Storytelling in the Selection Interview? How Applicants Respond to Past Behavior Questions

Abstract

Purpose Increased use of past behavior questions makes it important to understand applicants' responses. Past behavior questions are designed to elicit stories from applicants. Four research questions were addressed: How do applicants respond to past behavior questions, in particular, how frequent are stories? When applicants produce stories, what narrative elements do they contain? Is story production related to applicants' characteristics? Do responses affect interview outcomes? Design/Methodology/Approach Using a database of 62 real job interviews, the prevalence of five types of applicants' response to past behavior questions were analyzed: story, pseudo-story, exemplification, value/opinion, and self-description. We also coded the narrative content of stories, distinguishing between situations, tasks/actions, and results. We analyzed relations between applicant characteristics (gender, age, personality, self-reported communication and persuasion skills, general mental ability) and response type. We used hierarchical multiple regression to predict hiring recommendations from response type. Findings Stories were only produced 23 % of the time. Stories featured more narrative elements related to situations than tasks, actions, or results. General mental ability and conscientiousness affected response types, and men produced more stories than women. There were differences in the storytelling rate according to the type of competency. Stories and pseudo-stories increased hiring recommendations, and self-descriptions decreased them.Originality/Value Behavioral interviews may not be conducive to storytelling. Recruiters respond positively to narrative responses. More research is needed on storytelling in the selection interview, and recruiters and applicants might need training on how to encourage and tell accurate and representative stories.

Disfluent Responses to Job Interview Questions and What They Entail

“…Given that past-behavior questions project narrative responses, one might expect that candidates most often respond to them by telling stories. There are little data on this issue, but one study found that in fact only 23% of responses to past-behavior questions are stories (Bangerter, Corvalan, & Cavin, 2014). Two main problems could prevent candidates from producing narrative responses.…”

“…We reanalyzed the data by measuring candidates' pause durations between recruiters' question offset and candidates' response onset and using them as predictors of response type (Research Question 1) and recruiter hiring recommendations (Research Question 2). In investigating Research Question 2 we controlled for a range of ancillary variables (e.g., personality, general mental ability [GMA], and the like) using data available from the original study and from Bangerter et al (2014), who investigated the impact of different response types on hiring recommendations controlling for the abovementioned ancillary variables and found that response types influenced hiring recommendations, for example, narrative responses were associated with better hiring recommendations. Research Question 2 goes beyond Bangerter et al (2014) by controlling for the same ancillary variables and response type to test the additional effect of delays.…”

“…We coded candidates' initial responses in two categories, narrative response and non-narrative response. These two categories were obtained by collapsing five different response types distinguished in Bangerter et al (2014). Narrative responses feature responses about particular episodes or sets of episodes featuring candidate actions described more or less concretely.…”

“…They collapse across stories, pseudo-stories, and exemplifications. A story was defined by Bangerter et al, (2014) as a set of events related to a unique past episode, characterized by a unity of time or action, which constituents often linked by temporal markers (e.g., then). A pseudo-story was defined as a description of a generic episode or recurrent set of similar episodes, without unity of time or action.…”

The Interactive Influence of Ambition and Sociability on Performance in a Behavior Description Interview

“…The BDI is unique among interview types given its exclusive focus on description of past experiences, responses that should be more extensive and verbally involved given that they typically include a description of the context and the problem, the actions taken, and the outcome of those actions. Some have even described the BDI process as akin to storytelling (Bangerter, Corvalan, & Cavin, 2014). Being talkative and gregarious (the sociability aspect) by itself should not necessarily translate into more effective reporting of experiences and, in fact, could be counterproductive.…”