In an interview situation you may be faced with competency based questions, which at first may seem a little daunting, and can potentially be fairly disastrous in you don’t know how to make the most of your answer. However, using the right technique this type of questioning at interview actually gives you an excellent opportunity to provide evidence of your suitability to the job. In this article I will explain what a competency based question is, why interviewers use this technique and how these questions can be easily and effectively answered. The aim of this article is to help you prepare and structure your responses, make the best use of the opportunity you have to demonstrate your suitability and very importantly to avoid the dreaded nervous rambling response!
What is a Competency Based Question?
Competency based questioning is a technique used by interviewers to assess your suitability to the job you have applied for, by using questions based on the competencies required to perform the job. These competencies will relate to the job role and the values of the company. Key competencies are specific skills you need for the job, i.e. decision making, leadership, problem solving, conflict resolution, customer service skills, management, project management, budgetary control or team working.
Why do Interviewers use Competency Based Interview Questions?
Faced with perhaps 6 good candidates who on paper may all have similar or equal attributes for the job, the hiring manager will have to make a decision based on a meeting with the candidates often lasting no more than an hour. The outcome of this meeting will be the appointment of one of the candidates. The hope is that the successful candidate will become a valuable and long lasting member of their staff. This person will be able to fulfil the role, fit in with the company ethos, prove profitable, be happy in the role, and not present unexpected problems or require training and development above and beyond what the hiring manager had initially envisaged for the role.
Competency based questioning is an effective way to assess the suitability of candidates in a short time, and is an unbiased method of comparing one applicant against another. The interviewer will ask a series of questions relating to the key competencies for the job. The best indicator for the future performance of an applicant is to look at their previous performance in these key areas, this will demonstrate clearly if they have the required experience, behaviours and potential to fulfil the new role.
How to Answer Competency Based Interview Questions
You will be able to easily rehearse for this type of interview, and some good preparation at this stage will help you answer your interview questions fully and also reduce your interview nerves. The first task is to identify the competencies for the job. Look for the competencies for the particular job you are applying for, you should be able to spot these in the job description. You may come up with a list something like this: team working, project management, quality service, liaising with clients, working to deadlines, commercial awareness. You should also identify the mission statement and values of the company as you will probably be questioned on these too, remember they are looking for a fit for the company as well as the role. The type of areas company values and mission statements often cover are quality, team working and budgetary considerations, so be sure to revise these too.
The key to answering this type of question is to be specific in your response. You should avoid generalisations, it is important to remember why they are using this technique and what they are looking for. So do not generalise, use actual specific instances when you have demonstrated the competency they are questioning you on.
The STAR Technique
I would strongly advise you to use the STAR technique. By sticking to this method of answer you will be able to keep your response to the point and structure your answer effectively.
To explain, your answer should incorporate the following elements:
S – Situation
T – Task
A – Action
R – Result
Situation
For the particular competency describe the background of a particular situation when you used the key competency in question. For example if the competency is budgetary control , you may answer ” In my last job I was appointed to lead a project involving a £600,000k engineering factory shutdown lasting 2 weeks, and I had overall responsibility for the budget for this project. I did face some challenges on this project which required careful management to keep to budget.”
Task
Describe what you particular task was in relation to this, i.e. ” My responsibility was to ensure that the project came in on time and to budget, which required very close liaison with the discipline heads, maintenance managers and cost and planning team. As it was very important the project ran to timescale and costs were maintained as per estimates. This was my ultimate responsibility. Any overspend, delay or conflict had to be resolved immediately to keep the project to budget. 1 week into the project we were faced with unexpected delays due to unavailability of essential maintenance equipment which threatened the completion of the project on time and would ultimately have prevented the plant from becoming operational again on time. This would have obviously created a loss in production and so revenue.”
Action
“I worked long hours with the buying and contracts manager, sourcing alternative suppliers and negotiating price, to keep to the original estimates. I worked closely with the planning team to reschedule some of the other work to ensure no time was lost. It was key that I kept in very close contact with the whole team throughout, as any delay would affect the budget. I examined all aspects of the project to ensure that there were no wasted costs and that despite the tight budget safety standards were never compromised.”
Result
“I am pleased to say that through perseverance and my determination to deliver on time and to budget, the long hours paid off and a new supplier was found who have since proved to be a new and more effective supplier for us. The project was completed to time and came in a little under budget, and the whole project was carried out without accident or injury.”
Remember the interviewer will probably score your response, and you will gain marks by giving a specific instance, quoting what the situation was, what you did and what your motivation was to do this. Think about what did you say and what was the outcome? You might also add your observations about what you learnt from the experience. If you give a generalised answer it will be very difficult for the interviewers to award you any points on this part of the interview. Try not to use any scenarios which are too personal and which will cause any awkward moments in the interview. Try to think of a situation that you are quite familiar with, and one which involved interacting with other people, you may also be asked about your personal feelings in this situation, i.e. how did you feel about that? be prepared for this.
Finally, the interview may not be overtly competency based and if your interviewer is not very experienced may include questions such as: This job deals with a lot of confidential information, have you done this before? This question is in fact a closed question which could be answered with a yes or no. However, in order to make the best of this opportunity to demonstrate your suitability, think of it as a competency based question and answer with a specific example of when you have dealt with confidential information. Use the STAR technique and you will find that you will be able to stick to the question, demonstrate your suitability and present clear evidence to show you are capable of fulfilling the role.
Good Luck, although I’m sure using the STAR technique and with some good preparation into the key competencies and the mission statement of the company you will succeed.
