Behavioral Interviews Surface the Qualified Candidates Who Can't Describe Their Work

The first cut in most hiring processes runs on how well a candidate writes about themselves. Some of the capability an employer is hiring for never surfaces in the document being screened.

Susan Newman is Executive Director of school2life, a Chicago organization that works with students, recent graduates, and mid-career professionals on how to present their experience to employers. She also teaches a career preparation course at Columbia College Chicago, and before school2life she managed national campaigns and accounts at Leo Burnett and Omnicom Group. Two decades of coaching candidates on one side of the process and advising organizations on the other have convinced her the fix belongs with employers.

"Employers need to be asking different questions. Not what do you have, but what have you done, and what can you do," Newman says. The problem carries past the resume. The posting asks for required experience and the interview tends to follow it, so work outside that frame surfaces only when a candidate brings it forward.

The question employers skip

Newman calls the missing piece professional fluency. She defines it as the ability to take work a person has already done and explain why it matters for the job they want. "If you can't talk about how what you've done is relevant and applicable, then we have a huge gap," she says.

The candidates who get filtered out this way aren't the unqualified ones. They've done the work and can't put it into words on their own. Early-career candidates show the pattern most clearly, because they often don't recognize which of their experiences count. "They don't even understand the value of all the experiences they've had. So how can they possibly convey that?" Newman notes. The same thing happens with senior people, who undersell a project or report a result without saying what they did on it. It's the missing step that has stalled skills-first hiring more broadly, where employers dropped the degree requirement without putting a structured way to test for skill in its place.

A behavioral interview closes it by asking directly. The candidate walks through one situation they've handled, what they did, and how it turned out, and that answer gets scored against the same criteria used for everyone else in the running. "The behavioral interview cites specific instances to understand how they'll work in the future based on how they've worked in the past," Newman says. Structured interviews, where the questions and the scoring are set in advance, rank as the strongest predictor of job performance among the selection methods researchers have measured.

Starting with the job description

Job descriptions ask for years of experience and coursework. The people writing them usually know what the job takes, and that part rarely makes it onto the page. "For those of us that have been in business for a while and see a lot of candidates, we actually know what the skills are necessary to execute the roles in discussion," Newman says.

Take a role supporting a demanding client. Staffing it takes someone who can stay calm, communicate under pressure, and make decisions without checking in on every one. A posting that asks for five years of account experience is a rough stand-in for all of that, and it leaves candidates guessing at what to put forward.

The pressure to sort quickly keeps rising. AI tools let a candidate apply to dozens of jobs in the time it used to take to apply to one, and what lands in a recruiter's queue now reads much the same from one applicant to the next. Judging people on how they write about themselves gets less reliable when most of the writing comes from the same handful of tools.

Where the software stops

Screening software reads volume no team could get through by hand, and Newman says that's worth having. Her concern is what the tool is told to look for. A filter set to match keywords and phrasing picks the applications that read best, which repeats the mistake the rest of the process makes, only faster.

The narrowing is the part worth automating. Cutting 1,000 applications down to 100 saves time a recruiting team doesn't have. Picking the best of that 100 off what they wrote is the same guess, on a smaller pile. Let the software cut the field, then ask every finalist the same questions about work they've done and let a person decide.

Newman thinks the lasting fix starts long before anyone applies, in schools and career centers, where people either learn to explain their own work or never do. Employers have a nearer-term reason to get better at it. Many are already filling more roles internally, where they've watched the person work and don't have to guess from a document. Outside candidates don't come with that history, which is what the interview is for. "There's a lot of qualified people, and both sides are missing great conversations that move people and business forward," she says.