Behavioral Hiring By Rev. Peter Corney and Dr. Ken Byrne

Hiring and the Use of Behavioral Analysis

Hiring the right person requires discovering the candidates’ actual character traits and skills.  This isn’t easy. The candidate wants to sell themselves. It is in their best interest to focus on what makes them a good fit for the role. They also want to direct attention away from any shortcomings.

To do this, many interviewers rely on behavioral analysis. This happens in two ways. One is fraught with risk. The other is far more solid and reliable.

The Task

When interviewing a job candidate, we are meeting a stranger. Our task is to determine whether they meet the specific job requirements. We want to answer six questions:

• Can this person do the job?
• Will this person do the job?
• Will they fit in with our existing team?
• Do we understand their real character?
• How long are they likely to stay?
• What are the chances that they will cause problems?

This is a tall order for an interview. The main problem is that the very information you want to know is precisely what the candidate wants to keep hidden.

Some Common Approaches

Many people rely on reading the clues that are supposedly given off by body language. They will note whether the applicant closes their arms, leans forward, makes direct eye contact, looks nervous, and a host of other variables.

While this can be appealing, it has a significant problem. There is a recognised science in reading body language.  Those who can do this reliably have made a long study of body language.  Most of us can’t, despite what we may tell ourselves.

A second approach is to study how the candidate behaves during the interview. This means considering things like:

• Can the person establish rapport?
• Did the candidate provide straightforward answers to the questions?
• Do they require a simple question to be repeated?
• Do they use language that is easy to understand?
• Are they overly reliant on jargon?
• Do their answers wander well off the topic?

Making Notes

The interviewer should be making notes. If two or more people are conducting the interview, one person should ask the questions while others record the answers. 

Of course, no one can record everything. The two most potent bits of information you can record are:

• Direct quotes of what the applicant said.
• A recording of the applicant’s behavior.

Hiring and the Law

When hiring someone, you are inadvertently entering a complex legal area. The applicant has a legal right to expect fair treatment. If not offered a job, they can object to the decision.

Faced with such an objection, you must provide a factual basis to justify your decision not to hire that applicant. Interpreting body language or a “gut feel” just won’t do.

On the other hand, if you can accurately quote what the applicant said and did, you will have little difficulty.

Look for Patterns of Behavior

Remember the old saying that “One swallow doesn’t make a summer“. Although an applicant might be hesitant about one question or ask for it to be repeated, nothing significant can be made of this. Most people will do this from time to time.

It is a pattern of behavior that has the most meaning.

I interviewed an executive candidate who initially came across as polished, quietly self-confident, and poised. However, when we later came to more challenging questions, the kind that required both a degree of candor and thoughtful insight, his behavior changed dramatically. He either asked for the question to be repeated, avoided the question by changing the topic, gave an answer which appeared to be responsive to the question but wasn’t, or frankly said that he couldn’t answer the question.

Here, we have a pattern of behavior. Having notes of this made it easy to explain my findings to the client who sent me. If challenged in a legal context, I would have no trouble defending my recommendation that he not be hired.

Conclusion

When interviewing job applicants, don’t pay too much attention to body language. The best you can do is guess at its meaning. This can lead to quite incorrect findings. You may be missing out on a good candidate, or worse, hiring an unsuitable one, because of your interpretations.

However, take very careful notes of what the candidate says and how they behave. Look for behavior that seems unusual or out of the ordinary. The more examples you have of this, the more likely it is that you can come to some educated guesses about its meaning.

This is one of the reasons why experience in interviewing, all things being equal, makes for a better interviewer. With experience, each person develops a mental library of the kind of behavior to expect. When someone deviates from this in numerous ways, it becomes more likely that you’re seeing something revealing about their personality.

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This material is adapted by permission from Hire Right the First Time: A Practical Guide for Christian Organisations, which is available from Amazon. Rev. Peter Corney and Dr. Ken Byrne co-authored this book.

• Rev Peter Corney is an Anglican minister who has been actively involved in writing, teaching, and leadership development for Christian ministers for the past sixty years.
• Dr. Ken Byrne has been an independent organizational psychologist for over forty years.

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