Over at the Electronic Recruiters Exchange Dr. Wendell Williams of ScientificSelection.com has posted an article called "How to Leave the Interviewing Stone Age," making the case for the primacy of behavioral interviewing in the selection process – which has prompted a spirited exchange between him and Lou Adler of The Adler Group, who pushes more for past performance as the best predictor of future performance.
I’ve chimed in on the discussion myself. I’d say Adler and Williams are splitting hairs - we need all the information we can get about candidates, and it’s not an either/or proposition. If you had a method that gave you good information about both past behavior and past performance – information derived not from the candidate, but from the people who have seen the candidate in action - I think you’d be way ahead of the game, wouldn’t you? Particularly if you could use that information to make your behavioral interviews more effective, and put past performance into the right context. The hiring process has got too many problems at present for us to quibble about who’s got the magic bullet.
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