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Posts Tagged ‘Competency’

To help you prepare for your competency interview, we have a number of example competency based interview questions. In this particular article, we focus on Communication and consider the type of questions interviewers might ask you to assess your written and verbal communication skills.

Communication Competence — What Is Being Assessed?

When asking you competency based interview questions about communication, interviewers are looking for past evidence that you:

Example Communication Competency Based Interview Questions

Take a look at these typical competency based interview questions which cover communication. In some interviews, the focus might be on verbal communication. In others, it might be on written communication. In many interviews, interviewers will be interested in both!

Other Competency Based Interview Questions

If you’d like more example competency based interview questions, we have some on Customer Service as well as many more. We also provide tips on how to prepare for competency based interview questions.

The use of Competency Based Interview Questions is becoming increasingly common and not just within the largest corporations. Smaller and medium sized companies are using these tools as a means of improving their recruitment decisions.
This method of interviewing is also called Structured Interviewing and uses Behavioral Interview techniques to assess how a candidates past performance in work related situations can be used as a predictor of future performance.
Every job can be described in terms of Competencies, which are the skills, abilities or behaviors required and some of which will be regarded as essential and others desirable.
You may see them categorized as Managerial Competencies, Individual Competencies, Analytical Competencies, Interpersonal Competencies and Motivational Competencies however the 12 most common competencies are:
Communication, Achievement, Customer Focus, Teamwork, Leadership, Planning and Organizing, Operational Awareness, Flexibility, Developing Others, Problem Solving, Analytical Thinking and Building Relationships.
These of course will vary depending on the role and the level however in the job interview, you should expect a series of Competency Based Questions exploring each competency. These are usually behavioural in nature and take the form of:
• Tell me about a time when
• Describe a situation
• Give an Example
When you give your answer the interviewer may choose to probe deeper and ask about the detail such as:
• How exactly did you do that?
• Tell me exactly what steps you took to resolve that
• What was your involvement
By investigating further the interviewer is trying to discover more about your skills as well as looking for clues which may suggest that you are exaggerating your part in the process or have created a complete fabrication.
When answering competency based interview questions we suggest that you choose answers based on real experiences that you have had and be ready to give details. Your response needs to be relevant and sufficiently detailed. Be specific and tell a story. A technique to use when answering behavioural questions is what I call iPAR:
I = Talk about the part you played in IDENTIFYING or noticing the problem
P = Describe the PROBLEM, situation or task
A = Talk about the ACTION you took
R = Describe the successful RESULT by using figures and data to illustrate the benefit to the company.
And always use “I” rather than “we”.
Prepare answers which relate to all the achievements on your resume or CV as you will surely be asked questions referring to these. You will find that you should have a sufficient stock of answers that will help you answer any competency based interview question irrespective of the style used.

With competency interviews becoming increasingly common among interviewers across the world, it’s a good idea to be prepared for when you have yours.

In this article, you’ll find out:

After this, you’ll quickly start to feel more confident, be able to deliver a great competency interview performance and land the job!

Competency interviews are designed to find out how well you performed in given situations in the past. Research shows that how you did perform in the past is a more accurate predictor of how you will perform in the future compared to asking you how you would perform.

Here’s an example:

Rather than asking: “How would you cope if you were given too much work to do” , interviewers might ask you: “Tell me about the last time you had too much work to do in a day”. You see your interviewers want to know what you did in that scenario, why you did it and what the result was.

Before the interview, the recruiters study the job description and pick out the key skills, attributes etc.. that they think a successful candidate needs. They simply draft interview questions designed to find out if you are have these skills and attributes. The evidence is in what you did in the past.

Here’s what we mean: Suppose the job calls for a person who can deal with difficult customers, in a complaints department, let’s say. The interviewers will devise questions designed to find out how well you dealt with difficult customers before. The sort of things they will want to know are how you felt, what decisions/actions you took and the outcome of those actions. Some might even want to know what you would change about what you did.

On the whole, interviewers look for positive indicators that you are competent at the things they consider important in the job. But they also look for negative factors which will reduce the effectiveness of your answer. Negative indicators include not asking for help when appropriate, seeing changes or challenges as obstacles and reacting to things personally.

To fully understand how you behaved before, interviewers often want answers to the following 4 key components, often called STAR.

Situation or Task Did the candidate explain the task or situation that they were involved in?

Action Did they explain what they did, exactly, in relation to the task or situation?

Result Did they explain the results of their actions?

If your answers don’t give enough information, some interviewers will follow up with additional questions, like:

To help you get ready for competency based interviews, here are 5 things you should do:

Here are some example competency interview questions.