Why is there behavioural questions in job interviews?

34 comments

1. If you don’t even know the behaviours of a good employee how can you ever become one?

   I appreciate most people lie to make themselves sound good though.

2. I’m not sure exactly what kind of questions you mean. Care to give an example?

   But remember that the purpose of a job interview is not just to determine if you have the *skills* for a given job, but also to determine if you are someone pleasant to work/interact with, who will fit in with the company’s current staff and so on.

3. I’ve only seen this when I was a teenager applying for low skilled jobs. Since anyone can apply for a low skilled job, and there’s nothing to really test them on, you gotta weed out the obvious crazies somehow

4. Behavior is a huge part of what makes someone good at their job.

5. Because hard skills can be taught, even to machines, however soft skills and character cannot.

6. They are important to judge how people will react to common situations in the workplace. Having an idea of how someone processes conflict, approaches teamwork, or other likely workplace events is important to know how they will fit into a workplace. Even if someone is lying on behavioral questions, understanding what they think is a good answer to them is, can be a helpful tool in gauging their ability to function in a workplace.

   For some jobs they aren’t necessary, like positions that are mostly remote individual work, but there are few of those.

7. Applied to Home Depot years ago.. There was no questions on qualifications just behavior based

8. So you don’t turn out to secretly be a little pr^^k

9. I’d focus on the grammar questions if I were you.

10. It isn’t about your answer, it’s about how you answer. Your reaction, whether or not you’re calm, if you’re clearly lying, etc.

11. Usually behavioral questions are more for jobs where skill isn’t as critical as the employee just not being a prick – retail, food service, most minimum wage jobs. Similarly for public facing jobs – receptionist, salesman, and the sort. When what matters is how you interact with people, they want to know what you are likely to do in those types of situations.

    It’s easier to start with someone who is kind and able to deal with stress appropriately and teach them the skills needed for the job, then to hire someone who has all the skill but is a prick/horrible to work with.

12. It allow the employer to avoid lawsuit by saying: Personality did not match with what they wanted.

    This way they don’t need to provide reason for rejecting people.

    Truth is once you get to the interview, you have what is required to work there.

    But in the interview, they will try to figure out the following 3 things.

    1. Do you intend to stay long term or are you in there for experience before leaving elsewhere? (formation is a high cost for many firm)
    2. Are you a fast, proactive learner?
    3. Are you willing to do overtime for the company?

    They don’t really care about the rest, but they cannot directly tell you: You seem to value your offtime so we won’t hire you. They need a reason to refuse hiring you.

13. Cause they want to weed out the psychopaths?

14. I am really curious what you mean. In the US, there are pretty specific areas that you can ask about, and ones that you cannot. That is why employers ask things like “tell me about yourself” versus prodding into areas that they cannot. You are free to say whatever you want, but they cannot ask whatever they want.

15. In a word – fit. Will you fit with the people already there or will you be a disruptive person. As a manager that has a team working together, are you going to be right team player or something else.

16. They want to know how you’ll behave/interact with the team

17. I want to know if the person will be a good fit and if they can think on their feet.

    I don’t care if the answer is bullshit. In fact, I’ll know it’s bullshit and made up on the spot. I can also read body language.

    At the end of the day what it shows is intent. If the bullshit answer is still a good answer, i can be fairly sure that’s what you would do if said situation came up.

    I’ve had to flunk out applicants because they were honest and said “I don’t know what I would do in that situation” even after I asked them to think about how they would handle it. All of my questions are based on things that do come up in a typical day or week, they’re not hypothetical, so being able to make at least an attempt is preferred.

18. A bad attitude employee can bring the whole team down and potentially cost the business money.

    A company would like to weed these people out as much as possible, and behavior questions are one way to do it.

19. I got asked this only once and it was for low skilled job.

20. Why wouldn’t there be? It’s not just about doing the job, but how you interact with your co-workers/customers/vendors, etc.

21. Not the best barometer to measure the ability, but it is a measure to use?

    Idk in my time in interviews, it’s still difficult to choose who would be successful and who isn’t. I think it’s just another way to hopefully narrow down the selection

22. The typical Boeing interview is 1 hour long, and they must first ask the candidate 3 “structured interview” questions. They can only ask job-related technical questions in the remaining time. It’s not a good way to find people with good technical skills, but does help filter out the jerks and poor communicators.

23. If you’re talking about the…

    “Tell me about a time you had to deal with an angry coworker?” kinda questions, believe it or not some people answer those wrong.

    and by wrong I mean “There was this guy Jim that was all upset and I told him to fuck off!”

24. 1. To get an idea how you interact with others.

    2. To get an idea of how you handle stressful situations.

    3. To build a profile to provide to your manager to help them properly manage you according to your behaviors and personality (this is the biggest one).

    4. In some industries, there are regulatory pressures behind these things.

    Different organizations put differing amounts of weight behind this sort of thing; some just do it to “check the box” from an HR/regulatory standpoint, while others elevate the DISC Assessment to the level of gospel and everything in-between.

    As a manager, I don’t put too much weight in them, but they can provide useful information that help me adjust my management style for different people. The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that the people who take issue with behavioral assessments tend to not play well with others.

25. “Is it ever OK to take home office supplies?”

    They’re basically testing your intelligence. Are you smart enough to not answer that honestly? Like who would think twice about taking home some pens or something like that?

26. To sum it up, so they dont hire a cunt.

27. I haven’t had anything but competency based interviews in decades. What do you mean by behavioural questions?

    Edit: okay, so you mean competency based questions. The point is to see what you’re good at.

    The old fashioned questions didn’t actually reveal anything useful, so they went the way of the dodo years ago.

28. Obviously you can just lie but I think it’s a way of weeding out people who don’t even know how an employee SHOULD behave.

29. Its easy to tell if someone can think on their feet and solve a problem through them.

    Even telling a story about it you can pick up on just how quick someone is intellectually.

30. Behavioral information would be covered by hipaa, which only means that you’re free to disclose it if you want to, but a medical professional with your information is not free to disclose it.

    And more to the point, the Americans with Disabilities Act makes it illegal for an employer to ask about this: “An applicant is not required to disclose any medical conditions during an interview, even if asked. In fact, under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), employers are prohibited from asking questions about physical and mental illnesses during job interviews.”

    https://resources.workable.com/career-center/should-you-disclose-a-mental-illness-in-a-job-interview/#:~:text=An%20applicant%20is%20not%20required,mental%20illnesses%20during%20job%20interviews.

31. we got a whole hour to fill. chill out!

    also, some of the best technical people I’ve ever hired are insufferable assholes. I’m trying not to do that again.

32. Those are probably some of the most relevant and practical questions

33. I used to think this way.

    Now after 15 years of the wildest shit I have seen happen in professional settings, I wish they’d ask more and really probe.

34. To justify corporate HR jobs