High-Impact Interview Questions: 701 Behavior-Based Questions to Find the Right Person for Every Job - Softcover

Hoevemeyer, Victoria

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814473016 ISBN 13: 9780814473016

Publisher: AMACOM, 2005

Synopsis

"Tell me about a time...." The words evoke a child's fairy-tale innocence. Yet when used by an interviewer, they can help to determine the suitability of a job candidate by eliciting real-world examples of behaviors and experience that can save you and your organization from making a bad hiring decision. High-Impact Interview Questions shows you how to use competency-based behavioral interviewing methods that will uncover truly relevant and useful information. By having applicants describe specific situations from their own experience during previous jobs (rather than asking them hypothetical questions about "what would you do if..."), you'll be able to identify specific strengths and weaknesses that will tell you if you've found the right person for the job. But developing such behavior-based questions can be time-consuming and difficult. High-Impact Interview Questions saves you both time and effort. The book contains 701 questions you'll be able to use or adapt for your own needs, matched to 62 in-demand skills such as customer focus, motivation, initiative, adaptability, teamwork, and more. It allows you to move immediately to the particular skills you want to measure, and quickly find just the right tough but necessary questions to ask during an interview. Asking behavior-based questions is by far the best way to discover crucial details about job candidates. High-Impact Interview Questions gives you the tools and guidance you need to gather this important information before you hire.

About this title

Review

Like many of the offerings from Amacom, the publishing arm of the American Management Association, High-Impact Interview Questions: 701 Behavior-based Questions to Find the Right Person for Every Job has a no-nonsense, practical bent. Focused on both the art and the science of effective job interviews, it's clearly intended as a manual for everyday use by hiring managers and human-resource professionals across a wide range of organizations. Author Victoria Hoevemeyer has worked for over 20 years in organizational development and leadership coaching from her home base of Illinois, and her expertise shows through in the direct, straightforward tone suffusing this book.

If the interactions between job seekers and job interviewers can resemble a cat-and-mouse game, with each group trying to outwit and to stay one step ahead of the other, High-Impact Interview Questions serves as recruiters' foil to the books popular with candidates, such as How Would You Move Mt. Fuji? and Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions . It opens by describing three different kinds of questions which dominate most modern job interviews: conventional questions ("What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?"), situational questions ("How would you handle a crisis in which your boss asked you to do something that you considered unethical?"), and brainteaser questions ("Why are manhole covers round?"), and analyzes the shortcomings of each approach. These techniques for sorting good job candidates from bad are fundamentally flawed, according to Hoevemeyer, because they are far too predictable and artificial, and don't illuminate the qualities that actually make a difference to new employees' success.

Instead, Hoevemeyer advances a philosophy which she terms "Competency-Based Behavioral Interviewing" (CBBI). Her basic premise is that past performance is the best predictor of future performance, and that the more recent a particular behavior, the stronger of a predictor it will be. If you accept those assumptions, then much of what follows in the book's explanations of CBBI are highly logical.

The most valuable part of High-Impact Interview Questions is its extensive catalog of sample interview questions, grouped according to the underlying quality which they're meant to uncover. After introducing CBBI and showing how it ties specific and precise interview questions back to the functional competencies job seekers will need in a particular position, the book provides a very handy guide to sample questions which any interviewer can use. Interested in a candidate's decision-making ability? Try "Describe a time you had to make a quick decision with incomplete information?" How about attention to detail? For that, the book prescribes queries like, "Tell me about a time when you caught an error that others had missed."

Esoteric philosophical tome, this isn't. But for those job interviewers who believe in competency-based questions and want an efficient guide to learning about interviewees' true potential, this book is a worthwhile read. --Peter Han

About the Author

Victoria A. Hoevemeyer has more than 20 years' experience as a HR leader, with a focus in learning and development and organizational development. She has helped many organizations make the conversion from traditional to behavior-based interviewing. She lives in Palatine, Illinois.

Edition details

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0814473016
• ISBN 13: 9780814473016
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 192