We provide competency-based behavioral interviewing training for interview teams including hiring managers, recruiters, and interviewers.

Kennedy's Column

Behavioral Interviewing Lessons From a 16 Year Old

An effective interview progresses from knowing what someone did to understanding how and why he or she did it. This second level of understanding adds value to any interview and is the basic premise behind behavior-based interviewing. In our Effective Interviewing!® training, we dramatize this idea by the real life example of Daryl Bernstein, an enterprising sixteen year old who wrote Better Than a Lemonade Stand - Small Business Ideas for Kids and is now on a national book tour.

I had the opportunity to meet Daryl at an entrepreneurs conference in Palm Springs last month, where he was one of the keynote speakers, and lived up to all my expectations based on his profile which I read in the Wall Street Journal. Let's take a look at how Daryl brings home the idea that understanding the how and why adds the depth to interviewing that we need in order to fully understand any candidate.

WHAT Daryl did - at the age of sixteen - wrote a book on fifty creative and original ideas on how kids can make money today. That feat itself tells us a lot about Daryl. But we learn even more by considering HOW and WHY he wrote the book.

HOW: He completed his book in four months by getting up every morning at 3:00 a.m. and writing until it was time for school.

WHY: He wrote the book to earn enough money for his favorite hobby - investing in the stocks, bonds, and options markets.

Now, knowing the how and why of Daryl's behavior, some of you might be interested in recruiting him in about five years, as many of our financial service organizations are. It's easy to see that moving beyond the WHAT to the HOW and WHY of a person's behavior provides valuable information for any interviewer

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