Before we can start interviewing, we have to know what it is we’re looking for. That means analyzing our job for behaviors, and creating interview questions.

You may be inclined to skip this portion of our guidance because, “I already have my interview questions.” Trust us—it is unlikely that the interview questions you are using are good enough, crisp enough, written down, in order, to meet our criteria of setting the bar high and an interview’s purpose being to say no. Worst case, you’ll only have to create a new set of questions once for each of your roles, and it will take 45 minutes each time—a worthwhile investment for the best interview you’ll ever create.

Looking Beyond Traits and Characteristics

The keystone of effective interviews is having great interview questions. But how are great interview questions created? What do we want to know?

This is where most managers go wrong. They say, “Well, I want smart, hard-working, nice, ethical, knowledgeable . . .” While no one can argue with such a conclusion, the problem here is that these traits and characteristics are insufficient. We have to be careful about questions regarding personality traits or internal characteristics that we associate with this job’s success. Why? While everyone who is good at the job has these traits and characteristics, there are also some people who have the traits and characteristics who could not do the job. That is, traits and characteristics may be necessary, but they are not sufficient.

So what questions do we ask to be sure that this person will be able to do this job?

It’s the end of that question that matters: “do the job.” To be a success at something, you have to be able to do it. Not think it, not smart it, not ethical it, not characteristic it. The bright hard nub of job success is doing.

The best way to see whether someone can do the job is to find out whether he’s done it before.

But this makes us have to work a little bit harder. What we’ve done in this short analysis is make a synecdoche error: We’ve let the whole of the job obscure the tools that are used to do it. If we see only the job, the only way to be sure that someone can do the job is for someone to already have done the job. That conclusion creates succession and growth and talent market friction problems very quickly. Everybody would be stuck where they are.

So we dig a little deeper and ask, If we can’t do a job for job comparison (which really isn’t specific enough anyway), what can we look for to determine whether someone can do the job? Since you’ve followed along this far, you’ve probably figured it out: Jobs are so multifaceted that “doing the job” is too gross an analysis.

We don’t just want traits and characteristics. That’s not enough. On the other hand, it would be too restrictive to demand that someone had done the exact same job before. And so we come back to the word “doing.” What do we mean?

Doing is a great word here, because it points us to behavior. Behaviors aren’t traits or characteristics—they’re (usually) traits or characteristics put into action. Don’t our classic success phrases like get the job done, make things happen, achieved, and got there all imply action and activity beyond states of mind, or attitude, or traits, or characteristics?

What we are looking for in an interview is for someone to show us that he or she has engaged in the behaviors that we believe are necessary to do our job well.

Behaviors are the engines of doing. They are specific enough that they get past the too-general “job” idea. They are portable enough that if a candidate has engaged in them before it’s reasonable to assume she can do them again. They are known, and they are measurable.

The best way to interview someone, then, is to look for behaviors that are necessary and sufficient for success in our role, and which the person has engaged in previously.

If you’re still clinging to the idea of traits and characteristics, you’re not alone. There’s a classic concept called hire for attitude, train for skill. The idea is, figure out what attitudes you want, and then just make sure that you can train people on the skills you need them to do.

Unfortunately, this approach is flawed, for two reasons. First, you don’t have enough time to train everyone on every skill needed for your job, and your company won’t support it. We’ve got to screen for skills when we interview. Second (and this is my favorite part), traits are only proven by behaviors which reveal them.

Suppose I told you someone was smart. Nevertheless, you observed him regularly do things that you wouldn’t characterize as “smart.” At what point would you question how smart he is? The fact is, “behaving with smarts” is what we mean by “smart.” Behaving ethically is what we mean by ethical. Behaving with kindness is what we mean by kind.

If you still want to hang on to the idea of attitudes and skill, think of it this way: Hire for behaviors that show the maximum skill and attitude.

Knowing the Necessary Behaviors for the Job

What we’ve just walked through is the analysis that leads us to behavioral interviewing. Once we realize that we have to look for behaviors, we are led to the core preparation question: What behaviors are most important, necessary, and sufficient to do this job well?

In order to get to those behaviors, we have to do two things: define what the behaviors are, and then analyze our role for the ones that matter.

Lucky for us, behaviors have already been well defined. In a professional context, there are five behaviors:

• The words we say. What actual words we utter verbally.
• How we say those words. The tone, speed, and volume of those words. Someone who says, “I’ll do it” quietly and with hesitation is behaving differently from someone who says the same words quickly and more loudly.
• Facial expressions. If someone says “I’ll do it” with a smile, that’s different from someone who says so with a frown or a grimace.
• Body language. Someone who crosses his arms, rolls his eyes, and says, “I’ll do it” is behaving differently than someone who says it leaning forward.
• Work product. There are several categories of work product:
  • Quality. How well the work is done against an overall standard.
  • Quantity. How much work is done.
  • Accuracy. Whether the work is done correctly, measured against known processes like language and math and processes.
  • Timeliness. How much time is taken to do the work, usually against a time standard like a deadline or a known measure.
  • Documentation. Any durable output reasonably associated with the work: emails, spreadsheets, letters, posts, images, reports, written statements.
  • Safety. Actions taken against known protocols or standards of risk reduction, often, though not always, physical.

This list is probably a lot to take in, but don’t worry. Once you have that framework roughly in your head, you’ll discover it’s just a different way of looking at what you already know. Trust us that if you follow our job analysis process, you’ll end up with behavioral questions that will frame the role you’re hiring for in important, necessary, and sufficient behavioral questions.

Knowing now that we need to focus on behaviors, and knowing what they are, how can we identify the behaviors that are most important to the role for which we’re hiring?

Luckily, it’s not hard. There are four readily available sources for the kind of information you need:

• Job descriptions
• Performance reviews
• Top performers
• Manager Tools questionnaire