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I spent 21 years at Microsoft interviewing people. I asked why manhole covers are round. I asked coding questions. We used behavioral questions some of the time; a good interviewer would ask “tell me about a time” and actually listen. We also asked “tell me about yourself” and “how do you handle disagreements with others,” and then decided whether we thought the person was smart and liked them. It was not a mechanism, it was instinct. Some of us had good instincts. That is not the same thing as a scalable mechanism.
Within weeks of joining Amazon I saw the difference. Same job, completely different mechanism. You walk in with assigned leadership principles, two or three behavioral questions you actually intend to ask, and a bar you are supposed to raise. You write down what the candidate did, not how they made you feel. The debrief is about evidence. Amazon made conscious what I had been doing, inconsistently, for two decades.
Open-ended questions collect opinions and theater. Behavioral questions collect evidence.
This is not a new argument. Schmidt and Hunter summarized 85 years of selection research across 19 ways companies try to predict who will do the job. Structured interviews sit near the top, with a validity of .51. Unstructured interviews sit well below that at .38, and they wrote that carelessly run ones are worse still. Google’s hiring research says the same thing, and Laszlo Bock wrote it down: in the first minutes you make a snap judgment, then you spend the rest of the hour hunting for evidence that you were right. Psychologists call that confirmation bias. Interviewers call it “I just didn’t get a good feeling.”
Campion compared past-behavior questions to future-oriented “what would you do” questions. The past-behavior questions won. The candidate who tells you what they did is giving you data. The candidate who tells you what they would do is giving a performance.
I put all the behavioral interview questions I have collected and used over the years on the internet, so you have no excuse to not use them.
kindel.com/biq is an interview-prep tool. Select the principle you want to test and you get example questions and guidance. If you already know a listed company’s principles, pick that company and use those names. Or type the principle you care about in your own words. There are over 200 questions in it, the ones I have used and collected over the years.
Each question has hire and no-hire example sheets at Junior, Senior, and Exec. A raise-the-bar interview and a lower-the-bar interview, with a transcript, interviewer notes, and the scorecard writeup. The examples were generated from dozens of real interview notes and debriefs I anonymized and fed into an LLM with a tuned prompt.
The questions, the prompt that writes the examples, the generator, and a standalone site you can run yourself are open source at kindel/biq. kindel.com/biq is the hosted version. If you want to see exactly how a hire-level answer and a common no-hire answer get written, read the prompt. To add another company’s principles, open an issue on kindel/principles. Feel free to make it better and submit a PR.
I use it the way I learned to after Microsoft. The hiring manager assigned two or three principles and I picked two or three questions to ask per principle. When asking, I’d push the candidate to prefer a time he or she did the work over an opinion.
If you want the philosophy behind why hiring is the work, that is Hiring First. Everything Else Second. The interview craft (killing opinions and theater, becoming a bar raiser, running a debrief that is not a popularity contest) is in my training curriculum.
The bank is here: https://kindel.com/biq/. As usual, I’d be interested in hearing feedback or pushback.
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