Competencies are the personal characteristics that can contribute to excellent rather than average performance in a particular position. It is soft skills and personality traits like communication, enthusiasm, teamwork, decision-making, and resilience, all of which are difficult to identify or measure.
Competency-based interviews, also known as structured or behavioral interviews, are used to uncover these transferable skills in candidates and how their abilities, behaviors, and mindsets can affect their effectiveness in the position. The interview contains questions specifically directed at a particular skill or competency relevant to the position. The candidate is asked to explain how they have used or demonstrated that specific competence in the past.
Effectiveness of Competency-based interview are listed below.
1. Provides more objectivity in the hiring process:
A competency-based interview emphasizes on situational or behavioral questions. Suppose you are trying to assess on the candidate’s leadership skills. As recruiting personnel, you should ask questions like, "Tell me about a situation where you were leading a project at your previous company?" "What tools you used to manage to lead the team at that time?" "How did you do that?" "If a similar situation arises, how can we achieve the same this time, given that our equipment and our machines are different from that company?" "Tell me of a time you led a sports team in college or university?"
Here, in such cases, the competency-based interview is different from traditional interviews. The competency-based interview tries to understand how each candidate can add value to the company in the future.
2. Create clarity and eliminate personal biases in hiring decisions:
The overall selection process focuses on the effort to create clarity in the selection and hiring procedures.
A competency-based approach ignores the gut feelings of a party's goals. The candidate cannot suppress his/her behavioral characteristics. A single person on the interview panel cannot overwhelm the hiring decision, as the selection process is governed by objective analysis.
3. Reduce the risk of bad hires in the hiring process:
The relationships between two people depend on the behavior of each one. The attitudes of the workshops and retail floors are the most important. Attitudes create different team emotions, but they are also essential for a person's growth, learning, and development. Suppose you choose an efficient sales associate for the store, but what if they are rude to customers and is under stress?
This outlines employee development and advancement trajectories within the organization and enables employees to learn more competencies than their roles and provides the organization with more opportunities to scale and bend as needed, thus reducing the risk.
4. It effectively helps you choose future leader:
Some assessments are designed to rule out high-risk candidates. In contrast, others are designed to provide a more in-depth diagnosis of various competencies and help you identify the cream of the crop.
The advantage of using competency-based assessment for recruitment is that it closes the transfer gap between the training environment and the job at work. As a result, employees need less time to master the required areas. This, in turn, contributes to greater efficiency in training and assessment.
5. Increase the profitability of the recruitment budget:
Competency-based assessments save your organization time and money by allowing your staff to dedicate their time on candidates who meet the competency benchmark that is necessary to succeed on the job.
This is especially important for organizations with a small recruiting team or who want to use their recruiting talent in other ways.
How much time and resources could you have saved if you had known in advance that the candidates were not suitable? A little bit of money spent on an evaluation that weeds out the wrong candidates translate into hours of your team's time.
6. Makes the organization a preferred employer:
When employees are competent in achieving their job goals, understanding performance expectations, they are generally more motivated and experience greater job satisfaction. This will improve the productivity of the organizations. When employees become involved in your organization, the company moves towards becoming “the employer of choice”.
7. Witness increased customer satisfaction:
Employees who have been assessed using a competency-based approach can perform the necessary tasks associated with a position much more effectively. The ripple effect is that they can provide a high level of service in service-related industries, increasing customer satisfaction. Obviously, your brand is getting the nod from your loyal customers.
Conclusion
In summary, competency-based interviewing provides you with the necessary tools to evaluate way beyond than knowing if a candidate is right or wrong for the position. It is one of the best well-established method that helps in determining how applicants will perform in certain circumstances. If done precisely and by probing the right interview questions, your organization can get a flying start on acquiring the best employee.
Written by: Girish Rohra Chawla
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