What is Motivation-Based Interviewing (or MBI)?

MBI is an effective interviewing methodology for assessing an applicant's motivation and for identifying High Achievers. It can be used for hiring any position, it requires no additional interviewing time and it's easy to learn.

Traditional behavior-based interviewing does a reasonable job of assessing the candidate's skills, but it is not effective as a predictor of future performance, because it fails to take motivation into account. Think of skill as being analogous to a car. Think of motivation as fuel. A car without fuel runs great - going downhill. Using MBI is a more effective way to assess a candidate in terms of skill and motivation which enables you, the interviewer, to more accurately predict what kind of results you can expect that person to achieve. Taught in multiple languages and used around the world, MBI is all about hiring High Performers.

♦ First, let's start out with a definition of a "High Performer". These are ordinary people who are able to achieve extraordinary results. For interviewers to accurately single out the High Performers from other applicants, they must know why these employees are willing to go above and beyond while others aren't. The answer isn't their 'skill'. Skill simply means a person can do the job. It doesn't necessarily mean they will do it better than any one else.

It is important to understand where the employee selection process is going awry and fix it. Untrained interviewers, ineffective interview questions and hiring decisions based on skill level alone are the most common reasons bad hires happen. Research has found that ALL High Performers share 3 components, skill being one of them and the only one that can be added or changed AFTER the hire. That means...if you want a highly motivated team, or an entire organization, you have to hire highly motivated people.

A much better predictor of future job performance and achievement is an applicant's 'attitude'. What exactly is attitude? Attitude is how effectively, or ineffectively, a person responds to obstacles or difficult challenges. Let's face it, every job has it's challenges! It can be a difficult co-worker or customer, an insufficient budget, not enough time, being understaffed, too much competition, insufficient knowledge, something that breaks down...the list is truly endless. Obstacles are a normal part of getting to any goal and if an employee isn't good at overcoming these obstacles, then they aren't going to be good at achieving goals.

What makes an obstacle difficult to overcome is that there doesn't appear to be a solution - initially.  When a person encounters a roadblock, it's not their skill that determines whether they move forward. Rather, it's their attitude and their passion. These components determine how much  effort will be put forth to solve the problem. When someone makes up their mind that a goal is impossible to achieve or deems an obstacle to be insurmountable, they won't relentlessly pursue the goal like a true High Performer would. High Performers have an attitude that is conducive to achieving goals as well as the passion that drives them to do it. Many applicants who are NOT High Performers are interview-savvy. These applicants withhold information but interviewers who use motivation-based interviewing know exactly how to expose it. MBI is the only interviewing methodology with built-in skill, attitude and passion assessment components.