As a recruiter, I’m somewhat skeptical about behavioral interviewing as the magic bullet for predicting candidate success based solely on past experience. Don’t people change, or at least evolve over time? And is the process inherently skewed against those whose careers are less linear progressions than winding roadmaps?
One answer may be that linear achievers show their stripes early on. Take Jeff Zucker, who this month was named president and chief executive of NBC Universal, crowning a 20-year career with NBC starting as a researcher for the Seoul Olympics.
According to the school of behavioral interviewing, we would do well to talk with Mr. Zucker’s earliest NBC bosses. A New York Times piece noted that he “so impressed those for whom he wrote copy, including the sports announcer Bob Costas and the “Today” anchor Jane Pauley, that he was offered a part-time job on “Today.”
We could dig back to Mr. Zucker’s college career as editor of The Crimson at Harvard, where a fellow editor describes his reputation for “unrelenting competitiveness.” For that matter, we could go back to the glory days of high school sports, where a former coach recalls that after a successful run on the varsity tennis team he took on a sport he had not played before – varsity badminton – and immediately set his sights on becoming number one. As the coach recalled for the Times, “In hindsight, it’s exactly what his personality is now.”
Maybe the key word here is hindsight. When you construct a story backwards – with the advantage of knowing how it all turned out – you can build a retrospective case for almost anything. If Mr. Zucker had been canned this week instead of promoted, would his early mentors recall different aspects of his make-up or behaviors?
In fairness, Mr. Zucker was lauded by his current bosses specifically for his leadership during the network’s recent cold spell. Yet he has always operated within the framework of being a presumed winner.
This afternoon, I thought of Mr. Zucker as I de-briefed with a candidate after a highly structured behavioral interview with one of our clients. This individual was a Phi Beta Kappa, the student viewed by her college cohorts as most likely to succeed and sure enough, someone who blazed a trail in her earliest career roles. For a position that required the identical attributes that so far had propelled her to success, it would be hard to picture her not continuing on this trajectory.
If we’re really honest, behavioral interviewing is more confirmatory for linear achievers. There may be cultural or temperamental disconnects that ultimately block a hire but these are better teased out through other kinds of assessments in my opinion.
Behavioral interviewing uses its real muscle in cases that aren’t so clear cut, the ones where you’re trying to tell whether the way an individual handled and grew from a setback – or two – is predictive of true genius or disaster waiting to happen.
By Janet Long, founder and president of Integrity Search, Inc
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