The Complete Guide to Competency-Based Interviews
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
In an increasingly automated digital world where advanced tools are being used to apply en masse to open job offers, many organizations are turning to specialized recruitment partners to augment their hiring processes. Especially in certain spheres like sustainable development, companies are facing unique challenges as they are looking to hire professionals with more than just strong technical and leadership competencies, but also share a deep commitment to the mission and making a positive social impact.
As such, competency-based interviews have become the gold standard in modern recruitment. Just as you might expect, what differentiates a competency-based interview from other hiring techniques is that they have an increased focus on assessing key competencies and how candidates have demonstrated them in the past.
This type of hiring interview comes with several benefits, including greater transparency and objectivity as interviewers follow a standardized guide to make their assessments, all candidates for a given role are assessed consistently and equally, and research has shown that competency-based interviews are highly effective in predicting future job performance.
In this article, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about competency-based interviews, including their advantages, structure, how to prepare for them (if you’re a candidate), and how your organization can make the most of them (if you’re hiring).
Understanding Competency-Based Interviews
It really wasn’t that long ago when most candidates for an open role were assessed purely based on their technical skills, career path, and educational accomplishments. However, particularly in industries like sustainable development, it became clear that the best employees were those who were able to showcase their previous achievements when structured by core competency. This is different from other interview techniques, such as measuring general or psychological personality traits or relying on hypothetical scenarios.
Some of the most common competencies that organizations assess in a competency-based interview include:
Leadership
Teamwork/Cooperation
Multicultural communication
Problem-solving
Adaptability/Flexibility
There are many reasons why organizations prefer to conduct competency-based assessments during the interviewing process. For starters, they operate in a standardized and transparent manner as all candidates are assessed in the same way, a key objective for NGOs, government agencies, and other organizations with a commitment to fairness and equality.
Another benefit to competency-based interviews is that they help reduce the chance of unconscious biases creeping into the hiring process, as they focus exclusively on real examples from a candidate’s past job experience rather than made-up hypothetical scenarios. Furthermore, because all candidates are being assessed on the same competencies for a given role, this means that all candidates for that role are assessed in a consistent manner.
But perhaps the greatest advantage in using competency-based assessments in the hiring process is that past behavior has been conclusively proven to have a strong positive correlation with future job performance. In other words, someone with demonstrated previous experience at being good at a competency like leadership is almost certainly going to continue to be good at it in their next role as well.
Preparing for a Competency-Based Interview (for candidates)
For any candidate hoping to maximize their chances of being favorably assessed during a competency-based interview, the key is to be prepared for what to expect and how to structure your answers.
For starters, the advertisement for the open role or job description should list the key competencies that the hiring organization will require you to demonstrate.
For example, when being assessed on your teamwork and cooperation skills, you might be asked something like:
Tell me about a time when you had to work closely with your colleagues to meet an urgent deadline.
Can you give me an example of how you overcame difficulties with teamwork misalignments at your previous job?
Could you describe a time when you had to help a colleague finish some work that they couldn’t complete?
Generally speaking, candidates will be asked to respond using the STAR method:
Situation - The problem faced.
Task - What your responsibility was.
Action - What you did to fix the problem.
Result - The outcome as well as lessons learned.
For example, using the earlier question about meeting an urgent deadline, you might respond:
Situation - My unit had to work closely together in order to deliver a report in order to meet a key deadline.
Task - I had to ensure that the report contained all the required components, including two graphs and seven subsections.
Action - I reached out to my colleagues to make sure they each understood what components they each needed to contribute. As the deadline approached, I carefully monitored each component to make sure they all came together smoothly in the final report.
Result - The report was completed and turned in on time. Lessons learned include budgeting additional time to prepare future reports.
Obviously, the above scenario is only meant to serve as a loose framework for how competency-based interview questions are formulated and answered, but real interviews are very similar.
When preparing for such an interview, it is highly recommended that you build a strong portfolio ahead of time of real-life examples of how you demonstrated the key competencies required for the role. Then you’ll be ready to deliver a coherent and substantive example during the interviewing process.
Common pitfalls to avoid include providing vague or overly generalized answers instead of specific, detailed ones. It’s also a really good idea to practice delivering concise STAR-structured stories by rehearsing them aloud, ideally with feedback from someone else, like a mentor through a mock interview.
For best results, it is also recommended that candidates seize the opportunity to ask thoughtful questions of the employer at the end of the interviews, ones that demonstrate genuine interest in the role. For example, in terms of teamwork, you might ask:
Can you describe a recent project where the unit had to demonstrate strong teamwork skills in order to achieve a positive outcome?
How does your organization measure success for teamwork in day-to-day performance?
To what degree does teamwork matter in accomplishing the organization’s goals?
Not only will asking these kinds of questions help you, the candidate, assess culture fit for the role, but it will also signify to the employer that you are proactive, reflective, and committed to contributing effectively to the organization.
Conducting Effective Competency-Based Interviews (for employers)
Competency-based interviews are not just the gold standard in many industries; they are continuing to evolve rapidly in terms of structure, with virtual or remote formats becoming increasingly common due to their flexibility, reduced costs, and greater access to a broader global talent pool.
Best practices for conducting an effective competency-based interview include:
A clear and consistent structure to ensure fairness.
Using a standardized interview guide that directs how to measure the key competencies for the role.
3-5 targeted questions per competency, followed by suggested probing follow-up questions.
Specific time allotments for each competency (e.g., 10-15 minutes per key competency).
Concluding with a short post-interview debrief amongst the hiring panel for discussion and calibration of the candidate’s scores.
Many organizations prefer to outsource the process to companies that specialize in conducting competency-based interviews, such as DevelopmentPeople. As part of the DevelopmentAid family of companies with two decades of experience in working within the sustainable development sphere, DevelopmentPeople offers organizations a full suite of recruitment tools and services, including candidate screening, onboarding, and interviewing.
By outsourcing the interviewing process to experienced professionals such as DevelopmentPeople, your organization will maximize its chances of finding the right candidate with demonstrated capabilities in the core competencies that you need to fulfill your business objectives and mission.
Best Practices, Trends, and Expert Insights
For organizations, best practices include maximizing accountability and effectiveness using a pre-formatted standardized guide, an objective method of scoring a candidate’s answer, and a clear structure to efficiently identify suitable candidates for open roles who will have a high likelihood of contributing effectively.
For candidates, best practices include understanding the STAR format of providing responses, building a portfolio of examples of previous demonstrations of where you executed core competencies, and following up the interview with questions to better assess culture fit and prove your ability to meaningfully contribute.
Trends in the industry include a greater reliance on remote formats for interviewing as well as the use of AI tools to provide instant and objective analysis of a candidate’s responses, suggest targeted follow-up questions, and automatically score a candidate via a predefined rubric.
In an age when applications for open roles can be overwhelmingly numerous, expert insight into the competency-based interviewing process is essential for effectively measuring the return on investment (ROI) for such a process. Key costs now include interviewer training, the development of objective competency frameworks and scoring rubrics, the time spent on conducting interviews, as well as the need for supporting tools and technology.
As such, the value of outsourcing a competency-based interviewing process to a third-party organization like DevelopmentPeople results in greater value for organizations through productivity gains, positive revenue impact from hiring better-performing candidates, and cost savings realized from lower attrition rates.
If you’d like to find out more about how DevelopmentPeople can help you achieve better ROI on hiring candidates through a competency-based interview process, reach out and contact us today.
