High-Impact Interview Questions: 701 Behavior-Based Questions to Find the Right
Person for Every Job
Like many of the offerings from Amacom, the publishing arm of the American
Management Association, High-Impact Interview Questions: 701 Behavior-based
Questions to Find the Right Person for Every Job has a no-nonsense, practical
bent. Focused on both the art and the science of effective job interviews,
it's clearly intended as a manual for everyday use by hiring managers and human-
resource professionals across a wide range of organizations. Author Victoria
Hoevemeyer has worked for over 20 years in organizational development and
leadership coaching from her home base of Illinois, and her expertise shows
through in the direct, straightforward tone suffusing this book.
If the interactions between job seekers and job interviewers can resemble
a cat-and-mouse game, with each group trying to outwit and to stay one step
ahead of the other, High-Impact Interview Questions serves as recruiters'
foil to the books popular with candidates, such as How Would You Move Mt.
Fuji? and Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions .
It opens by describing three different kinds of questions which dominate most
modern job interviews: conventional questions ("What are your greatest
strengths and weaknesses?"), situational questions ("How would you handle
a crisis in which your boss asked you to do something that you considered
unethical?"), and brainteaser questions ("Why are manhole covers round?"),
and analyzes the shortcomings of each approach. These techniques for sorting
good job candidates from bad are fundamentally flawed, according to Hoevemeyer,
because they are far too predictable and artificial, and don't illuminate the
qualities that actually make a difference to new employees' success.
Instead, Hoevemeyer advances a philosophy which she terms "Competency-Based
Behavioral Interviewing" (CBBI). Her basic premise is that past performance
is the best predictor of future performance, and that the more recent
a particular behavior, the stronger of a predictor it will be. If you accept
those assumptions, then much of what follows in the book's explanations of
CBBI are highly logical.
The most valuable part of High-Impact Interview Questions is its extensive
catalog of sample interview questions, grouped according to the underlying
quality which they're meant to uncover. After introducing CBBI and showing
how it ties specific and precise interview questions back to the functional
competencies job seekers will need in a particular position, the book
provides a very handy guide to sample questions which any interviewer can
use. Interested in a candidate's decision-making ability? Try "Describe
a time you had to make a quick decision with incomplete information?"
How about attention to detail? For that, the book prescribes queries like,
"Tell me about a time when you caught an error that others had missed."
Esoteric philosophical tome, this isn't. But for those job interviewers
who believe in competency-based questions and want an efficient guide to
learning about interviewees' true potential, this book is a worthwhile
read.
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