People Management: What is Competency based or behavioural Interviewing?

If you are doing any kind of recruiting of new people then asking great questions and digging techniques are important interviewing skills to acquire.
Competency based Interviewing is asking a question about a candidate’s previous behaviour and experience.
The topic of the question should be about a competency required to be successful in the job role.

You do this to ascertain if the way they behaved in a situation is what you want for your organisation or for the job.

Unlike the warning on many financial products…
Where past performance is NOT a good indicator of the future…
Behaviour in the candidate’s past is a good guide for future performance.

An example for you:
You decide that you want to recruit someone to frequently work on their own and unsupervised.

Stage One:

To name the behaviour you want in the competency you want.
Behaviour name: Working alone

Stage Two:

To define ‘working alone’ into how this person needs to behave in a job.
Behaviours:
Be very clear about their own working priorities,
Able to make decisions without reference to anyone else.

Stage Three:

To design behavioural questions to obtain evidence from the candidate.

Suggested Behavioural questions for ‘Working Alone’:

1. Can you think of a time recently when you needed to ask someone else’s advice before you could complete a piece of work?
2. Describe the most important decision you have made recently.
3. Talk me through a project which you managed yourself over the past 12 months.
4. Can you think of a time when you struggled with a decision and needed someone else’s help?
5. Have you ever forgotten to do something for someone?
6. Describe a deadline you have missed recently.
7. Can you think of a day when you already had a lot to do, yet you were asked to do something else?

Tell me about it …

In summary

1. Be clear what behaviour you need evidence of
2. Be clear how you would know that it was being demonstrated
3. Build questions that force the candidate to give examples of where they used this behaviour previously
4. Ask the questions and reflect on if the candidate can behave in that way
5. Note that down and assess each candidate on that evidence