How do you use competency based questions to assess and select other candidates or team members?

Competencies describe the skills, knowledge and behaviours that are critical to successfully perform a role. They are important for a recruiter to assess candidates using directly comparable information; they are important to candidate to understand the role; they are important to a manager to identify and articulate growth and learning needs.

Competencies refer to the Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Other characteristics (KSAOs) someone needs to be effective in their job. Competencies should be measurable and include observable examples of what effective behaviour looks like. Ideally, competencies should also have multiple levels or stages of development to describe what effective behaviour looks like for someone still learning the competency (i.e., more basic or entry-level understanding) to someone with advanced expertise (e.g., expert knowledge and application of the competency).

From my experience, competence is the cornerstone to the company's survival. The competence of staff can either make or break a company. Therefore, in order to develop the competence of the staff, it is imperative to develop competence standards for each job position in a company. Nevertheless, before any competence standards are developed, I would recommend that an analysis (Competence Analysis) of the competence/training system be conducted to understand the current practices of the competence or training system of the company.

Consulting with SMEs and leaders who understand the skills, knowledge and behaviors to be successful in a role, identify 3 to 5 competencies required. Then define the level of proficiency - is a basic level needed, or expert level? This is a very important step to fully illustrate the competencies.

Again, this is where the development of the competence standards is of prime importance. Based on the Competence Analysis (CA), the competence developer would need to have the scope and specifications of the job position. From the findings of the CA which also includes the scope and specs of the job position, a Competence Blueprint (CB) can be crafted as the overall policy and implementation plan to develop staff's competence. Please note that when I use the word 'competence', it is not training per se, but it means 'the ability of a staff to perform the work in accordance with the required competence standards'. Training is only a means to achieve the required competence and NOT the end by itself.

You should first have a competency framework in place to know how many competencies are required and what type of competencies to include (e.g., 3 Core + 4 Job Specific competencies). To identify competencies, you can refer to documents that describe the requirements of the job (e.g., job descriptions, learning materials, onboarding materials), any relevant industry standards or industry documents (e.g., National Occupational Standards, O*Net), and talk to people internally who are very familiar with the role. When talking to subject matter experts, it's often helpful to come to them with a "shortlist" of relevant competencies to choose from rather than starting from a blank slate.

Based on the competence standards that I have described earlier, the relevant assessment questions can be developed for each job position. In the development of the assessment questions, the in-house developer or the assessor needs to tailor the questions based on the competence standards. The assessor needs to bear in mind that the questions must be based on the VCARS concept - Valid, Current, Achievable, Reliable and Sufficient. Valid-based on the competence standards, Current-latest technologies, Authentic-candidate must perform the tasks himself, Reliable-the meaning of the questions must be clear; Sufficient-the questions must not be too simple or too complex for THAT level of competence.

The key to using competencies for interviewing is that the example behaviours within your competency should become your behaviourally anchored rating scale for each interview question. Questions should be open-ended enough not to lead candidates to the right answer but specific enough to get at the target competency. You will want to ask follow-up probes to get a clear picture of the candidate's behaviour.

The assessment process must be fair in that the environment of the assessment areas must reflect the requirements of the competence standards. When it comes to the practical assessments, the assessor must observe firsthand and to take note every step the candidate does in performing the tasks given. Hence, the assessor needs to develop the questions, model answers and the marking schemes in a structured manner. It should be noted that when it comes to practical assessments, the candidate would be deemed as 'passed' the assessment if he/she completes 100% of the tasks correctly. There is no 'passing mark'-either he/she does it right or otherwise. This is the core of the assessments based on competence standards.

Yes - you should use a structured interview with all the components described here. The most important piece is to use a behaviorally anchored rating scale instead of the more subjective scales typically used.

After the assessment is completed, the assessor needs to give feedback to the candidate. The feedback needs to be detailed-the assessor will read from his notes 'play-by-play' the performance of the candidate. In each of the segment during the feedback, the assessor will comment on what the candidate did right or otherwise. The assessor adds value to his/her feedback in which he/she puts on his hat as the instructor and where required, demonstrate to the candidate on how to do it right. That is the power of feedback if it is done properly as it provides the educational value to the candidate whether he/she passes the assessment or not. The assessment needs to be verified to ensure the assessment's quality-a different topic altogether.