Past behavior and performance are our best predictors of future behavior and performance. This truism is the basis for most employment screening. This does not mean that people cannot change work habits or behaviors; they often do. However, we can look to past behavior and see how and when these changes take place. A selection process, including an interview, must be based on assessment of the applicants ability to perform the essential functions of a position. With student jobs, assessing current skills or specific work experience may be less important factors than learning about behaviors that are transferable to the job.
In analyzing your student jobs, there are a number of ways to determine which work behaviors are the most critical. Consider past employees. What made them successful in carrying out job duties? If you had less than stellar student workers, what behaviors were they lacking? Some typical behaviors that are critical to many jobs include: ability to follow through; ability to collaborate and work as a member of a team; good customer relations skills; problem-solving skills; creativity; ability to communicate effectively with individuals from diverse backgrounds and cultures.
What techniques do you use in determining work behaviors that are important for success in a student job? Which behaviors have you identified to use in evaluating potential student employees?
Once you identify the behaviors that you want to evaluate, the next step is to create interview questions. These may be retrospective: “Tell me about a time when you participated as a member of a team to ___.” Or they may be prospective: “In this position, you would be working with a team of four other workers to ____. What would you do if one member of the team disagreed with an action that you and others had decided upon?” A retrospective question requires the applicant to articulate how they used certain behaviors in the past. A prospective question requires the applicant to apply their past behavior and experiences to typical situations that may occur on the job in the future.
As always, you will want to make sure that you are able to articulate the types of behaviors you are asking about. In the example above, you would first want to identify the elements of being an effective team member and then consider interview responses as a way to assess whether the applicant demonstrates these.
Hopefully you can share your success in designing interview questions with your campus colleagues. What questions have you found to be successful in screening the work behaviors of potential student employees? Are there questions that you have tried using that you would recommend others to avoid?
In future entries, we can explore other methods beyond interviews to assess the qualifications of potential student employees.
* Comment has been edited by administrator.
Quote from original submission:
Some typical behaviors that are critical to many jobs include: ability to follow through; ability to collaborate and work as a member of a team; good customer relations skills; problem-solving skills; creativity; ability to communicate effectively with individuals from diverse backgrounds and cultures.
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While the subsequent discussion of questions is about behavioral demonstrations, I think it’s worth noting that the things listed here aren’t behaviors; they’re skills. The difference is that an ability is whether you CAN and a behavior is whether you DO. The reason this is an important distinction is that a person can have all the skills in the world, but without the behaviors associated with applying them in the way(s) you want, that doesn’t make them a good employee. I think that if you write them out as skills on a job description without thinking about what behaviors demonstrate these skills, then when it comes time to talk about actual behaviors, there has to be this translation process and that’s a place where there can be confusion.
Example: “ability to follow through” is an ability/skill; “following through” is a behavior, and can be described (and then evaluated, when the time comes) some different ways:
Completes assigned tasks by deadlines.
Communicates clearly where a project stands, if it is to be passed along through several fellows (thereby causing the project to be something that will continue moving along)
Checks upon completion that a task has been performed correctly/Checks for feedback or verification that work is correct.
What you’re asking in a behavior based interview isn’t whether the potential student employee CAN leave notes; you’re asking whether he does, and you’re asking him to relate to you a story about doing so, wherein he will probably tell you whether it was or wasn’t important to him to do so.
One of the things I’ve tried to do in this regard is to (try to) make sure that when I ask my students and staff to “be” a particular way, I am asking them to do something that I can see either physically or by looking at their work or listening to their words. “Ability to use a welcoming manner with customers” might become “Greets customers with a smile;” “Ability to communicate effectively with a diverse population” might become “Consistently checks for understanding when interacting with users whose language or cultural approach is different.” And then once I’ve put it as a behavior in the first place, it’s easier for me to write out the questions about whether someone exhibits these behaviors, because I know what the behaviors are. I know using traits or characteristics (abilities and skills) is typical on a job description, so both things have their places, but I think being clear about the difference is useful, is what I’m saying.
You have brought up some good points about how we can observe these positive behaviors in a work setting. It will be interesting to hear from you, and others, about questions that have been effective in interviews with students to determine their demeanor on the job (i.e., “Greets customers with a smile” or “Consistently checks for understanding when interacting with users whose language or cultural approach is different”?)
My current student worker is freshly from India and works in my office. He’s quite awesome as far as tasks, but is sometimes hard to understand. Of course, there are cultural differences in daily interactions as well. At first it was an issue and people in the department wondered if I made the right choice in hiring him, but now they all see that his responsiveness and attentiveness to his job makes him invaluable. They know that when they ask him to do something, they can rest assured it is going to get done and then he lets them know when he’s completed the task.
So, in this case, I decided to try to not intervene between him and the other people in the department. It has turned out very well. His speech has also slowed down and others can understand him better, so it seems like everyone involved has grown accustomed to each other as time has passed.
My group has been successful in using open-ended questions with increasingly difficult follow-ups when we hire students who perform technical tasks.
First, we let the student who we are interviewing know that we are going to do this to them. Most students feel like they’ve failed if they have to say, “I don’t know” in an interview, so we tell them up front that we will ask a series of questions that will end with them saying, “I don’t know.”
We then ask a broad question of a technical nature, such as, “A customer brings you a laptop that’s only 6 months old but it’s running really slowly now. What would you do?”
If the interviewee answers correctly (or even somewhat correctly), we ask for more details: “You said it might be malware. How would you go about checking that?”
This type of questioning demonstrates the student’s thought process and troubleshooting skills, and sometimes reveal how he or she would interact with customers. (We ask customer service questions separately, as well.)
Has anyone used an Assessment Center approach to checking behaviors? I know they take time to set up, but if thought goes into such an experience, the student can get a sense of the work they will be doing, in the context of the multi-tasking that so often occurs.
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) defines an Assessment Center as:
Assessment center
A testing location where a candidate being considered for assignment or promotion to managerial or executive-level position is rated by a team of experienced evaluators over a series of days using standardized activities, games and other simulations to predict the candidate’s future job performance.