Mastering Competency-Based Interviews for SMEs: Key Considerations

Audience: SME's, Managers, Recruiters, HR

Companies might invest in training and adopting a specific competency-based interview model from a provider whilst others, where perhaps they don’t have budget to do this, or don't have high recruitment demands might develop this model internally using their HR or Resourcing team with input from hiring managers who are experienced in interviewing.

What is a competency model? In simple terms it's a model to assess the skills, knowledge and behaviours needed to do a job. So importantly you'll need to know what those are before engaging in competency based interviews.

If you are an organisation that wants to start to use competency based interviews you might consider the following:

Identify the Competencies

Identify the key competencies relevant to the role and to the organisation, the latter reflecting your values.  The key competencies might include teamwork, problem-solving, decision-making, communication, leadership, adaptability and others.

Create Behavioural Questions

Craft questions that prompt candidates to share specific examples of past behaviours related to the identified competencies.  These questions might begin with phrases such as “can you give me an example of a time when…” or “Describe a situation where…”.  You might want to consider creating a suite that hiring managers can select from so that they have some flexibility in the questions depending on the role. 

Behavioural Response Assessment

Interviewers assess the candidate’s responses based on the STAR method.  If you have read any of my other blogs or read future ones this method pops up a lot!  That means I like it, have experience of it and believe it adds value to the process. 

Situation (S)

Task (T)

Action (A)

Result (R)

Scoring

Scoring should be established and needs to outline the criteria for evaluating each competency.  You could consider using a simple scale of 1 to 5 to quantify the candidate’s performance on each competency. 

Objective Evaluation

It’s important that interviewers focus on observable behaviours rather than personal impressions or assumptions.  They compare the candidate’s responses to the predetermined criteria, working to avoid biases and subjectivity. 

Overall Assessment

Once all interviews are conducted, the scores for each competency are aggregated to provide an overall assessment of the candidate.  This can help in ranking candidates and making informed hiring decisions. 

Adjustments and Iterations

Be prepared to evolve your model based on your experience of using it, for example if certain competencies are consistently difficult to assess you may want to look at the questions you’re asking and change them.  Avoid and change part way through an interview process for a role as you want to ensure that all candidates are asked the same questions to keep consistent.

The competency-based interview should be designed to assess a candidates’ suitability for a specific role based on their demonstrated skills, behaviours and abilities by evaluating job-relevant skills, predicting future performance, bringing objectivity and standardisation to the process and increasing hiring success.

If you would like to know more contact us at info@reachpeakperformancecoaching.co.uk to discuss how this model could be right for your organisation and how we can support you in its design and implementation.