Motivation-Based Interviewing

To hire high performers consistently, organizations need better tools.

An organization’s success depends on hiring high performers. But at many organizations, hiring personnel lack training in interviewing and use faulty behavior-based techniques. They also tend to equate candidates’ skill level with performance and assume past behavior predicts future behavior. All of this hampers the quality of hiring. But learning the qualities that high performers have in common can help you identify and hire them more consistently.

The primary quality that predicts performance? Motivation. High performers possess – or can gain – the skills and experience they need to do their jobs, but they set themselves apart because they love their work and draw on self-motivation to do it well. When you focus primarily on candidates’ skills, you might learn which skills they possess and their proficiency levels, but you’ll learn nothing about whether potential hires will exert the initiative to use them well.

Accordingly, interviewers can greatly improve their odds of hiring high performers by using Motivation-Based Interviewing (MBI). When you use MBI...