When you are looking to bring in new employees one of the most important and most delicate parts of the process is the competency based interview stage. It is very easy to make interview mistakes, and those mistakes could lead to getting the wrong people in, lost money,time and energy.Doug Walner, CEO of Psychological Services Inc, produced a useful article highlighting that bad recruitment decisions can have numerous negative repercussions, beyond the obvious ones you might expect.
If you want to hire the best candidate, and who doesn’t? You should follow competency based interview best practice. You must know how to design questions that are effective and will help you compare candidates and get the right ones for the demands of the role.
Here is what you have to do:
Interview Preparation
A day or two to the interview, you have to put time aside to prepare for the interview and draft questions. Steve, of Express Staffing, explains that “it is interview preparation that really gets you the right results. If you know what exactly what it is you need from people to be successful in the job then you will be far more likely to recruit well. People tend to recruit people they like, when they should be recruiting people that are competent for the target role.”
You should draft the questions after you have gone through the following elements:
- Revisit the reasons that you are looking to fill the position
- In what ways can the individual fail in the position?
- What is the individual expected to accomplish to be deemed successful in the role?
- What attributes is the individual expected to have to be able to fit in and thrive in the role?
- What environmental challenges is he/she expected to overcome (resources, politics, bureaucracy etc.)
Break down the requirements into knowledge, skills, attitudes and personality factors (traits). These are known as KSATS. When you have done this you can measure answers against what you are looking for in a highly focused way.
When you have the competencies you are assessing you should work out at most 8 interview sections. Each section could look at related KSATs by targeting questions to draw out experiences that will help you assess the candidate’s ability on them. You can further narrow things down if you are able to quantify just how important the various KSATs are to succeed in the role.
The next step is to decide on the numbers on the different sections that qualifycandidates for the role.You can then have clear metrics for each section, weighted by how crucial each characteristic is for the role.
Once you have done this, you can go ahead and write questions with answers that will make it easy for you to judge the candidate based on the areas you have noted down. Interview Skills have put together a handy resource with lots of interview questions that relate to specific competencies. Use these and build upon them, or use your own questions.
Hours to the interview
As the time draws closer, you need to review the positions to be filled to make sure the assessment criteria are well understood by you and the rest of the interview panel. Go through the application information for all the candidates and make notes of areas you think would be useful to probe.
At the interview
The first thing you should do when the candidate comes in is to welcome them and help them relax with a minute of small talk. Don’t make the mistake of jumping right in. Avoid distractions for both you and the candidate by keeping your phone on silent. Go through the questions you have drawn up and take notes of the response. If you are close enough to the questions, and understand the competencies well enough, you can score the answers there and then. If the whole panel are doing so you can average scores and use them for post-interview evaluation and decisions.
By putting numbers around the interview process, and being highly focused, you can guard against natural bias and subjective judgements. You want to find people that can excel in the job, not people who you will enjoy socialising with.
