Transcript: Chris Norris describes the BEI (behavioral event interview)

Peggy: Hi. Good morning. This is Peggy McKee, with PHC Consulting.

I am the Medical Sales Recruiter, and I have asked Chris Norris, who’s a sales manager, sales trainer, vice-president of sales and marketing — he’ll tell you a little bit more about that — to come back and speak to you, my listeners, about the behavioral event interview.

Chris, before we jump into the topic, can you tell our listeners a little bit about your experience — perhaps the roles you’ve held, the companies, and maybe even just a little bit about their products that you represented.

Chris: Sure, Peggy.

First of all, thanks for the opportunity to come back. I think it’s just a very relevant topic in this day and age.

A little bit about who I am and some of the roles that I’ve had. Vice-President of Sales Training in commercial operations for General Electric; National Sales Director for Bayer HealthCare; Vice-President and General Manager for a privately-held company called Chronic Care Solutions. Prior to that, various commercial roles: training, sales management, director of sales, and so forth, up to this point in my career — most of it has been in, in vitro diagnostics.

Peggy: So describe for us the behavioral event interview, as you understand it.

Chris: We spoke last time on the call in regards to the hiring process, and typically what are the different steps that companies will go through in order to bring new talent into the organization.

Just to go back for a second, we did talk about a sequential process by which talent is brought in: starting with the screening interview, and then perhaps an initial interview, that goes through and looks for function, fit and background — then probably an interview thereafter, which would focus more on competency.

This is the point where we had previously discussed the behavioral event interview. Really what the behavioral event interview is, is the opportunity to go back and really peel back the layers of the onion, and really understand what are those unique competencies, and elements of success, that are hard-wired in the DNA of a candidate, that are beyond the superficial skill sets that we may see or accomplishments that we may see in a résumé.

This is the opportunity to really kind of dig into detail and go back. The term behavioral event interview — you may hear it as BEI. Some companies will refer to it that way — is to go back and focus on very specific examples, typically, two to three years old — to go back and have the candidate walk through very specific questions in order to draw out competencies that would tie in to the selection model or the competency model for that particular company.

Peggy: In the past, have there been three, four, five specific behaviors that you want to see; say, let’s identify this as a sales candidate, because probably for every position, there’s different behaviors that you’re looking for.

My audience is typically sales, marketing and management of sales. In the key behaviors that you’re looking for in a sales rep, what have you defined, in your past at GE and at Bayer and at CCS, what were those behaviors that you were looking for?

Chris: I think regardless of the company, the competency models tend to be pretty similar in many ways; most typically within sales organizations. I, myself, think of a couple that probably hold more value than others, and I would think most hiring managers would feel the same.

For example, what are some of the competencies? First of all, I would think about achievement drive, and achievement drive is one’s ability to accomplish difficult, insurmountable tasks. It’s the desire to win. It’s the get up and go in people.

We’ve all worked with people that, they’re going to win. They just have this winning spirit about them, everything they do, they try as hard as they possibly can. Achievement drive, I submit, is probably one of the most important competencies that we look for in a sales representative or in a sales manager.

There are differences between roles. For example, a competency model for a sales manager, a key competency we may look for may be developing others in their career. How did they do as it relates to developing others? Certainly that’s very important, and most great managers would go through and look at their track record of accomplishment in which they’ve moved people on in their career and have assisted with the development.

But I would think when you go back — we’ll just talk about sales representative, capital sales representative — what are some of the other key competencies that we look for? I would think about impact and influence. This is an ability to want to be very impactful in front of a customer. Some of it is as simple as presence and bearing, dress, the manner in which we speak, and the ability to influence the customer, to create a persuasive argument, to understand the customer’s situation and explicit need, in order to be able to demonstrate capability of a particular product; and to be able to dialogue with the customer in order to relate the needs of the particular product back to their particular situation. Certainly I think most would agree that impact and influence is a critical one.

I think we could think about interpersonal skills or customer focus are probably critical skills, as well. I’m sure we’ve all seen in our career that you may have a capital sales representative who’s just tenacious and their achievement drive is off the chart, but it comes at the expense of a lack of customer focus, in which they may ride a little roughshod over the customer, and may not have the focus that they need, and the development of the relationship, and the long-term success and the business partnership that should occur.

