Interviewing candidates for employment with your company can be very stressful. It’s hard to tell from looking at a resume and spending a few minutes speaking with applicants if they will be good fits for your organization. Many small business owners make the mistake of talking too much when they interview potential employees. Instead of asking questions that can help them figure out if the people they are interviewing have the potential to succeed with their organization, many hiring managers find themselves pitching the benefits of working for their company.

It’s important to remember that the job interview is the time for people who are interested in working for your company to sell themselves to you, not the other way around. Before you begin an interview, it’s important to remind yourself that your goal isn’t to convince the applicants to come and work for your company. After all, by sending in a resume, the applicants have already let you know that they want to work for you. The interview is your chance to figure out which of the applicants will be the best choice for your company.

It’s very beneficial to adopt a behavior based approach to asking interview questions. When you use the behavior based interviewing technique, you don’t ask questions that require applicants simply to respond with a yes or no. Instead, you are going to ask open ended questions designed to get them to tell you about what they have done in the past. The idea behind behavior based interviewing is the belief that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

If you ask an applicant if he or she is comfortable dealing with irate customers, the interviewee is going to tell you yes. This really doesn’t let you know anything about how that individual will react when faced with an irate customer in your organization. Behavior based interviewing requires the use of three part questions. You’ll ask applicants to (1) describe a past situation (2) explain how they handled it, and (3) tell you about the consequences or outcome.

If you are using a behavior based interviewing technique, you will start by asking the candidate to describe a time that he or she had to deal with an irate customer. Once the applicant describes the situation, you will follow up by asking how he or she handled the situation. You will then follow up by inquiring about the outcome of the interaction.