Our talent chief talks talking.

When our CEO Joel and I talked at a local Starbucks five years ago about starting a talent practice at OpenArc, both of us agreed we wanted nothing to do with being a typical staffing firm. What we wanted was to be the best at identifying talent and matching candidate skills and motivations with our clients’ needs. One early commitment we made to achieve this was to have every recruiter on our talent team become a certified behavioral interviewer.

Simply put, behavioral interviewing seeks to compile a more objective group of facts with questions based around a candidate’s past behavior, as past behavior tends to be a strong predictor of future behavior.

So how does behavioral interviewing help our recruiters find the best talent?

Behavioral interviewing helps our recruiters focus on the best ways to probe for key actions and behaviors that are typical of successful employees in the world of information technology. We want to go beyond what a candidate knows and get to a sense of what the candidate will do when faced with the opportunities and challenges that are typical of our client customers.

Behavioral interviewing helps us match a candidate’s job motivations, cultural motivations, and organizational motivations with our clients. We are looking for people that love what they do and would thrive with one of our clients due to their fit with the organization, their team, and the position in question – and if we have concerns about that fit, we will always share that with our clients so they can make an informed decision. Behavioral interviewing techniques help us hone in on the factors that will make for a truly successful hire.

Behavioral interviewing makes candidate interviews consistent, efficient, and structured. It’s important to us that our recruiters are consistent about the types of questions they ask our candidates, so that we get a well rounded view of everyone we talk to. As we interview people, we listen closely for “we” and “I” statements in the answers we get, so that we get an accurate sense of what the candidate’s capabilities are. On a practical level, we talk to a ton of people, making efficiency a must. We need our recruiters to be able to keep an interview moving forward – and also be able to regain control of an interview if a candidate is too loquacious. Finally, we want our interviews to be structured, with an appropriate amount of dialogue, note taking, and next steps for each and every candidate.

Behavioral interviewing makes us stronger. Another key aspect to training our team in behavioral interviewing is that it allows us to bring in recruiters that are best suited to our environment. Behavioral based interviewing quickly becomes behavioral based leadership, and we can tailor our message and management specifically to each individual – which in turn allows us to provide better service to our clients.

We’re dedicated to fruitful, lasting relationships – helping job seekers find rewarding careers and helping client companies find career employees. Record-setting levels of coffee intake helps some, but getting to the heart of our customer needs through behavioral interviewing helps a whole lot more.