I would think interpersonal skills would be a critical one, as well; and that is, most often these roles are individual contributor roles. When we think about superstar sales representatives, they’re all so very demanding, internally, to their organization. They’re pushing back with contracting and marketing, and so forth. That’s great, and I think in really dynamic, strong organizations, there’s always a healthy tension. But once again, the ability to relate with others is a critical skill, and it’s important that we bring people in that are well-balanced.

Peggy: Right. I’ve actually experienced the candidate who’s an amazing salesperson, but just leaves a wake everywhere they go.

Chris: Absolutely. So these competencies, it’s going to depend upon the company, because the company is going to go through and create a competency model. I’ll list off a couple of other key competencies. One of the things, as candidates go through and they’re looking at different companies, surprisingly enough, in some cases, companies go through and they post — they may not call it their competency model — but they may refer to it as the values for that particular position.

And you’ll go through and you’ll think about that, and what they’re looking for in the values for that particular position. I then want you to think about, I want you to expand that and say, Great. Well I understand what their values are, so therefore, as I prepare to go in for an in-depth behavioral event interview, these are the key elements that they’re going to be looking for and trying to draw out of me through effective questioning.

So what are some others? I’ll go through and I’ll list off some others. Then I’ll provide an example to you, Peggy, that you could share and perhaps hang on your website. Certainly I would think analytical thinking is a key competency, business expertise, champion for change would be one that we might expect to see when we’re going through and hiring managers, conceptual thinking would be a key one. Customer focus, as I mentioned previously. Facilitation skills of flexibility, holding people accountable, information management, initiative and optimism. Innovation, integrity. Internal networking. Judgment and decision-making. Leadership. Learning orientation. Quality focus. Negotiating skills. This is a pretty comprehensive list.

Now as you go through, and you’re brought into a company for this more in-depth interview, the question you model that the company will go through, this is the behavioral event interview. So the question you model is very specific, and written with great thought in order to elicit a response that ties back into these particular behaviors.

So now, as you go in and you think about, maybe you saw the values that were listed by that particular company on their website. Or maybe the hiring manager shared, “Hey, gosh, this is the ideal candidate and this is what we’re really looking for in great candidates that comes to this company.” Now you can think about this questioning model that goes back and ties in, and be a little bit more strategic relative to that.

I’m going to share a couple of questions with you, because I think that may help. But let me stop for a second, Peggy, and see if there’s any questions up to this point.

Peggy: I think one thing that I want to point out, that the candidates may not have heard, but I think you said, and that is how to prepare for this behavioral event interview.

First of all, you can look at the job description, like you said. Look at what they’re saying is important to them, and then think about what type of those BEI-type questions — and I know you’re going to give us a couple of examples — that they might want to ask, in order to highlight and see if, in fact they see, those specific competencies that, as you’re saying, they probably have, maybe in their job description.

But there’s a lot of mangers who do the behavioral event interviewing, Chris, that are in much smaller companies, so they’re not nearly as organized as you are. I know that you’ve got some other tools for us that you’re going to let us share on our website, where people can see some more of the competency model and things like that.

But a lot of companies, these small companies under 100 million — they’re not as organized in their interviewing process, but they still may buy into the BEI interview, because maybe the manager who’s the vice-president of sales and marketing or maybe the regional sales manager, was at another large company, like a GE, like a Bayer, or like a CCS, that did have this type of organization.

So they may be totally bought into behavioral event interviewing, but their job description may not reflect it. So if that doesn’t happen — and this is where I’m throwing in my two cents for you, Chris — you as the candidate can find out that information through a couple of different channels.

One, you can speak to, if you’re involved with a recruiter like myself, if I’m the one who’s representing you with an organization, you can ask me what type of competencies I think they’re going to be looking for, and I would certainly share that with you so that you could prepare more adequately for that.

The other thing is that typically they don’t do a BEI on the first interview. They’re going to do that after a phone interview or maybe even a first initial screening interview. And if that’s the case, when you’re in that phone interview or that screening interview, the onus is on you to say, “Tell me a little bit about what you’re looking to hire.”

