What is behavioural interviewing?

In a nutshell if you are doing any kind of interviewing then tips, skills, questions and techniques are an important skill to acquire.
Behavioural Interviewing is asking a question about a candidate's experience.

You do this to ascertain if the way they behaved in a situation is what you want for your organisation or for the job.

Unlike the warning on many financial products...
Behaviour in the candidate's past experience is a good guide for future performance.

An example:
You decide that you require someone to frequently work on their own unsupervised.

Stage One:

To name the behaviour.
Behaviour name:   Working alone

Stage Two:

To define 'working alone' into how this person needs to behave in a job.
Behaviours:

• Be very clear about their own working priorities,
• Able to make decisions without reference to anyone else.

Stage Three:

To design behavioural questions to obtain evidence from the candidate.

Suggested Behavioural questions for 'Working Alone':
1.   Can you think of a time recently when you needed to ask someone else's advice before you could complete a piece of work?
2.   Describe the most important decision you have made recently.
3.   Talk me through a project which you managed yourself over the past 12 months.
4.   Can you think of a time when you struggled with a decision and needed someone else's help?
5.   Have you ever forgotten to do something for someone?
6.   Describe a deadline you have missed recently.
7.   Can you think of a day when you already had a lot to do, yet you were asked to do something else?
 Tell me about it ...

In summary

1. Be clear what behaviour you need evidence of
2. Be clear how you would know that it was being demonstrated
3. Build questions that force the candidate to give examples of where they used this behaviour previously
4. Ask the questions and reflect on if the candidate can behave in that way
5. Note that down and assess each candidate on that evidence


If you want  us to give you a hand to constuct your first set of interview questions and process then email us at
info@rainmaker-coaching.co.uk and we'll give you a couple of ideas for free...