Top talent is the cornerstone of achieving a competitive edge and driving organizational success. Competency-based interviews have emerged in popularity for their ability to find the right talent – replacing traditional interview techniques. The novel approach digs deeper into potential candidates’ skills and abilities, enabling strategic and informed recruiting decisions. It is a highly recommended strategy when hiring C-suite professionals as the executive interview questions are exclusively based on it.
What is a Competency-Based Interview (CBI)?
The competency-based interview is a structured evaluation technique that examines candidates’ past behaviors to anticipate their effectiveness for a particular job role. By determining specific competencies required for the position, recruiters can make better hiring decisions. Interviewees mainly rely on hypothetical questions and real-life situations to determine a person’s competency for a job role.
How Competency-Based Interviewing Help Better Hiring?
Recruiters strategize by determining benchmarks usually defined as competencies to assess how effective a candidate is for a particular role. Generally, candidates are evaluated based on their soft skills, personality traits, and attitudes. Here is how competency-based interviewing helps better hiring:
Know the Role
Before starting the interview process, it is important to have a deeper insight into job responsibilities, and roles in the organization.
Identify Required Competencies
List down the required competencies for the job role such as technical and soft skills: communication, interpersonal, problem-solving, teamwork, leadership and more.
Prepare Interview Questions
The best way to prepare competency-based interview questions is to use the STAR technique (Situation, Task, Action, Results) that let candidates share real-life experiences.
Effective Evaluation
Another way to nail the competency-based interview is to use a pre-determined rating scale for every question, ensuring a standardized evaluation process for all candidates.
Follow-up Questions
Competency-based interview questions require candidates to share their stories with the recruiters. The best approach is to follow up with questions that focus on evaluating the candidate’s effectiveness for the role.
Use a Combination of Evaluation Techniques
While CBI is one benchmark to evaluate the candidate, you can use other assessment methods such as technical evaluation and reference checks along. It will be a more effective interviewing and hiring approach.
What Are the Benefits of Competency-Based Interviews?
CBI is a revolutionized approach to interviewing and recruiting, offering incredible benefits to organizations.
Adapted to Job Position
CBI questions are tailored to a particular job role in an organization. Unlike generic interviews, it is a highly competitive technique to assess a candidate’s key competencies, skills, and behaviors.
Standardization
Another key advantage of CBI is its standardized evaluation framework that helps eliminate bias and ensure accurate outcomes. When conducting competency-based interviews, managers mainly focus on the candidate’s attitude and past experiences to determine how fit they are for a job role.
Predictiveness
CBI is designed to anticipate a candidate’s performance in a particular job role according to past behaviors. Interviewers ask scenario-based questions on how they have managed challenging situations in the past, which guides the hiring decisions.
Comprehensive Insight
The novel interviewing technique considers the candidate’s qualifications, experience, and technical and soft skills providing a comprehensive insight into a candidate’s eligibility for the job role.
Greater Engagement
CBI is a highly interactive, insightful, and engaging interview session in which the candidates feel more involved and are likely to be candid. This helps with better hiring decisions.
Positive Perspective
CBI techniques create a positive perception of the company, attracting the cream of the crop.
Goal-Oriented
CBI empowers organizations to streamline and align their hiring processes according to the company’s vision and goals. By hiring competent candidates, organizations can strategize to achieve a competitive edge in the market.
Low Employee Turnover
Hiring motivated and competent candidates ensures higher job satisfaction, resulting in a reduced employee turnover rate and greater cost savings.
Training and Skill Development
CBI can provide a detailed insight into a candidate’s skills and abilities, identifying areas of improvement. Likewise, the company can engage employees in relevant training and skill development programs. This contributes to employees’ personal and professional growth, increasing job satisfaction rates.
Improved Team Dynamics
Choosing candidates according to their competencies can help improve team dynamics. A good team possesses the right mix of professionals, skills, and competencies, resulting in effective collaboration and minimal workplace conflicts.
Legal Compliance
CBI questions are structured and objective, which ensures transparency and minimal discrimination, helping organizations ensure legal compliance in recruiting process.
Takeaway
CBI has emerged as the most popular interviewing technique, offering a range of benefits to organizations. Data-driven and objective decision-making are the greatest benefits steering company success. This can be achieved by preparing scenario-based final interview questions and a structured evaluation matrix.