A lot of candidates don’t do that because they either don’t feel that they have enough power in that relationship to ask those kinds of questions; however, if you do take the initiative to ask the question, “Tell me about the candidate you’re looking to hire. What’s the ideal person, if this person walked in the door tomorrow, had these competencies or these skill sets, would you say, ‘Hey, you’re hired,’ on the spot.”

And then from that, you already know what that manager’s mindset is, which is very important, because again, there may be a little bit of disparity between what the job description says and what that particular manager appreciates.

So, not to take over and take too much time here, Chris, but just to say to candidates, you can find this information, either through the job description, through your recruiter, through networking and talking to other people within the organization, and through asking direct questions from the sales manager when you’re in that first screening interview. Do you agree?

Chris: I absolutely agree. It’s no different than making a sales call to uncover the customer’s need. It’s amazing sometimes, if you just ask people, what they’ll tell you; and no different than asking a very probing question to a customer about their particular needs on a capital sale.

I think to go through and ask the hiring manager, “Really, I’d like to understand more what the ideal candidate looks like. Maybe you could describe …” and I think probably a good way to get to that is, “Help me understand, if you could go through and choose some key adjectives that would describe the ideal candidate,” it will probably elicit the response that you want.

Because too often, I think, sometimes, if you ask the question, “Gosh, what are you looking for,” sometimes a manager will say, “Gosh, I’m looking for a person that’s just a great capital salesperson, that makes their number consistently. They’re fun to be around and they’re a good team player.”

Now, I didn’t really tell you that much, specifically, that helps you prepare when I say that. I gave you, really, the 300,000 view on what that candidate looks like. I think you really have to ask, “Great, I understand that. What are some of the adjectives that you’d use to describe that candidate that you just mentioned?” That’s where you want to start to draw out achievement drive, and impact and influence, and these other attributes that I previously mentioned. So, a great point. If you ask a question, you may be delighted in the response.

So, as we go in, let’s say we just don’t know, and the company didn’t share, and we’re really struggling to try to find out what some of the key competencies are. Common sense would dictate, to some extent, that we know that achievement drive, and impact and influence — these are very critical skills. So I want to go through and I want to just share a couple of examples of effective questioning, and this may be our opportunity to go through and dialogue back and forth, and talk about the formatting and thought and so forth.

So I’ll start with achievement drive. I think this is probably the most important competency that companies are looking for. Let me define it again, what I think achievement drive is. It’s a concern for surpassing internal standards and achieving superior performance against external competition.

What are some questions that we can go through to get at? I’ll think about a couple and I’ll share one. For example, Tell me about two of your current business objectives, and what you are doing to meet them. It’s a pretty open-ended question, wouldn’t you agree?

Peggy: Yes. Very open-ended.

Chris: Right. Now, if you are going through and you’re meeting with a professional who’s been well-trained in the art of interviewing — and by the way, I think there a few people who are just absolutely wonderful at going through and doing this — and you come back and you say, “Gosh, there’s two really tough situations that I’m trying to impact in my current sales territory. One relates to this and one relates to that,” you really didn’t accomplish the mission.

Peggy: Because you just defined it. You answered the question in terms of, you told them about your two objectives, but you didn’t do the story that you have to do, to be effective, which is, “Here are the two objectives.” You want to demonstrate what strategy, that you’ve thought ahead, that you have a plan, and then execution.

What else?

Chris: That’s exactly right. You just reiterated back the question to the interviewer. This is the opportunity. I want you to think about it. I want candidates to think about telling a story. And this is really the art of the behavioral event interview, both for the candidate and for the interviewer.

The candidate should be thinking about writing a story, and what are the different chapters of that particular story, back to this particular question. Tell me about two of your current business objectives.

So I want the candidate to go through and in very specific detail, explain these business objectives. And it may be something like this, for example: Gosh, Peggy, let me go through. Probably one of the critical business objectives for me is impacting this group purchasing organization in my territory. The reason why that’s so important is it represents 50 percent of the total business opportunity in my territory.

So I knew it was a critical opportunity for me, and in order to impact this particular group purchasing organization, one of the things that I needed to do was take a cross-collaborative approach, and working with different business partners, both in the field and internally, and with my manager, to be able to go through, step back and think about the development of a broader strategy by which we could get many involved in the craft, just trying to break into this particular account.

