Have you ever experienced situational-based questions in your interviews? Worldwide, many organizations ask these types of questions to test your core skills, experience and suitability for the job. Situational-based interviews give recruiters a fair understanding of your personality and how well you would fit into the role. These types of interviews are known as competency-based interviews.

Definition of Competency-Based Interviews:

Competency-based interviews, also known as behavioral interviews, feature questions designed to gauge your ability to handle the job and specific situations. Questions in these types of interviews generally require you to demonstrate that you have the skills the employer is looking for by providing examples of similar situations you’ve faced in the past and how you dealt with them in those situations. – Chron.com

What are competencies?

Competencies are core qualities that recruiters look for in a candidate while interviewing them. In such cases, they understand how candidates would leverage their skills (competencies) with the recruiter’s pre-determined expectations of the same.

Some of the most common competencies include:

• Problem-Solving Skills – Here, recruiters gauge your problem-solving abilities by understanding how you would face a tough situation and quickly derive effective decisions.
• Teamwork – Strong interpersonal skills are fundamental to every employee. When a candidate can work in teams, it demonstrates a positive skill.
• Communication – Verbal skills are no doubt one of the most sought-after skills by recruiters. Good communication skills translate to good clarity and understanding of the job at hand.
• Conflict Resolution – Through this skill, the recruiter can assess both your ability to identify conflicts as well as your persuasion skills.
• Leadership – A good team leader can be assessed by their ability to actively listen and strategically think in diverse situations.
• Collaboration – In today’s world, employees have to adopt collaborative skills to work in tandem with other teams to achieve mutual goals.
• Working under pressure – When recruiters assess a candidate on their ability to work under pressure, they look at how the candidate would handle time constraints and unforeseen challenges.
• Decision Making – Here, the recruiters analyse how you used critical thinking to conclude, and how you overcame obstacles and made a decision under difficult situations.

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Why Do Interviewers Look For Competencies?

In several companies, the nature of the job role demands different skills. In some cases, it depends on the nature of the organization, too. Recruiters look for competencies to see if you are a good fit for the challenging role, to see how commercially aware

 You are, and to gauge your personality to see how you can cope with pressure.

Through competency-based interviews, recruiters give you natural, everyday situations to see how you demonstrate your skills. These days, even application forms include competency-based questions before the interview process.

Frequently Asked Competency-Based Questions Include:

• Describe a project where you had to lead a team
• Describe a situation in which you resolved a team conflict
• Tell us about your experience in achieving success in a challenging task
• Give us an example of how you overcame communication gaps
• Tell us about an achievement you are proud of
• Tell us about a time when you had to motivate, convince or positively influence a colleague or your team
• Give us an example of a task that was done outside of your comfort zone

How do you prepare for a competency-based interview?

By all means, situational questions like these that test our competencies, do keep us in a challenging position, especially when you are unaware of what is going to be asked, however, competency-based questions have a fair amount of weightage in the interview process and hence is a good chance to positively influence the recruiters.

Adopting a STAR approach is useful in structuring your answers in competency-based interviews:

What is the STAR Approach?

The STAR approach stands for Situation, Task, Action, Results. Through the following steps, a candidate can logically structure an effective answer when he/she is being tested for the competencies in the interview.

• Situation: While preparing for the interview, one should always think and re-visit the unique experiences, such as the instances of conflict resolution, or the time where you successfully lead a project. This keeps you mentally prepared for competency-based questions. In a competency-based interview, it becomes easier for the candidate to talk about those experiences and describe them clearly.

• Task: In this step, the candidate should talk about the expectations in that experience. For example, ‘’I was told to convert x percentage of leads using y methods’’. This section is for explaining the specifics of the challenging situation and the difficulties you faced while doing it.

• Action: As the STAR approach follows a logical approach, the third step includes talking about how you overcame the challenges you faced. This means how you arrived at the solution and the positive approach that followed. For example, research on your part, talking to your team members, adopting non-traditional methods, and so on.

• Results: At this stage, we finally talk about the outcome of the task. This is one of the most important parts of the STAR approach as it focuses on how you handled the situations using your competencies. However, that does not mean one should refrain from talking about the failures – an honest answer that explains your approach to the problem is well received by the recruiters in these kinds of interviews. It is always beneficial to add what you learnt from your experience and how you would do better/differently next time. This demonstrates that you are willing to continually improve your skills and yourself.

Lastly, a positive attitude combined with good communication skills makes a lasting impact on the recruiters. Don’t dwell too much on your failures – you need to show the recruiters how you expertly navigated through challenging and tough situations.

If you liked reading this post, you may be interested in reading “Why Upskilling Can Win You The Race” too.

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