Rowena
I’ve been reading the infroamtion on your site for quite some time now, just wanted to do a quick post and say thank you for all of the useful information you have been providing your readers all this time.
Verygood and Quite informative article for job hunters. Really STAR technique is good but can anybody tell me how to distinguish that whether Interview is competency based or knowledge based. Often I found that people are taking knowledge based interview and they are not that much interested in descriptive answer.
I like the STAR framework for competency questions and would add an “E” to the end (which makes for an odd acronym: STARE) because the E, for Evaluation, is very important. It answers the interviewer’s questions “What did you learn from the situation?” and “What would you do differently?” The latter is particularly important for those questions that try to ID a candidate’s lack of competencies, for example when asked about a time when budgeting skills didn’t were not as strong as you would have liked, or when you made a mistake. Employers expect employees to be human and make mistakes. They also expect employees to recognize and learn from those mistakes. A solid Evaluation can turn what seemed like a strong negative example to a positive one.
As an interviewer, to answer your question Pratik, the difference is in how the question is worded. The knowledge based questions are fairly direct in what the interviewer is looking for as a response. For example, do you have experience with heat exchangers? Competency questions are looking more for a demonstration of a certain behaviour. By using the STAR technique you set up the response by giving the situation, describe what was required to be done by you, how you reacted and what was the outcome. Competency/behavioral questions are set up with: describe a situation where…or give an example of where you showed this type of characteristic.
For behavioral interviewing it is not so much the technical details of the answer as how the interviewee responds. You need to listen carefully to the question to understand how to set up your response. I can agree the interviewer may not have much interest in a descriptive answer but it depends on what you are describing. In an interview for example, where I am looking for a demonstration for an attention to detail for a pump install, I am not really interested in the technical details of the install but in how you ensured it was installed correctly and what you did specifically.
I am a Competency Based Training CBT Consultant. Are you working in CBT in addition to your expertise in Competency Based HR?
Good, concise article, thanks Rowena. My opinion is that the R (including the added E which Heidi mentioned) is where you make your real money as a candidate, and the part which people might tend to leave out. Even if what you did in the A section didn’t quite work out for the best, you can explain what you learned and what you would have done differently. When I’m doing interviews, I look very positively on people’s self awareness of their behaviors, and it’s the R part where this really shows through.
The other area where some people get let down is in the A for Action – the actions they talk about were not actions they themselves did, but rather what someone else did, or what the team did. Often a little coaching is required to get the candidate to understand that we want to hear about their actions.
A really good STAR answer needs to be about what the person actually did themselves, what came from it, and what they learned from it.
I agree that the STAR analysis seems to be a good way to approach these questions, however, as a candidate I have often been asked rather long winded and specific questions. For example rather than, ‘think of a time when you have displayed x skill’, I have been asked think of a ‘time when you had noticed a problem, implemented a solution to fix it and dealt with the any resistance from colleagues…’ I am not going for senior level jobs at all – Im only a fairly recent graduate – and so find questions like this very difficult to answer. It seems to me if you dont have a specific example you will end up using a weak example and waffling!
Thanks Heidi, you make a really good point here. I agree reflecting and evaluating the action shows insight into the situation from which you can learn and apply in the future.
This is a really good point Jamie. Candidates must keep the answer relevant and also related to their OWN actions and results, sticking to these principles will also help to prevent the dreaded rambling off the subject too! You also make a good point that a skilled interviewer will help to tease out the required information, which will give the candidate every opportunity to give a relevant and revealing answer.
Thanks for your contribution to the discussion.
Rowena
I think the trick here is to simplify the question yourself. Even a lengthy and apparently complex question is probably aimed at exposing one or two particular competencies. For instance in the question you site, the competencies may be problem solving and you could include a bit of conflict resolution too for good measure. The question may not be overtly framed as a competency based question but if you analyse its content you can probably identify what the interviewer is looking for and reply accordingly.
As a recent graduate you could probably find an example of a situation perhaps in a team working environment at University, where you dealt with a problem which would serve as a good answer for this type of question. Remember that a competency based question is aimed at trying to identify past behaviours to assess your potential for future suitability to the competencies required for the role. As a graduate this is all the interviewer has to base their assessment on, so citing examples of potential are an excellent way to demonstrate you are right for the role, despite your lack of experience.
Rowena
The STAR format is great when implemented with other interview stratagies. I’ve turned down more than one position when this was used. Specifically because the way the STAR format was used presents the “I” concept in a team based enviornment. There isn’t room for “I” in the word team. The jobs that I have turned down due to this was focused more on the format than actual competencies required to be successful in the position such as computer skills, best practices, time management, people skills, mentoring abilities, communication, the ability to accept constructive feedback, etc. The STAR format addresses one’s ability to lead in a single situation, but should only be utilized as such and not the sole decision making or breaking of chosing the right candidate.
Ok so far as it goes. It can really be summarised in one sentence: war stories are more effective than theoretical answers, and structured war stories are better still.
But there is one key element that is missing here. It’s crucial to research the company, far beyond what’s in the job spec. I always reckon I succeeded in one interview by making reference to a particular market challenge the company was facing – and this was from an “anonymised” job description so I had first to figure out who the recruiting organisation was. This kind of research is a lot easier now than it was then in the pre-internet days. Don’t neglect it.
Also, if there isn’t a war story, still make it clear you understand the issue. I appointed a teacher to an inner-city school who responded to probing on his experience of equal-opportunities issues by saying that he had not experienced them to date (he’d been teaching in a rural area) but was able to talk about the issues and express his willingness to be trained.