It’s a little bit more involved, to step back for a second, because the example that I gave back to you is a little bit more involved. Now, the interviewer is going to say, and step back, and those that have been professionally trained would say, “That’s great. I understand what you were trying to accomplish. Let’s go into it a little bit more in detail. Tell me about which group purchasing organization it is. Oh, it’s Novation. Fantastic,” or whatever the particular group you’re trying to influence.

“Tell me who was involved in this cross-collaborative team, and what their specific roles were. Who was the captain of that team, Peggy? Who set up the initial meeting, and who went out to craft the original objective? What was your particular role in that business meeting? What did you do to prepare for that? What was the first action that you took on coming out of that meeting, and what were the series of steps that you knew you had to take in order to accomplish that?”

It’s detail. It’s the level of detail. Once again, I want you to think about telling stories, chapter by chapter, that relate to the overall question that the interviewer asks. Does that make sense, do you think?

Peggy: Oh, absolutely. It’s interesting. I don’t use BEI when I’m screening candidates, but I use a form of it whenever I have a candidate, and I’m unsure whether or not they actually achieved what they said they did — or if someone was on a team with them, who did it.

I do this as a manager within my own recruiting firm. When I have a candidate on the phone, who sounds really good and has those accomplishments that you said you see on those résumés, and I find out they were part of a team calling on a specific customer or a particular challenge — like what you said — then I move into a role of asking behavioral event questions. If I have them tell the story, I’ll find out very quickly who really did the work.

Chris: And this is the heart of why it’s done, Peggy, and that’s a great illustration. The interviewer is trying to go through and gain, in great detail, what specifically you did in that situation, in order to draw out the individual competencies that you demonstrated relative to their specific competency or selection model for the organization.

I think it’s very important for candidates, as they go through — and listen, I’m advocating to both the interviewer and the candidate — this is a great tool. This is really a wonderful tool, and for those superstars that are just the absolute killers out there, this is your opportunity to go in there and knock it out of the park, to tell the story. For the interviewers, this is your opportunity to really understand and to get down to what makes these people successful, at the competency level.

When you tell these stories and you’re writing the chapter of the particular story here, you need to go through, and you need to talk about your involvement in the first person — to your point, Peggy — because too often, teams are great, but specifically, I’m not hiring the team. I’m looking to hire you, and so I want to know what you did, and I want you to speak in the first person.

I want you to talk about the dates, and very specific dates as to what you did. What exactly did you do, and who else was involved? When you go through and you talk about who else was involved, good interviewers will go through and say, “Who else was involved, Peggy? Tell me the names of those people, and what specifically they did.”

What’s going to happen, as you write the chapters here, these themes all start to weave together and you’re going to start to see involvement of other people. Great interviewers will go through and weave this all together, and really develop the broader picture. And it may come down, you may say, “Well, Fred, my manager, was involved and he helped me out with that.” And that may be the first time that was brought up.

After going through and spending a couple of hours together, this may be the opportunity for me to go back as an interviewer and say, “Gosh, this sounds like it was a great accomplishment. I’d love to talk to Fred. Is he one of your references? This sounds like it’s such a compelling story, and you really did some wonderful things there. Fred has firsthand knowledge on this. He’d be a great person for me to talk to, wouldn’t you agree?”

Peggy: I love it. And the really good candidates, as long as that person isn’t in their current organization, where it puts them at risk, will absolutely say, “You bet.”

Chris: That’s exactly right, yes.

Peggy: The good ones will say, “That’s not a problem.”

Chris: That’s exactly right.

Peggy: Now, have you ever had a candidate — because I have this happen in my firm here — where we’ll talk to candidates about referrals, and when you say just what you said, “Hey, I’d like to speak with Fred. Is there any way …”

“Well, I’m not sure how to get in touch with Fred. It’s been six years since I last talked to Fred.”

I have such a judgmental point of view on this, but I’m wondering if I’m just biased because I’m in the business of knowing how to get in touch with people. But doesn’t that make you think, Gosh, if you’re a professional who values your career; someone who wants to move ahead and understands the process of hiring and moving ahead in the business world, wouldn’t you understand that you needed to keep that relationship warm?

I do believe that fifty percent of the time, it means that the candidate does know how to get hold of Fred, but doesn’t want you to hear what Fred will say. But I also think fifty percent of the time, it’s just these candidates are so naïve about their understanding about their network.

