Competence-based interviews

Competence interviews and competency-based questions regularly crop up in graduate recruitment processes. Employers identify the skills and abilities (competences) that are vital for working in their organisation and they use these as selection criteria for choosing new recruits.

To measure your suitability, recruiters will ask questions where you will need to draw on examples from your life so far to demonstrate times when you have employed particular competences. The logic is simple: your past ability to use a skill is a good indicator of your potential to be successful in the future.

What competences do graduate employers want?

The competences used as selection criteria vary from employer to employer, but the most common skills looked for, in no particular order of importance, include:

• communication
• teamwork
• problem-solving
• leadership
• time management
• planning and organisation
• customer-facing skills
• delegation
• influencing
• decision making
• motivation
• adaptability
• commercial awareness
• creativity

Job descriptions and adverts often list the key skills required for a role and many graduate employers also highlight the core competences they look for on their recruitment websites.

Tell me about a time when…

‘Can you talk me through an example of when you…’, ‘Describe a time when you…’ or ‘How would you go about…’. These are the common prefaces of competence-focused interview questions. Interviewers may then probe deeper to draw out more information.

For example, if teamwork is one of the employer’s selection criteria, you might be asked the following:

• Can you give me an example of when you worked in a team?
• What was your individual contribution?
• What did you learn from the experience and what would you do differently in future?
• Tell me about another team you have been involved in.
• What factors do you think contribute to the success of a team?

How to respond… and stay on track

As a student or graduate, you will have a more limited bag of work-related examples to draw upon, but aim to use a different example for each competence you are asked to discuss. Use examples from your studies, work experience and extra-curricular activities.

With competence-based questions it is very easy to go off topic or meander around providing too much detail about the situation when the interviewer really wants to know how you acted. You may find it helpful to use the STAR approach to structure your response:

• Situation: give the interviewer a context by describing the situation.
• Task: what was your goal?
• Action: tell the interviewer what your specific actions were.
• Result: the end result – make sure it shows you in a good light, even if the overall project was not a success.

Dedicate most of your response to action

Proportionally, you should dedicate most of your response to the Action part. So, if you were responding to the teamwork question, here’s how you could tackle it:

Situation: I completed a group work project with four other students from my marketing course. Our task was to plan the relaunch of a brand.

Task: We had to use a range of research methods, provide a written report and present our joint findings to the rest of our year group and an expert panel drawn from local Media agencies.

Action: I had to devise, market and analyse the results of an online ‘brand-awareness’ survey, but I also took responsibility for co-ordinating the activities of the rest of the group who were focusing on different activities. I facilitated initial discussions so that we were all clear on what we needed to do and I encouraged us all to work to interim deadlines so that it wasn’t all last minute. I also proposed that we met regularly to discuss progress and so that we could all support each other in achieving our aims. The regular meetings helped us to identify each others strengths, which really helped when planning our joint presentation. We were also in a better position to support each other and work out how to complete the task amid competing priorities of our other academic work.

Results: We submitted a full report on time and won the prize for best presentation. We were commended by the expert panel for our ability to bring together our findings in a coherent form and present professionally. While I like to take a lead and organise, I also learned through our regular catch ups that it is possible to accommodate different working styles happily if you keep communicating.

What if you are faced with a hypothetical situation?

Questions in a competence-based interviews are not exclusively based on behavioural evidence. You may be asked some hypothetical questions too where you’ll be asked to say what you would do in a given situation.

While you can imagine how you might respond to a situation and explain how you would tackle it, try always to reinforce your skills by comparing the situation with something similar you have faced successfully before. Always give specific evidence where you can.