When a recruiter searches for the right candidate to fill a role, they assess their job competency. Competencies, unlike skills, are about how a candidate combines their knowledge base, skill set and individual approach to the job. By using a competency assessment during an interview process, you can help narrow down your search for the right candidate.

What is job competence?

You can create a structure for your competency assessment by first deciding on its criteria. Useful during either a performance review or recruitment selection, creating a list of core competencies can help you decide whether a candidate will fit in well with your current company culture. When deciding between several candidates with a similar skill set, competency assessment can be a good way to find out whether they have the right soft skills or approach for your team. 

This is because competencies are more about how a candidate behaves, as opposed to a skill, which a candidate either has or hasn’t got. You can ask certain questions to help gain insights into this, such as how they would deal with a specific problem. This allows you to find out more about how they apply their skills to different situations. Therefore, you might want to look at your current team and what competencies they already have or what competencies would make a good addition. 

Competencies also give you insights into how a candidate will perform, even when dealing with a challenge they haven’t faced before. This could include certain customer-facing scenarios, or how they might go about raising an issue with a manager or colleague. 

Asking competency-based interview questions

To find out whether a candidate has the right competencies for a role, you can ask competency-based interview questions. These are interview questions that prompt a candidate to discuss how they have handled situations in the past, and how they might handle a novel situation. Competency-based interview questions include topics such as: 

You can assess whether a candidate then responds to these questions via the STAR technique, which stands for situation, task, action and result. By looking at the success of your candidate’s actions, you can decide whether a candidate has the right competencies for the job. 

Types of competency

Competencies are broad, so it is up to you to decide which ones are important to assess for a particular role or during a performance review. They might include areas like:

Unlike their core skill set, these competency areas will tell you more about how your candidate relates to their colleagues and managers. This is worth noting if you are looking to maintain a workplace in which the members of staff get on well with each other.

Soft skills

According to Forbes, by 2030 two thirds of jobs might require soft skills. Therefore, in order to prepare your employees for a modern workplace, training them in soft skills is a great way to keep their abilities relevant.

You might be hoping to recruit a candidate with excellent IT troubleshooting skills, but if you find out during the interview process that they have a poor ability to explain the solution to your customers, or are rude to your customers, then you may decide against hiring them. This is because in this instance, they lack the soft skill competency to handle situations that are important to you in terms of maintaining your business reputation. 

When an employee or worker is in a customer-facing role, soft skills become more important. They influence how your business comes across. Diplomatic, approachable and helpful staff can help build a solid reputation by providing your business with a friendly face. 

Soft skills are also a useful competency for candidates to have if you are looking for a manager who is able to coach or mentor other members of your team. If they have past experience to draw from here, it will be especially worth noting whether they can draw on this to apply it to new situations. Another useful soft skill for a manager to have is conflict management, which they can use to help successfully resolve disagreements between colleagues or a customer issue. 

Technical competencies

According to a recent UK tech jobs report, demand for tech employees is higher than ever. Therefore, you might find yourself assessing a candidate’s technical competencies more often than not. 

Technical competencies are closely related to skills, but involve building on these skills by using the person’s initiative and knowledge base for better results. This is about the practical knowledge of how to apply skills well in a particular situation. Examples of technical competencies include:

Choosing to assess technical competencies that are closely related to the core responsibilities of the role you are recruiting for will help narrow down the search for the best candidate. There are various ways to assess technical competencies, such as by setting a test during the interview process. 

You might also ask your candidates how they would solve a particular problem. If a candidate provides a particularly novel but successful solution to a problem, then this candidate has creative competence. This may be useful to your business in the long term, as it might mean that they are able to help their colleagues to deal with complex projects or troubleshoot any outstanding issues.

Leadership skills

If you are recruiting for a managerial position, looking at a candidate’s past leadership achievements can give you an indication as to how they might lead your own team. There are various leadership styles, and different situations call for different approaches. A candidate with strong leadership skills will be able to decide how to lead a team, as well as solve internal conflicts between co-workers successfully. You can ask them a few challenging leadership questions to find out more about how they handle these situations.

Consider asking these candidates competency-based leadership questions on:

Competency assessment is a useful way to find out whether a candidate has the ability to act on their knowledge, using their pre-existing skills to tackle new challenges. Highly competent candidates can provide novel solutions to new problems that your industry faces, often making them a valuable addition to the team.