Chris: Yes, I agree with you. I do think there’s probably some mismanagement of the relationship. Good-hearted people who are superstars didn’t do an effective job of the management of the relationship, long-term, and lost sight.

And then I think probably the other half is, “Gosh, I just don’t want you to talk to the guy.”

Peggy: Because Fred’s not going to tell you the same thing I just told you.

Chris: Listen, this is at the heart of it. We’re judged by our accomplishments. The whole purpose of this behavioral event interview is, it’s a predictor. What we’ve accomplished in the past is the predictor of our future success. I think good hiring managers will understand that you may not have been a fit in working with that particular manager, and that’s okay, but I would say, to your point, “Gosh. I haven’t maintained a relationship with him and it’s hard for me to get a hold of him.”

And I’d say, “I understand that.”

But as I’ve gone through, and you’ve told and written the chapters, I’ve also uncovered lots of other people that have been involved in the stories as you’ve written them, and so, it allows me to go back and say, “Well, I can appreciate that you may have lost contact with that individual. But you’ve also mentioned Susan in marketing as really a key member of this particular team, that helped you impact that GPO example that we shared earlier. Is she one of your references that could go through and help me understand a little bit more, specifically, about what you’ve accomplished in that situation?” I think that’s fair.

Peggy: Oh, I do, too. Where I see some managers making some mistakes — and I know we’re speaking to candidates, as well — but with managers, the thing I’ve seen is they are more forgiving than they should be. And like you said, if that guy’s not available, maybe the relationship was mismanaged or whatever, and like you said, there’s this other individual, Susan, who was involved.

Managers see that person in their own image, so they think, Well, they let the relationship fall apart. That’s why this is a problem. But if you ask for another reference, and they can’t provide that relationship; or, if they’re not excited enough about your job to go and make sure that they have their relationship with Susan again solidified so that you can speak with her, then I just don’t think they’re the candidate you want for a sales position in this complex medical sales arena that we’re in.

If a person can’t go back and develop a relationship with someone that they worked with, and like you said, you’re being forgiving. You’re allowing him to let Fred slide; share with me Susan.

Chris: That’s right.

Peggy: I’ve seen a lot of managers who are just too forgiving. They think, Oh, you know, it’s probably this way or that. But I would say, in our information age that we’re in today, if you are the sales candidate that you say you are, you ought to be able to provide either Fred or Susan. I would just encourage managers to realize that if they don’t provide one or the other, then when you get them on-board, you’re going to find that there’s a reason, and you’ll experience it in their performance.

Chris: Yes, I completely agree. Let me share just a couple of other questions, just to get people used to the format.

Another one for achievement drive is, Give me an example of a project you completed despite obstacles. Now you’ll notice that the manner in which that question is written is completely wide open. And all these questions are written in such a way, to get you talking. None of them are yes/no. They’re very probing questions, and once again, I want you to think about writing individual chapters to the novel, relative to that question, and be very, very specific and detailed about that.

Another example might be, Give me an example when it was necessary to take risks to reach a goal in a short period of time. It goes back and it’s trying to draw out your achievement, but in the space of time constraints or a more challenging situation.

I’ve shared a couple on achievement drive, and I’ll share a couple of generic ones with you, Peggy, that you can perhaps hang on your website as well, on customer focus, just to get your viewers used to the format.

In customer focus, Think of a time when a customer called you with a complaint or a request that was out of the ordinary. How did you respond? You think about that question — it’s a loaded question, don’t you agree? Think about the time when a customer called with a complaint or request that was out of the ordinary.

I went through and I mentioned integrity as a competency. You think about that question, integrity, and there’s the opportunity. Maybe a customer asked you to do something that was in a gray area. This is the opportunity — and this is why the competency model’s so important — because you want to be able to go through and demonstrate one’s mastery of the competency of customer focus, but at the same time, you want to be able to go through and demonstrate high integrity in your business dealings and superlative interpersonal skills, and how you managed that particular situation.

So you can see that, in some cases, a question might be very specific and targeted relative to one’s competency, but it will cross over into three, four, five, six individual competencies when the whole story evolves.

Peggy: Oh, yes. Give us another example.

