Behavior-based interviewing is a great tool that helps ensure you find the right people. It starts with writing down the behaviors, not the tasks, that are most important to a specific job. Managing a team, motivating people, developing under-performers, starting a line of business, engaging people in change - these all might be behaviors you're looking for. This list becomes your litmus test for selecting the right people.

The corollary of behavior-based interviewing is openended recruiting: When a position comes open, you keep searching until you find the right person, even if it means temporary hardship. Finding the right person is simply too important to warrant settling for less.

The quest to get the right people means you should always be on the lookout for talent. After all, talented people are almost by definition not looking for work. So if you want to build a great company, you're going to have to employ unusual means to get the right people on board. Recruiting and developing talent usually takes up about 25 percent of a successful leader's time.

The cost of settling for second best can be huge. First, there's the cost to ensure someone is trained properly. That's a cost you would bear in any case. But by settling for second best, you may have to spend more time training them to make sure they don't make mistakes. Maybe you spend more time checking their work. Maybe you insist on multiple signoffs on their decisions. One possibility is revising the process to make sure his or her work is reviewed by someone you trust. You begin to compromise for the sake of filling the position by adding more bureaucracy to the organization.

Now comes the higher, hidden cost. The talented people in your organization start to resent the new person. His or her mistakes must be dealt with. Maybe they have to subject themselves to the same bureaucracy. At that start this is an irritant, but it soon starts to grate. Morale suffers. Ultimately, the genuinely talented people decide to move on. This ultimately results in a damaging loss of trust. All as a consequence of not taking the time to find the right people at the start.

Here is an example of a typical interview vs. behavior-based interview.

Typical Interview:

Describe your experience in sales.

Have you ever been entrusted with managing large accounts?

Describe your greatest success.

What motivates you?

How do you handle conflicts?

Behavior-Based Interview:

This position requires a person to make five sales calls a day while traveling in a territory from Minneapolis to Atlanta. How have you managed those kinds of sales logistics in the past.

This position requires people to manage large accounts with three or four contacts inside the organization, all of whom need to say "yes" to consummate a sale. Explain your experiences making such a sale. How did you get them all to say "yes" to cause them all to say "yes"~How did you succeed in making them all say "yes"}?

We insist on people who are self-motivated. Describe your own motivations for success. What are some examples of times you went the extra mile for a client - and for your company?

Tell us how you handled a situation that made you look bad. How did you handle the situation? What did you say? What did it produce?

This position means working with an internal R&D team to help revamp our product for a new launch every year. Describe how you've successfully managed internal relationships with R&D teams to maximize the success of upgraded products?