Week 22 Day 7: Assignment: Rewrite Your Next Interview to Be 80% Behavioral

Take your current interview question list for your next open role. Count the questions. Categorize each as technical (testing knowledge or skill), situational (asking what the candidate would do), or behavioral (asking what the candidate has done). If behavioral questions are less than 80% of the total, rewrite until they are.

Here is the rewrite process step by step. Step one: list your current interview questions. Include everything -- technical screens, culture questions, and any standard prompts you use. Step two: categorize each question. Technical questions test knowledge: 'Explain how a hash map works.' Situational questions test hypothetical judgment: 'What would you do if a teammate missed a deadline?' Behavioral questions test actual experience: 'Tell me about a time a teammate missed a deadline. What did you do?' Step three: convert every situational question to a behavioral one. The formula is simple: replace 'what would you do' with 'tell me about a time you did.' 'How would you handle conflicting priorities?' becomes 'Tell me about a time you had conflicting priorities. Which one did you choose and why?' Step four: reduce technical questions to 20% or less of the interview. Keep enough to verify baseline competence, but eliminate deep technical trivia. You are not hiring a textbook -- you are hiring a person. Step five: add at least one question targeting each of the three traits from Day 5: intellectual humility, follow-through, and feedback reception. Step six: practice the rewritten interview with a colleague before using it with a candidate. Behavioral interviewing is a skill -- the follow-up questions matter more than the initial prompts, and follow-up skill improves with practice. Add the rewritten interview to your Leadership Operating Manual under 'Hiring Framework.' This becomes a living document that evolves as you learn which questions produce the most revealing answers.

The 80% behavioral target is supported by meta-analytic evidence on interview validity. McDaniel, Whetzel, Schmidt, and Maurer (1994) found that structured behavioral interviews have a mean validity of 0.51 for predicting job performance, compared to 0.20 for unstructured interviews and 0.31 for structured situational interviews. The diminishing returns of technical questions beyond baseline competence verification is documented by Schmidt and Hunter (1998), whose comprehensive meta-analysis of 85 years of selection research found that cognitive ability tests (which technical questions approximate) have a validity ceiling of 0.51, and that adding structured behavioral interviews to cognitive ability tests increases validity to 0.63 -- the highest combination of any two methods tested. The conversion formula from situational to behavioral questions is drawn from Janz's (1982) original Behavioral Description Interview methodology, which demonstrated that the key validity advantage of behavioral questions is their resistance to socially desirable responding. Latham, Saari, Pursell, and Campion (1980) found that candidates can intuit the 'right' answer to situational questions at rates exceeding 80%, while behavioral questions require genuine recall that is significantly harder to fabricate. The practice recommendation reflects research by Campion, Palmer, and Campion (1997) on structured interview best practices, which identifies interviewer training as the single most effective intervention for improving interview validity.