Chris: Let me think about impact and influence, the ability to leave a particular impression or persuade, or generate commitment, or build professional credibility; really, I think one of the critical skills for a sales professional. Tell me about a time when you had to sell an idea or approach, either to someone in your organization or to a customer. How did you do this, and what was the end result?

I’ll share another. Describe a situation where you convince an employee to alter his or her behavior. This would be more targeted for a particular manager. Why and how did you do this? It’s really trying to draw out — you’re still thinking about that question that’s more manager-related, looking at a competency associated with leadership, impact and influence, interpersonal skills.

So we’re starting to pull all these themes together, and that’s why all of these weave together, into one complete novel when we’re done. And then the interviewer will go back, and look at their competency model, and assess, in particular areas, the relative degree of mastery or not, relative to the questioning and how the candidate did.

Peggy: Now for these candidates to prepare for these interviews, do you suggest they look at a long list of behavioral event type questioning? How can they get their arms around this, so that they can be adequately prepared when they walk in the door?

If you really are the candidate that the company should hire, you’re a qualified candidate, or you have those competencies, you can probably wing it to some extent, but there has to be some preparation, or it’s going to be pretty choppy, right?

Chris: Yes, absolutely. You could go through and look at a competency model and understand what those attributes were that the company’s looking for, and that’s fine, but it doesn’t help the candidate prepare that much.

What I would say to prepare is, to go through and think about, in the particular roles you’ve been in, what you’ve done well. Go back through and think of those questions of, what were your critical successes when you were at XYZ Company? And it may be a particular win, or a big sale that you encountered. It may be the development of a new tool that you introduced within the region that you were in, and everyone utilized this tool, and it was adopted as a best practice.

What I’m saying is, I want you to go through, go back, and reflect about some of the things that you’ve done, and think about the key successes that you’ve had in your career. I want you to go through, and jot down, very specifically — I want you to think about telling the story — who was involved, the time sequence of this, what did you think about, what were your actions, what was the next step, what was the step after that, what was the resulting outcome? If you had to do it again, how would you do it?

I want you to think about evolving these situations in your mind, so when you go in there, you have tip of the tongue fluency relative to some of the successes that you’ve had in your career.

We’re all trying to find successful people, and most of the questions are trying to draw out what’s made you successful. All I’m saying is, crystallize your messaging, and be very thoughtful about the approach that you take, relative to talking about the particular successes.

Peggy: Now, one thing that we had talked about the other day, when we were talking about speaking on this audio for these listeners, was that perhaps you could even look at tailoring a brag book that would allow you to be even more effective in the behavioral event interview.

What advice would you give candidates on that topic?

Chris: Well, I think the utilization of a pitch book, or an I love me book, or brag book — whatever we want to call it — I really appreciate that, because it shows a lot of effort from the candidate, and I love the level of detail that people put into it.

I think it’s great for people to come in and show letters of accomplishment and awards. That’s all fantastic and I love to see it. But really, when I go through and I start asking these questions, trying to drive to achievement drive, Tell me about the biggest win you’ve ever had, a very open-ended question, wouldn’t it be nice if you had that story crystallized? Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a couple of slides where you went through, and you spoke about it?

Certainly, I’m not asking in any way, ever, to go through and violate any confidentiality, or anything like that, but I’d really like to understand and see, more from a flow standpoint, in a little bit more detail, for you to tell that story. If you can tell that story with examples and so forth, relevant firsthand examples that are in front of me, that’s very impactful.

Peggy: A lot of candidates are very nervous about changing the brag book as they understand that it should be. I had a candidate earlier this week that brought her brag book. It was like a five-pound gorilla. It was huge. It was beautifully done. It had different sections. She’d even had it bound at Kinkos.

But none of the information in it was created by her. It was copies of awards or attagirl, attaboy emails that say how wonderful you did on a specific project, a specific customer, or whatever. It had ranking sheets and maybe a phase done of financial proposals — they’ll put that in there. But most candidates are very nervous about adding to the brag book.

But you’re saying, “Hey, look. If you know you’re going to go into a behavioral event interview — and maybe it doesn’t even matter if you’re not going into a behavioral event interview — wouldn’t any manager appreciate the opportunity to really see your thought process and your strategy, and how you executed on that, in a way that really does much more than you can ever do, within the résumé format.”

