Here is the first summary of the posts that Gina and I posted over the last 24 hours. Thank you to all of our guest bloggers! We appreciate your support and your help to assist us with our journey through The Great Blog Off.
If you missed the Blogging Marathon we did as a fundraiser for Accion International, I am going to post a summary over the next few days. I wanted to give you an opportunity to read them one spoonful at a time. Take some time to review these posts. There is lots of good stuff here.
Hour 1: The …read more

Being able to influence people is not critical for all jobs but it is for some and it certainly never hurts.  Influencing people is sort of an art.  It’s about knowing how identify the effective way to speak to all kinds of people on their particular level to gain support, rather than using a one-size-fits-all delivery.  If you are assessing a candidate’s ability to influence in a behavioral interview, start by explaining the concept to them.
Here’s one example of how you could do that.
Influencing is the ability to persuade and enlist others support in accomplishing your objectives.  To sell your ideas …read more

If you work for, or are interviewing at a large company, chances are that responsibilities are spread out across many different people.  The more people that you have in an organization, the more important decision-making skills become.  For example, a company that consists of one manager and one employee may not worry as much about the employee making bad decisions because the span of control of the manager is small, making it more likely that the decision making power remains in the hands of the management.  However, the more staff that a manager is responsible for, the less likely it is …read more

From my experience, the behavior interview questions around problem solving are the hardest for candidates to answer.  Problem solving is tricky but even though candidates struggle with these questions, they can be the most important ones to ask, especially if you are interviewing candidates for leadership positions. 
Start by explaining what you consider the foundation of problem solving.  Here’s one way you could explain it. 
The most important part of effective problem solving is being able to separate the root of the problem from the symptoms of the problem.  After the problem has been diagnosed, it is important to consider multiple potential …read more

I can’t think of a single organization or business that isn’t concerned with customer service. Customer service is not just important in retail where there are obvious customers. Where I work, our customers are patients and even doctors and nurses.
In an interview where you are assessing customer focus, start with providing the applicant an idea of what you see as good customer focus. Here’s an example of what you could say.
Customer focus is the ability to build strong relationships with internal and external customers and identify and meet their needs and to use customer feedback to improve …read more

Behavioral Interviewing is an interviewing technique where the potential candidate is asked to tell the interviewer a story of a time in their career where they demonstrated a particular skill.
The premise of this interviewing technique is that, it’s easy to tell an interviewer what they want to hear when responding to a particular question but it is much more difficult to do when the candidate is required to give a specific example of a time where they actually used the skill. The questions usually start out with “tell me about a time when you…”
The great thing about behavioral interviews …read more