Competency Interview – How To Succeed At Competency Interviews

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:

• What competency interviews are
• What interviewers look for
• How you can prepare
• Where to go for typical competency questions

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 – What Are They?

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.

What Do Interviewers Want In Competency Interview Answers?

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:

• What was your particular role in this?
• What obstacles did you overcome?
• Why exactly did you take that action?
• What made you reach that decision?
• How did you feel about that?
• Who came up with that idea?
• What precisely was the outcome/result?
• What feedback did you get?
• How would you behave differently if it happened again?

Competency Interviews – How To Prepare

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

1. Review  the job ad
2. Note down the knowledge, skills and attributes the employer is looking for. Are they looking for a good communicator, someone with initiative, or someone with excellent customer service skills and so on
3. Come up with at least 1 example of where you’ve demonstrated each of the things you noted down in step 2
4. Write about the example/s in step 3. For every one, describe the circumstances, how you were feeling, what action your took, why you took it and the results
5. Read your notes back to yourself or someone else. Think of extra questions your interviewers might ask about each example. Very often your interviewers want to know more than you expect!

Here are some example competency interview questions.