Are you okay with adding additional slides to your brag book that tell stories about you?

Chris: That’s what I want to see. Yes, I do want to see history of accomplishments through performance reviews and stack rankings …

Peggy: The normal, right?

Chris: Of course, right. But I also want to see what makes you tick. When you tell me that story about why you’ve been successful, and you go through and you isolate that down to a couple of key chapters for me, go through in detail: really tell me why, and if you have examples to share or things that you’ve done.

Maybe you’re one of these people, as a capital rep, you’re just so creative when it comes to follow-up with customers, and you go the extra mile through communications, written communications. Gosh, can you share some of that with me? I’d love to see your writing style, and things that you’ve done in order to be successful, and what helped you be successful in that situation.

That is what I think is very impactful, and that is what makes for a very compelling tool when you go through the process of a behavioral event interview, because it supports and it backs up the story that you’re telling. You then say, Here it is, right here, and let me walk you through this particular situation.

Once again, the candidate always has to be careful about the balancing of what’s confidential information and what’s not.

Peggy: Sure, but most managers don’t want you to share confidential information, anyway. Like you said, you don’t want them to share anything like that with you, and I can tell you that none of my managers want a candidate to share something that’s inappropriate. No manager wants that.

And in fact, I hate to point this out, but since our listeners are these interviewers, you need to understand that if you have a manager that’s wanting that kind of information or is pursuing that kind of information, that may mean that manager, on your level of competencies, is low in integrity and you might not want to go to work for him.

Chris: That’s exactly right, and that’s a good point. Common sense prevails.

Just think about building out that story — that’s all I’m trying to tell you — with supporting documentation, so one can go back and look at recreating your success and how that particular success occurred.

Peggy: That’s great.

Well, Chris, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to the audience about this. I know they’re going to value this, as well. The behavioral event interview is a little scary to job seekers.

I think it’s scary because the questions are very open-ended, and there are some questions that you are asked, that you can’t really remember, or think of an appropriate story or action that happened, because there are so many of these questions. There must be a thousand of these open-ended type questions that can get you to this place.

So I think candidates are very intimidated by that. But doing the things that you said in the brag book, thinking about your successes, thinking about your failures, thinking through the stories, and understanding that this interviewer is not just asking you for that answer. He’s really asking you to open up your mind and share with him your thought process, your strategy, and your execution.

Chris: That’s exactly right. I would encourage everyone listening, there’s a great book out there, written by a fellow by the name of Bradford Smart, and the book is called Topgrading. It was on the business bestseller list a few years back. It goes through and it talks about not only topgrading an organization, but it talks about the behavioral event interview. They use a term called CIDS, which stands for chronological in-depth survey. But essentially it’s the BEI, and I’d really encourage everyone to go through and pick up that book.

Certainly as a manager, you absolutely need to read that book. But as a candidate, they have a guide in the back of that book that walks through and talks about the interviewing process, and you should understand it.

I’ll say one point to finish, Peggy. As we’re going through and looking at different competencies, the one thing we didn’t talk about is, oftentimes, candidates are brought in and they meet with two, three, four or five people in the process of an interview.

Typically what will occur is that interviewing team will go through and split up different competencies, with each trying to look at a different unique set of competencies. What you’ll almost always see is the overlap of one or two critical competencies, so different managers can go through, and at the end of the day, go back and say, “Hey, I focused on achievement drive. I know you focused on achievement drive, as well. Let’s go through and talk about this situation.”

They will go through, and they will openly talk and unravel the stories, and the novel, and the chapters, and so forth, that was told about the particular successes. That’s why I say, tip of the tongue fluency, the ability to be consistent in telling your story and really getting to the root of it is important, because all of these themes will come together, and at the end of the day, when the interviewing team gets together, they’ll have the full picture of the key competencies for that candidate.

Peggy: Well, great. Chris, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today. I’ll get this up on my blog as soon as possible for the job seekers out there and the managers. I think there’s a lot of value for both of those sets of groups in this discussion that we just had.

So I want to thank you, once again. I am Peggy McKee, the Medical Sales Recruiter, and my website is www.phcconsulting.com.



Written by Peggy McKee - the medical sales recruiter
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5 Responses to “Transcript: Chris Norris describes the BEI (behavioral event interview)”

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