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 tool you can use to ensure you find the right people is behavior-based interviewing. To begin with, you must write down the behaviors, instead of the tasks, that are most important for success in a particular 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. It's too important to find the right person for a position to settle for less.

The quest to get the right people means you should always be on the lookout for talent. By definition, after all, the most talented people aren't the ones 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, there’s the cost to ensure someone is trained properly. 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. Maybe you spend more time checking 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 you see the higher, hidden costs. The talented people in your organization start to resent the new person. His or her mistakes must be dealt with. Maybe they have to subject themselves to the same bureaucracy. At first the find this irritating, but soon 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 as a result of failing to bring on 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 had to manage large accounts?
Describe your greatest success.
How are you best motivated?
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. Describe your past experience in managing those kinds of sales logistics.

This position requires people to manage large accounts with three or four contacts inside the organization, all of whom need to say “yes” to consummate a sale. Explain your experiences making such a sale. How did you get them all to say “yes” to make them all say "yes"~How did you succeed in making them all say "yes"}?

Self-motivation is an expectation of ours. Describe your own motivations for success. Tell me about a time you went above and beyond for a client, and for the 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 result?

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

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