We're in the process of interviewing candidates for a few technology licensing manager positions, and the method of interviewing always comes up. After this year's Super Bowl, one of the first things I think of when I start preparing to do an interview is this Tide coffee stain commercial:

While we might open with a question for a candidate to tell us about themselves, most of our candidates are asked better questions than in the commercial. However, it can be a real challenge to figure out whether a person would fit well into the organization. For most positions, a candidate will spend an entire day or more with us in interviews with the entire staff and other stakeholders in our department. In the course of that much time, usually you find out what a person is like. The person who talked about skinny dipping in his backyard? Yeah, probably would not have come out in a half-day interview, but it did come out over dinner conversation.

By having these extended interviews, we are usually able to get at the real personality of a person and how they might fit into our department. But maybe there are better phone interview questions that can be asked to try to weed out these poor behaviors before they get in front of the entire group. The best method for this is called behavioral interviewing. The idea behind behavioral interviewing is that past performance and past actions are the best predictors of future performance. In traditional interviewing, the interviewee actually has a lot of control as the questions most interviewers ask are pretty open-ended and move from subject to subject. Behavioral interviewing has the interviewer asking an open-ended question and then more probing questions to get at the details of the answer in order to learn something about the interview subject.

Here is an example of how a set of questions might go in a behavioral interview:

Tell me about a time you had a conflict with someone else in the office.
How did you approach the person to resolve the issue?
What was the discussion about the resolution like?
Whose advice did you seek in evaluating the situation?
What was the atmosphere like between the two of you after the issue was resolved?

Can you imagine how a candidate might answer differently if they were given the first statement and then the interview moved to another subject? The goal of the follow-up questions is to really probe into the behavior of the person you are interviewing. By using this probing style of questioning, you can find out multiple things. You can better judge whether they gave a fully honest answer. You can find out how they really dealt with the given situation. You can maybe get some insight into their personality.

This interview style can even be carried over into technical areas. Here is an example of how you can use behavioral interviewing with technical subjects.

Tell me about a time you had equipment go down that impacted the organization's operations.
What did you say to the server vendor to explain the problem?
What did you tell the non-IT staff about the problem?
How did you decide on a solution?
How long did you think the repair would take?
How did you communicate that to the rest of the organization?
How long was the equipment down and impacting the organization?

Asking these questions will not only tell you a bit about their technical abilities, but they will also tell you how they deal with others during a crisis. The IT field is beyond the days of being a bunch of basement-dwelling, antisocial jerks, and that means it is even more important to know exactly how a new hire will react when you have an emergency or handle day-to-day operations. If someone is just good enough to get through a traditional interview, you might find out too late that they are a really bad fit for your organization.