I’m getting nervous with the proliferation of all of these AI-infused chatbots that will change life and work as we now know it. Some of them are wrong. Really wrong.
For example, I just asked Bing’s AI chatbot to describe the difference between Performance-based Hiring and traditional behavioral interviewing. The answer was not even close to being correct! Bard was slightly better but still wrong.
This is critical especially when you’re using these tools to guide your company’s hiring decisions. There’s enough bias and flawed thinking to begin with and getting bad advice is a recipe for disaster.
Now the Bing answer was quite concerning since I thought it was built on the same platform as ChatGPT, but it turned out that when I asked ChatGPT the same question I got the right answer.
In case you’re interested, here’s the right answer cut and pasted from ChatGPT.
- Focus on Performance: In Performance-based Hiring, the emphasis is on what the candidate needs to do to be successful in the role. The job description is based on Key Performance Objectives (KPOs) – clear outcomes that the person in the role should be able to achieve. Traditional behavioral interviews, on the other hand, focus more on the candidate’s past actions, behaviors, and skills without directly tying them to specific outcomes required for job success. (Note: this is the big difference that the other AI chatbots didn’t understand.)
- Past Performance Predicts Future Performance: Performance-based Hiring operates on the premise that the best predictor of future performance is past performance under similar circumstances. During the performance-based interview, candidates are asked to provide detailed examples of comparable past accomplishments. Traditional behavioral interviews typically ask candidates to describe how they behaved in past situations, but these situations may not be directly comparable to the challenges in the new role.
- Bridging the Gap: The performance-based interview is designed to bridge the gap between what’s needed to be successful on the job (the performance objectives) and the candidate’s past accomplishments. This is achieved through a series of problem-solving questions where the candidate is asked to describe how they would handle job-specific challenges. Traditional behavioral interviews don’t explicitly make this connection.
- Two-way Process: Performance-based Hiring recognizes that top candidates are evaluating the company and role just as much as the company is evaluating them. The process therefore emphasizes not just assessment but also attraction, selling the role and company to the candidate based on what motivates them. Traditional behavioral interviews may not put as much emphasis on this two-way street.
- Structured Interview Process: Performance-based Hiring uses a structured interview process, which is designed to minimize bias and ensure all candidates are assessed against the same performance criteria. While some forms of behavioral interviewing are also structured, others can be less formal and more prone to bias.
Overall, while there are similarities between Performance-based Hiring and traditional behavioral interviewing, the differences lie mainly in the emphasis on job-specific performance, problem-solving related to the role, and the recognition of hiring as a two-way process.