Competency Based Interviews
Competency based interviews (CBI) are a trend that is not slowing down. Love it or hate it, it’s a form of interviewing that’s been around for many years now, and is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Many of our HR community will be familiar with the CBI approach and may well have used this format to conduct interviews in the past. However the experience of being on the “other side” of a CBI process as a job seeker is likely to be quite different. This interview technique requires you to frequently focus on your own specific achievements rather than those you achieved within a team. As a result, this emphasis on “I” rather than “we” feels like uncomfortable boasting for some, and isn’t the type of “team talk” we’re indoctrinated into as members of the HR community.
Why do competency based interviews exist?
There is a school of scientific thought that believes the best guide to the future is to look at what has happened in the past. By looking for evidence that something has or hasn’t occurred we are better able to make decisions about what should or will happen in the future. The same general principle applies to human behaviour. Interviewers in a CBI are looking for evidence of what you have done so that they can more accurately predict what you will do, or be able to do, in the future.
Traditional CBI, also known as “situational” or “behavioural” interviewing, focuses on experiences in both a candidate’s personal and business life to determine one’s competencies. The idea is that a candidate possesses and utilises a range of competencies in all situations and these are all relevant in determining suitability for a job. Being a good leader, for example, might be evidenced equally from a work activity, a neighbourhood project or captaining the local cricket team.
Interview questions typically start with a “tell me about a time when” or “give me an example of” or “describe an instance of”. Interview answers are expected to have a logical sequence structure, often referred to as the STAR (situation, task, action, result) or SOAR (situation, objective, action, result) or SAO (situation, action, outcome) method. The logical sequence answer should give an interviewer a clear idea of the challenges you had to overcome and why, a good understanding of what actions you took and why, and then the outcome of your approach/initiative. Some outcomes won’t be positive, which is fine, in which case we’d recommend you finish with a “in hindsight I would have done…” or “what I’ve learnt from this is….”
Interviews for HR leaders will often for example feature a question along the lines of “tell me about an idea of yours to improve employee engagement” (checking concurrently the competencies for innovation, commerciality, influencing and project management) which might then feature an answer along the lines of:
S – “I noticed we were having ongoing issues with engagement and retention of our call centre staff. This was costing us “x” time and money for hiring and training, reduced productivity because the team were constantly spending time on getting new joiners up to speed, and was starting to impact negatively on our customer service satisfaction ratings, so it seemed only a matter of time before it also impacted on sales revenues. When I looked into the situation more closely I could see that our team leaders were busy being busy, but not developing their teams, which meant that those staff felt that their work value wasn’t being recognised”
A – “I suggested a new bonus structure, that rewarded call centre team leaders, who not only had great personal performance, but who committed x hours per month to formally mentoring others - it was all conditional on those leaders and the people they mentored having achieved x months of regular work attendance - I wanted these people to buddy up and have a vested interest in keeping each other at the company. In addition, I designed a weekly recognition program, which allowed all team members to nominate each other for providing exceptional support, which was then judged by a member of the leadership team, which gave great insight for those folks for what was going on “at the coal face” and made the call centre staff like their efforts were appreciated “from the top”. I tested these ideas with focus groups from the call centre and they shared some modifications, which was great because they got to feel like they “owned” these ideas. I calculated that I could offset the cost of the bonus and recognition programs to the savings we would make if we increased retention by just 1% per month.”
O – “After 1 month of implementing and promoting these programs, retention stayed stable. After 3 months, retention improved by 1%. After 6 months, retention had improved by 10%. After 8 months, retention had improved by 26%. Our call centre staff were visibly more engaged, our customer satisfaction ratings soared to their highest ever, and our hiring teams reported the least number of vacancies to be handled since we’d established that call centre 8 years ago. Our CEO and management team were delighted and have given me a budget to use towards more training our team leaders in more formal mentoring and staff development programs.
Note that this answer is very clear on what the business challenges were, rather than just the effect on HR. It is also full of quantifiable measures - something which business leaders and high performance HR executives expect and value, but which isn’t part of the DNA of stereotypical HR professionals.
What are competencies?
