The ultimate guide to competency-based interview questions

Competency-based interview questions are a great way to ensure objectivity in the recruitment process whilst helping you fight the right candidate for the job. In this article, we’ll look a competency-based questions to ask candidates that will bolster your recruitment efforts.

Two interviewers asking a candidate competency interview questions

Research from Deloitte shows that 98% of business executives want to make their organisation skills-based, making them 90% more likely to retain high-performers in the long term. As a result, businesses are looking for ways to hire employees who can demonstrate the skills they need to be successful.

On top of uncovering candidates’ skills and knowledge, competency-based interviews are becoming increasingly popular because they provide more objectivity than other interviewing techniques. As a result, employers looking to reduce interview bias and expand talent pools are increasingly implementing competency-based interviews.

We’re here to look at the competency-based interview questions you can use to hire the candidates your organisation needs.

What are competency-based interviews?

Competencies themselves are made up of the knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviours that contribute to improved performance and efficiency in a job.

As a result, competency-based interview questions are designed to explore whether a candidate has the skills and knowledge required to carry out the job they are interviewing for.

What are some common competencies?

During the interview process, recruiters and hiring managers will likely be screening for key competencies that are most likely to make an employee effective in a role.

More often than not, recruiters will look for candidates to demonstrate a core competency or competencies in the interview process. These might include:

Communication skills
Leadership
Decision-making
Problem-solving
Management
Business
Teamwork
Critical thinking
Organisation

Structuring competency-based interview questions

While determining which competency interview questions to ask is important, first it’s vital to ensure any questions you ask are structured correctly. Once place to start with this is utilising and understanding the funnel technique.

The funnel technique

A tried and tested approach, the funnel technique involves targeting a desired competency, asking the candidate to introduce an example of when they used it, probing them for more information before finally clarifying the answer the candidates has given.

By deploying this technique, interviewers can better control the amount of detail they get from a candidate in an interview, driving more insightful answers and helping to uncover additional insights.

Let’s delve further into the structure of common competency-based interview questions and the specific steps within the funnel technique.

Introduction

To kick things off, you’ll want to prompt the candidate to give real examples of the desired competency in action. For example, you could ask a candidate “tell me about a time when you worked as part of a team.”

This is where it’s important to know how to ask competency-based interview questions. You can do this by using the TED (tell, explain, describe) method of questioning. This means starting your questions with:

“Tell me…”
“Explain to me…”
“Describe…”

If you wanted to find out about a candidate’s time management, you could ask the question:

“Describe a time when you had to meet a tight deadline. How did you ensure timely completion of the task?”

Questions like this allow you to delve into real life scenarios of how candidates solved a problem or achieved success.

Probe

Once the candidate has provided their answer to your initial question, you may want to probe them more for additional information.

Candidates often spend time preparing for a competency-based interview, and as a result many will deploy the STAR (situation, task, action, result) technique to answer competency-based interview questions. This means that candidates answers will include:

Situation: Describing the background or content.
Task: Describing the task or challenge they were faced with.
Action: Explaining the action they took and how and why they did it.
Result: Describing how it ended, and what they accomplished and/or learned from the situation.

However, if the candidate misses something from the STAR technique in their answer, or you just want additional context, you can ask follow up questions to establish the full picture.

Some of the follow up questions you can utilise during a competency-based interview include:

Who was involved?
Why did you take that course of action?
Where did you get that information from?
What effect did that have?
When did you complete this?
How did you deal with that?

Clarify

Once the candidate has given their answer and you’ve probed them for further details, it’s time to seek any clarification you need.

You can do this by summarising the key details of the candidates answer to ensure you’ve heard all the information correctly and giving them the opportunity to provide more context. This can be confirmed by the candidate with a simple “yes” or “no”.

50 Common competency-based interview questions

Take your hiring to the next level using our list of competency-based interview questions that can help you delve deeper into candidate’s skills, knowledge and experience.

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