Tips for conducting behavioral interviews
With the Thanksgiving holiday, many programs take a break from interviewing candidates. It’s a perfect time to assess just how well your interview day and candidate interviews are going.
One thing to look at is the questions interviews are asking candidates. Many programs use behavioral interview style questions that are aimed at getting interviewees to talk about their past activities and behaviors. This gives you an idea of how they will handle similar situations in the future (when they’re in your program). The following are tips for conducting behavioral-based interviews:
- Start the interview by asking questions regarding items on candidates’ applications. They’re expecting these questions, so it helps put them at ease.
- Make sure the interview flows more like a conversation rather than a test. Show candidates you’re interested in what they’re saying by asking follow up questions. By all means, put the candidate application down and look at the person as he/she is speaking.
- Lead into questions about their experiences rather than just diving right in. For example, say, “I’m sure you had some training on ethics, tell me about that.” Then follow up with a more heavy hitting question, such as,” Tell me about a time when you saw your ethics training in use or when you actually had to deliver bad news to a patient.” This way, applicants don’t feel like the question comes out of the blue.
- Move on when a candidates cannot answer a question, but note what kind of question it was. If they cannot answer a question you think anyone can answer, such as, “Tell me about the most interesting patient you’ve seen in the past six months,” That is a red flag.
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Julie McCoy
Julie McCoy is the associate editor for the residency market at HCPro, Inc.
Julie has written 293 posts.
Comments
This year our program started to conduct recruitment interviews with a focus on Behavioral questions. Before the interview season began I distributed a list of behavior based questions that they could use when interviewing, so far, the faculty that have interviewed candidates state that using behavior based questions have made the inteview process flow more naturally and have been very informative and insightful.
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