Competencies are made up of knowledge, skills, abilities and personal attributes that typically result in a likely set of behaviours. These in turn provide organisations with an indicator on how people will go about the work tasks required. These competencies enable organisations to evaluate whether the way someone does their work is in line with company culture, and achieves the type of result required. They are also an indicator for the extent to which employees are, or are not performing, and may therefore be used as a means to develop individuals in a very specific way.
The specific competencies in any organisation will depend on the desired behaviours of that organisation but there are many that are common across multiple employer companies. These include Leadership, Communication, Self-Motivation, Decision Making, Problem Solving, Teamwork, and Commercial Awareness.
Typically, competencies are expressed on a scale (eg: from novice to expert), with individuals being assessed against the standard required at the level of their job or the job they wish to have. This is often referred to as “the competency framework”, and behaviours are expected to vary within a competency depending on experience level.
Using the “leadership” competency as an example, this might consist of four levels of behaviours from simple supervisory skills at the novice end to complex multi-disciplinary team leadership at the top end. The precise definition of what leadership means in one organisation is likely to be unique to that organisation and likewise the specific behaviours within it.
There is significantly more background and information on Competency Behavioural Interviews available in the public domain. Quite separately to this style of interviewing, but also with a focus on competency checks, is an array of psychometric tests, which could be used in place of or in conjunction with the competency based interview.
HR job seekers continue to fail their own competency based interviews
Given that this is a quite common interview format, one would assume that HR leaders would understand it, and successfully apply the methodology to their own interview presentations. Not so.
Year on year, the number of interviews we conduct result in 68-73% of HR leaders failing their CBI, not because of their lack of experience for any given role; but by not providing strong and relevant examples that addressed the competencies being explored. In every instance these people had already been through our screening assessment for hygiene factors, interest in the role, and key role requirements, and were only invited to interview because they had genuine potential for each role so in theory the majority should have actually “aced” their interview.
However, the majority of failures stemmed directly from a lack of preparation. As one HR VP informed me – “I thought you’d just go through the motions and refer me straight away to your client”. Another HR Director said “in 20 years I’ve never been so thoroughly tested and checked so just wasn’t prepared”. Yet another HR leader advised “I’ve never had a comprehensive interview for any of my HR roles till now, so thought it would be easy enough to breeze through as normal”. Another stated “I conduct CBI’s day in day out, so figured this agency interview would be easy, but my interviews are nowhere near as structured or detailed as yours”.
Which leads me to wonder what is happening out there in HR hiring world. Do so many agencies just do a “light touch” screen before flicking through a CV? Do HR hiring leaders not bother with formal interviews for fellow HR professionals? Is it a case of the “cobbler’s children” – HR being diligent to screen and assess and interview for other roles within the business, but a little neglectful when it comes to their own? I also wonder if another reason for the high failure rate in our CBI events, is the lack of many HR leaders to think and communicate in a logical, business case fashion, and/or to innovate with measurable outcomes as part of the end goal. That certainly ties into some of the frustrations we hear from business leaders who believe their HR partners “are not capable of talking sense” (a direct quote from a FTSE50 CEO I met recently)
We warn every HR professional that they will need to pass a formal and structured interview with us, before they get to meet with our clients. Heck, we even spell out what they should focus on in terms of expected answer format for the competencies to be explored. We are quite clear that many of our hiring clients effectively use us their “first stage” interviewers rather than just sourcers and screeners. Given our reputation is on the line every time, we have a vested interest to be thorough with our interviews. You might be the greatest in the world at what you do in HR, but if you cannot articulate your story to me through this simple interview format, how can I have confidence that you’ll impress my hiring executives?
If this format of the interview is one you’re unfamiliar with, beg time from someone in your network who has experience with it, to put you through some practice scenarios. If the format of the interview is one you’re very comfortable with, it is still wise to practice – it is very different being on the other side of the desk and you’ll want to ensure you’re using answers that best show off your skills and expertise specific to the challenges of the actual role and company you have interest in and make sure they’re relevant to the types of workforces you would be supporting. There is no point recalling the strongest examples after the interview – its too late.
About the Author
Leanne Morris is well known as a both an outspoken advocate and critic of the HR profession. With long standing networks across 94 countries in all specialist areas of the function, and a multi- continent work history, she is a sought after subject matter expert on international HR hiring trends and HR hiring best practice.