How To Prepare For A Competency Based Interview

Key messages: The UN uses competency based interviews to identify the right
candidate. Based on “If you could do the job in the past, you will be able to do it in the
future”. Competency based interviewing is mainly about your past experience:

Tell me about a time when you where part of a successful team?

What was your role in the team?

What were the problems in the team and how did you solve them?

Always print the vacancy notice to have the competencies available for you interview
and for preparation. The notice may be offline after a while. Reference the
competencies in the job announcement in your interview.

Keep the CAR-principles in mind for structuring your interview answers. That’s what
the panel looks for.

Context: Give a brief context.

Action: Outline actions attributable to you.

Results: Demonstrate the impact you had.

Demonstrate you are: Emotionally stable, agreeable, fitting in the organization.

On a phone interview: Stand up during the interview to increase the quality of your
voice. Use pitch, tone and speed to your advantage.

Simple questions sometimes have a deeper meaning. Think of the depth and
complexity of your examples. Your examples will be validated.

Don’t only repeat your CV show the intrinsic value proposition of you for the
company.

You should not ask about benefits and entitlements at the end of the interview. If you
do not have any good questions you can ask if you can elaborate more on some
key aspects of your profile.

Common questions:

How have you resolved a problem within a team?

What are the three values that are most important to you and how do
they translate into your work?
 Examples you give should be attributable to you, especially regarding the impact.

Be honest.

Full Transcript: Good afternoon everybody. My name is Michael Emery and I am the
Director of Human Resources, at UNFPA and I’m here today to give you some insights
into competency based interviewing.

Now, as you’re probably aware, most parts of the multi-lateral sector including the UN
and UNFPA use competency interviewing to assess whether or not candidates are
suitable for a certain position. And having sat through literally thousands of these
interviews, I’m here to share with you some inside tips if you like on how to prepare
properly for a competency interview.

Before we go into some of the tips, I want to talk a little bit about the basic premise of
why we use competency interviewing. And the basic premise is that, if you can
demonstrate that you can do the competency in the past, chances are that you’ll be
able to do it in the future. So basically, if you’ve done it in the past, you’ll be able to do
it in the future. And in terms of the research why this type of assessment is used, as a
predictor of future performance, competency based interviewing or sometimes referred
to as behavioral interviewing or situational interviewing is a .51 predictor of future
performance, which is a very strong predictor, the only better predictor is a .54 predictor
which is a trial period where you come in and you do an internship or a trial period as a
trainee. So it’s a very strong predictor to see whether or not somebody will be able to
perform in that role.

As a result, most of the questions that you get in a competency interview tend to be
based on past experience. So it would be a question like, tell me about a time when
you were part of a successful team, what made that team successful, what was
your role in that team? How did you overcome problems in that team? And a good
panel will be probing and delving and trying to get to the bottom of what your role was in
that particular team.

Now in preparing for a competency interview therefore, the first point of reference is the
vacancy announcement because in the vacancy announcements in UNFPA and most
parts of the UN system, they will list the competencies that are most relevant for that
position. So first tip, always print the vacancy notice when you apply for the job because
invariably we interview you a month or two months later and the vacancy has gone off
the net and you’re thinking, what were those competencies that were listed in the
vacancy announcement? So please, that is the first tip, always print the vacancy notice,
therefore you have a reference of how to prepare for a competency interview.

Now when you’re preparing for the interview, I like to encourage candidates to think of
what I call the CAR principle, Context, Actions, Results. So when structuring your
answers, you should be first of all giving a brief context, secondly, giving the actions that
where attributable to you as the individual, not part of the team. And thirdly, and this is
where a lot of candidates, they actually forget the third bit, is looking at the results or the
impact of your actions. Sometimes they also throw in a fourth letter as well, which is L
which stands for Learning. What learning did you draw from that experience?

And if you structure your answer in that way, then you’re giving the panel what they’re
looking for. Subconsciously, the panel are looking for several things as well and the
panel generally don’t even know this, they’re looking for people that are conscientious
so you have to somehow rather project that conscientiousness in your interview.
They’re looking for people that are emotionally stable, so you don’t want to come across
as a nutter during the interview. They’re looking for people that are likable and
agreeable and they’re looking for people that they feel will be a good fit for the position
and a good fit for the organization.

So certainly in your preparation for an interview, you should be referencing the

competencies, structuring your answers in the CARL context and be prepared to
engage with the panel.

A couple of other tips, often in UNFPA and other organizations, we’re using telephone
interviews. The tip I would have for you if you are given a telephone interview, is to
stand up during the interview. You tend to project your voice a lot better when you’re
standing up rather than sitting down.

Secondly, on a telephone interview, use pitch, tone, speed and silence to your
advantage. You want to keep the panel that are on the other end of the phone awake
and interested in your answers.

If you’re having a face to face interview, this is a completely different setup. It’s very
important that you come in warmed up into an interview. There’s a lot of evidence to
suggest that a very natural inclination for panel members is to make up their mind about
a candidate within forty seconds of an interview starting. So you really do need to come
in warmed up and ready to go. Certainly at various parts of the interview, the panel,
different panel members will be asking questions. What I like to advise people is to
address the panel member that asked the questions with the context part of your
response and then bringing in the other panel members with eye movements, hand
context, etc. The panel want people that are enthusiastic and you need to bring in that
enthusiasm into your responses.

