Dr. Eric Frazer is a forensic psychologist and author of The Psychology of Top Talent . He holds a part-time faculty appointment at Yale University’s School of Medicine and has spent over 20 years working as a forensic psychologist specializing in psychological evaluations and expert testimony.
In 2018, he was asked by a corporate executive to give a workshop for his team on how to more effectively interview and make better hiring decisions. His current leadership coaching practice evolved naturally from the work he’d done over the years using psychological assessments and predicting performance.
In his book, he reveals his research into the psychology of top performers: how they think, how they act, and how they solve the world’s most complex problems. His coaching practice helps managers hire and retain top talent and optimize their team’s performance.
With the right interview techniques and training, managers can increase sales, improve customer service, keep their employees more engaged and reduce team conflict. “When I coach an individual,” he says, “I find that 90 percent of the issues are connected to their communication style. They’re having trouble being assertive or being a good listener. They’re causing or having trouble resolving conflicts. I help them build self-awareness so they can see and head off behaviors that aren’t working for them in the current situation.”
As any psychologist will tell you, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Interviewers and hiring managers are tasked with learning enough about a candidate’s past behavior so they can predict how successful they’ll be in a new role. Dr. Frazer says that when looking at past accomplishments to gauge how effort was applied and successfully executed, there are three things to consider:
- What evidence is there that they did the work?
- How did they schedule the workflow to meet deadlines and objectives?
- How did they tolerate the discomforts from obstacles and solve conflicts that emerged?
Behavioral based interviewing is a technique interviewers use to get candidates to provide more information about what’s on their resume. In a face-to-face discussion, you can ask follow-on questions. You can ask what they think were the keys to success. What didn’t go well? What did you learn from it? How did you adapt?
But not all behavior is equal when it comes to predicting the future. Karen Franklin, Ph.D., writing for Psychology Today, says “high-frequency, habitual behaviors are more predictive than infrequent behaviors.” That’s why Behavioral Interview questions should include two types of examples: one that asks about how a candidate usually handles a common situation, and one that asks for a story about a specific time the candidate handled a situation.
Dr. Frazer also recommends that a hiring manager develop tools for evaluating intangibles that they know will make someone successful in the position. He suggests that the leadership team determines a set of necessary soft-skills (3 – 5) that are predictors of success. They might include empathy, good communication and listening skills, or curiosity, determination, or optimism, for example.
The interviewer asks an open-ended question about this trait or behavior: “Tell me how you might tailor your communication differently when talking to your peers versus speaking to a manager or a customer.” This gives the candidate a chance to demonstrate their skill and self-awareness. Then the interviewer follows up by asking for a specific example. “Can you tell me about a specific situation in the past few months where you employed these different styles?”
Red flags that interviewers should be on the lookout for are any sign of defensiveness (“this customer was always difficult, complaining about the service”) or vagueness – not being able to come up with specific examples of behavior.
After the interview, candidates can be ranked on each of the success traits as being present, partially present, or absent. When a candidate demonstrates most of the success traits in addition to the required skills and experience, you can be more confident that they’ll be a good fit for the team.
Find more about Dr. Frazer at his LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drericfrazer/
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