is amazing how you can ‘tune-in’ your scenario to include many, if not all of the competencies. And if you can’t fit them all in, there will be a use for them – later!
• Practice
  By reading through your scenarios (and by now you should not have more than six or seven) you will familiarise yourself with the contents, so well, that they will become second nature – even in the scary experience of a behavioral interview.
• In the InterviewThere are some tactics in here too!
  • Using your scenarios make just three key points about what you’ve been asked. Make them relevant and the right ‘weight’. Not too long or too short.
  • After that, leave space for them to ask more – that’s what they are listening for.
  • Say ‘I’ a lot – they want to know what your personal involvement and experience was, not ‘the team’ or ‘they’.
  • Have fun – whilst not contrived, smile and make some simple jokes, if you feel comfortable with that – they want to employ happy as well as capable people.
  • Can’t answer? That’s fine. Make sure that you reflect on your shortcomings by saying things like, ‘It’s one of the first things I want to develop in my next job – if you did your stuff on your scenarios and your competencies well enough, you will have covered 90% of the bases well and you’ll be forgiven for not being ‘perfect’. If you are really stumped – say so!
  • Ask questions – relevant, about their culture, focus on developing you, opportunities – the positive ‘peopley’ things (remember it’s your chance to see if you want to work with them!).
  • Also ask about current issues they may be facing – you did do your homework on them, didn’t you?
• Strong Ending!
  Keep the whole thing light, even as you leave at the end. Have a conversation in general terms – about anything! Do make sure that you ask them some things that are about them – they will love it if you ask them some open (what, how, when, where, who) general questions about your new job! About something nice in the building or their clothes – take as it comes and do what feels comfortable!

Remember that competencies are there to help you and they provide a guide-map for your competency based interview success!

April 05, 2010

Wisdom has a lot to do with avoiding decisions that look attractive, but will turn out badly. If you have been out late at a party and on the way home your friend says, “I know where we can still get one more drink!” well, that sure sounds attractive but the wise decision is to refrain.

Dr. Sydney Finkelstein, lead author of Think Again: Why good leaders make bad decisions and how to keep it from happening to you is interested in how we can figure out which decisions are at risk of being the really bad ones. If we understand the psychological processes that guide decision making, and look at real examples of where decisions have gone bad, then we can identify red flags to watch for. These red flags are the banners of wisdom.

How Humans Make Decisions

As we get into the topic of decision making we once again have to kill off the rational choice model beloved by economists. Wise management thinkers like Henry Mintzberg, James March and Karl Weick have long argued that the rational choice model doesn’t reflect reality. It’s important to understand the major mechanisms that underlie real decision making.

Finkelstein explains, “We don’t list a bunch of alternatives, identify the pros and cons, weight them and then identify the best ones. That hardly ever happens in real life. What we do is make one plan at a time – usually without discussion, perhaps even without conscious awareness that we are making a decision. We just take the first reasonable option and do it until it clearly isn’t working”

“If a marketing manager has to place ads in some media, she might well just place internet banner ads because that is what she did last time and it worked well, or she read something about it and it seemed reasonable, or it she felt it was the cool thing to do,” says Finkelstein. “She’ll keep doing it until it clearly is not working.”

Young and not yet wise MBAs critique this kind of ‘irrational’ behaviour but humans operate the way we do for a reason.

“We can’t take forever to make decisions,” says Finkelstein, “Imagine if we had to debate the pros and cons of everything. The one plan at a time model works pretty well—at least it does most of time.”

It’s that last phrase “most of the time” that chills the blood because just one really big mistake can be enough to kill a company.

“There’s another thing I want you to understand about the brain,” Finkelstein continues. “Anytime we do anything we file it away and it’s tagged with a memory of success or failure. I call it emotional tagging. When faced with a situation we almost always without thinking make our decision based on those emotional tags.”

Again this makes sense, of course we’ll do what worked for us in the past: it’s the “without thinking” part that you need to watch out for.

“If you look at RBS (the Royal Bank of Scotland)—which is such a disaster that they may be taken over by the British government—their really bad decision was the acquisition of ABN Amro. RBS had made previous acquisitions which had gone well and had got accolades in the press for their great work. So they went out of their way to repeat that experience and chased down the ABN Amro acquisition without proper caution.”

If only RBS had noted some kind of red flag which warned them that their decision making process was at risk of making a serious error then they might has escaped their nasty fate.

(to be continued)

Source: David Creelman

NOTE: Why not attend the “Managing & Making Decisions” workshop to be held from April 28-29, 2010 at the G-Hotel, Penang to learn more? You can download the brochure from this website.