Leading at Light Speed is a powerful leadership book by Eric Douglas for businesses, public agencies, and nonprofits revealing the 10 Quantum Leaps to build trust, spark innovation, and create a high-performing organization. In Chapter 3, Lead Through Others, Eric discusses the merits of using a behavior-based interview process instead of a typical interview.

One effective tool that can ensure you find the right people is behavior-based interviewing. It starts with writing down the behaviors, not the tasks, that are most important to a specific job. Managing a team, motivating people, developing under-performers, starting a line of business, engaging people in change – these all might be behaviors you’re looking for. This list becomes your litmus test for selecting the right people.

The corollary of behavior-based interviewing is openended recruiting: When a position comes open, you keep searching until you find the right person, even if it means temporary hardship. Finding the right person takes precedence over settling for filling a position.

The quest to get the right people means you should always be on the lookout for talent. After all, talented people are almost by definition not looking for work. Building a great company necessitates employing unusual means to get the right people on the team. Good leaders typically spend 25 percent of their time recruiting and developing talent.

The cost of settling for second best can be huge. First to think about is the cost of proper training. That’s a price you would have to pay in any case. But by settling for second best, you may have to spend more time training them to make sure they don’t make mistakes. It may be that you must spend more time critiquing their work. Maybe you insist on multiple signoffs on their decisions. Maybe you revise a process to make sure his or her work is reviewed by someone you trust. You begin to compromise for the sake of filling the position by adding more bureaucracy to the organization.

Now comes the higher, hidden cost. The talented people in your organization start to resent the new person. They must deal with his or her mistakes. Maybe they have to subject themselves to the same bureaucracy. This irritates them at first – then it starts to grate. Morale suffers. Ultimately, the genuinely talented people decide to move on. This ultimately results in a damaging loss of trust. All because you failed to find the right people in the first place.

Here is an example of a typical interview vs. behavior-based interview.

Typical Interview:

Describe your experience in sales.
Have you ever been entrusted with managing large accounts?
Explain one of your greatest experiences of success.
What motivates you?
How do you handle conflicts?

Behavior Based Interview:

This position requires a person to make five sales calls a day while traveling in a territory from Minneapolis to Atlanta. How have you managed those kinds of sales logistics in the past.

In this position it’s necessary to manage large accounts with multiple contacts inside the organization who need to be on board to get the sale. Tell me about your experience making such a sale. What did you do resulting in all of them being on board~How did you succeed in making them all say “yes”}?

We insist on people who are self-motivated. Describe your own motivations for success. Describe examples where you went an extra mile for a client – and for your company?

Explain a time when you looked bad and how you handled the situation. What did you do? What did you say? What was the outcome?

This position means working with an internal R&D team to help revamp our product for a new launch every year. Describe how you’ve successfully managed internal relationships with R&D teams to maximize the success of upgraded products?

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