Shyamal Majumdar: Using the past to predict the future

THE HUMAN FACTOR

A CEO of an Indian company hired a recruitment consultant to help select his personal assistant. To the three candidates in the final list, the consultant "" a psychologist by training "" asked the same question: what did you do when your boss came late to office?

"Called on his mobile," said the first girl. "Always waited for him as I didn't want to disturb him," said the second. The third girl's answer was more elaborate: "Waited for some time before calling on his residence number, and then on his mobile."

While the CEO was confused, the psychologist looked delighted and said: "We have three types of thought processes to choose from in this case. One is the obvious type, the other is the deferential type and the third is the cautious type. Which one do you prefer?"

"The one with the longest legs," the CEO said before walking out in disgust. A month after this happened, the CEO says he was keen to implement an out-of-the-box recruitment strategy like the behavioural interview process made famous by companies like Accenture, AT&T and Microsoft.

But he has now decided to stick to the more traditional forms of interviews as the experience with the behavioural one hasn't been too fruitful.

His reasoning goes like this: most HR professionals in India lack the finesse or intellectual capabilities required to conduct or draw the right conclusions from behavioural interviews; clever candidates can easily concoct responses, which means great story-tellers would have an edge over others; and third, such interviews don't reveal how a person would consistently perform because they assume that the past offers the best guide to the future.

Result: the job goes to smart alecs who can play-act to make a better impression. The candidates who would actually perform well on the job are often left out.

HR consultants, however, do not quite agree with him. Once used to assess only senior executives, behavioural interviews are fast catching up in India to evaluate candidates at all levels and across a range of industries.

"Using it is as good as guaranteeing that the best people will be hired for the job. The problem in the CEO's case may have been due to faulty implementation techniques but there is nothing wrong with behavioural interviews per se," they say..

The behavioural interview is essentially a technique in which the interviewer asks how the candidate behaved in real-life situations that have some relevance to the job being applied for.

While traditional interviews will begin with "tell me about yourself," behavioural interviews will start with phrases like, "tell me about a time when," or "can you give me an example of".

When an interviewer asks such questions, he or she is listening for examples of how candidates handled situations similar to the ones they may handle for this company.

The premise behind such an interviewing technique is that the most accurate predictor of future performance is past performance in similar situations.

Behavioural interviewing is said to be 55 per cent predictive of future on-the-job behaviour, while traditional interviewing is only 10 percent predictive. After all, if you didit somewhere else yesterday, you can do it for this company tomorrow.

HR professionals in large Indian companies say that to avoid the kind of pitfalls the CEO faced, recruitment managers are trained extensively to objectively collect and evaluate information, and work from a profile of desired behaviours that are needed for success on the job.

For instance, instead of asking a candidate how he/ she would behave in a particular situation, the interviewer will ask how he/ she actually behaved. As a result, the reliability and validity of interviews have improved markedly.

In any case, selecting people for a job will always be fraught with uncertainties. The idea is to use behavioural interviews to swing the odds in your favour.

In a behavioural interview, for instance, it's much more difficult to give fake responses. When the candidate starts telling a story, the interviewer typically greets him with a barrage of probing questions like "tell me more about your meeting with that person" and so on.

Moreover, such interviews are designed to minimise personal impressions that might cloud the hiring process. By focusing on the applicant's actions and behaviours, rather than subjective impressions that can sometimes be misleading, interviewers can take more accurate hiring decisions.

HR consultants say conventional interviews with dinosaur questions such as what is your greatest strength, why would you like to join your company and so on, often make it easier for candidates to bluff their way through.

The best solution is to have a mix of both conventional as well as behavioural interviews.