Now generally speaking, the way that a competency interview is structured, they tend to
have what’s called an icebreaker question. And this is designed just to get you talking.
They might say, how was your plane trip here today, was it busy at JFK? That’s just a
general question to get you relaxed and get you talking.

Often then they will ask what seems to be a very simple question which is designed to
ascertain motivation for the position, and this can be a question such as, why were you
interested in applying for this job?, what particular aspect of this job appealed to
you when you applied?, something like that. And this is a very, very important
question because as I said, that first forty seconds is pretty important. This is where you
need to come across and not just repeat what on your CV because the panel has read
your CV. What needs to come across here is the value proposition that you bring to the
organization and to this role. So what is it, what’s the intrinsic value proposition that you
have that makes you a strong candidate for this position and that you want the panel to
hire you for.

Then they would tend to go into the standard body of the interview where they are
asking competency based questions. And that can be anywhere from five to eight
structured competency based questions. And then they will typically wrap up the
interview and give you the opportunity to ask questions as well.

Now this is often a bit of an awkward stage for candidates because they don’t know
what type of questions they should be asking and I can guarantee you that I’ve been on
a lot of panels where people have asked quite dumb questions, where they’ve blown a
good interview and a dumb question.

Certainly in the multi-lateral context, you don’t need to be asking questions about
benefits and entitlements, because you can look at that on the website. You should
know that already.

I often counsel young candidates in particular that if I feel awkward about this part of the
interview, one thing they can do is to say, look I don’t have any questions parse but I
would like to provide some additional information, if that’s okay with the panel. And
that’s where you have two or three minutes just to hit two or three really, really salient
points about why you’re a good fit for this position and what’s your motivation for the
position. Again you can reiterate that value proposition.

Invariably, in competency based interviews, you’re asked two types of questions. One is
on how you work in teams and how you resolve conflict. So you need to really think
about what it is, how you do work in teams and you need to have an example of when
you’ve been able to resolve differences or conflict within a team when you’ve taken
action about that.

Also, often, we ask questions on a value proposition. A typical question on a value

proposition might be something like, what are the three values that are most
important to you? And how do these values translate into your work. Now, that’s
an interesting question because candidates at all ages tend to kind of be stuck on this
question. It’s not because they don’t have a value system, it’s because often they
haven’t really thought about what their value system is. Perhaps, that’s some thinking
for you to look at after this video presentation. Think about what are the values that are
important to me.

When the panel is assessing your answers in a competency interview, generally they’re
looking for two specific things, one is the depth of the example and the complexity of the
example and clearly the more complex the example that you’re giving, the higher the
chances you have of scoring. It’s kind of like the diving in the Olympics, the more
difficult the dive, the higher the possibility to get good marks.

Let me give you an example. I was interviewing for a position as a country director
position and I asked the question, tell me about the time when you had to resolve a
conflict between two colleagues or two sets of colleagues? And one of the respondents
gave me in the example of having two interns in his office and they weren’t getting on
and he had a chat with them, essentially he clunked their heads together and said you
two better get on and he gave them a project to work on and they started working on it
and now they’re really good friends. That’s a lovely example, nice result, nice impact but
in terms of the complexity and the depth of that example, it’s not really at the level that
we’re looking for for a country director.

Another candidate for the same position gave the example of an extremely volatile local
staff issue in a country office where he’d worked where people were bringing AK-47s
into the office. And he was able to setup a mediation and negotiation system in that
office and worked through a very, very complex series of negotiations to try and resolve
that issue. Clearly, that example had a lot more depth and complexity and he was able
to score much higher on that example.

It’s also very important too that the examples that you give are actually attributable to
you. I remember one particular interview when I asked the question, tell me about a
time when you’ve led a communications campaign and what was the impact of that
campaign? And I had a very eloquent candidate that said to me that she had led the
campaign on the launch of some big report and that report had four million hits on the
website and 16 op ed pieces on major newspapers etc. And I was looking at her CV as
she was giving me this example and I realized that she was an intern in the office at that
time, so I actually drilled down and I said, what was your specific role in this example
and she says? Well mainly I was preparing the press releases and photo copying the
press releases. So clearly she wasn’t leading the campaign, she was some back up
support for that so she had misrepresented her level of contribution to that example. So
you need to actually be quite honest in that because with reference checking etc. we
can validate the extent to which your examples are actually true.

So to summarize, I would say you need to be ultra-prepared for an interview. You need
to reference the competencies in the vacancy notice. You need to think about good
examples and bad examples of the competencies that we’re looking at. Thinking about
C A R and L, you need to be engaging with the panel whether that’s on a telephone
interview or on a face to face interview. And you need to be thinking about the depth
and the complexity of your examples. And you need to be thinking about the values or
the motivation or the value proposition that you want to bring to the organization and to
that role.

And if you’re prepared, the panel will appreciate it, you’ll feel much more confident and
you have a much better chance of getting the job. Good luck with your next interview.
Thank you.