Competency-Based Interview Questions and Answers [+ Tips]

Competency-based interviews are gaining popularity as an effective interview approach in many companies, especially when open positions require a high level of specific job-related skills and/or knowledge. Since qualifications and work experience are not enough to accurately evaluate applicants' skill levels, hiring managers have adopted competency-based interviews to ensure that they hire the perfect candidate whose skill set accurately matches the specific requirements of the job. 

As competency-based interviews can tell the interviewer whether the applicant fits the requirements for the role, your response should be clear and well-structured in a way that helps highlight your ability and behavior match to the position. 

In this article, we will equip you with useful answer tactics and examples for your next competency-based interview!

Competency-based interviews or behavioral interviews include a group of questions aiming at evaluating how individuals perform certain tasks and handle specific situations related to real-life situations of the position. Questions in this type of interview will require you to demonstrate that you have the capabilities employers looking for, often by providing examples of circumstances you've experienced in the past and how you resolved those arising issues. 

The logic behind this interviewing method is that by asking candidates questions related to a particular situation in the past, interviewers will have enough data to predict how candidates might perform in the future. Rather than asking how the applicant would behave in a hypothetical situation, hiring managers tend to ask how the applicant did to handle a real-life situation in the past.

In general, when employers ask competency-based questions, you are expected to show that you can cope with the challenges of the job, work well with colleagues, and handle assigned tasks effectively. 

Depending on certain positions, competency-based interview questions may be directly related to the job; for example, interviewees for an internal communication position may have to answer questions about how they handled when encountering a moral conflict at work or their definition of effective communication. In some cases, interviewers will also ask follow-up questions to investigate further and get a more well-rounded picture of candidates' backgrounds.

A great candidate must be able to offer practical examples of how his skills can help companies achieve their vision.

It might be difficult for you to get a sense of what would be asked in a competency interview, or think of proper questions without examples of competency-based questions, especially when you haven't experienced any interview of this kind before. 

Therefore, here we have a list of ten competency-based interview questions and answers that might be helpful for your next competency interview preparation.

❓Describe a time when you successfully worked as part of a team.

❓ Describe a situation in which you handled teamwork conflict in the workplace.

❓ Describe a project where you had to adopt different leadership styles to achieve your goal.

❓ Tell me about a time when you were able to use persuasion to successfully convince your co-worker to see things your way.

❓ Describe a time when you worked with a difficult person.

❓ How did you face challenges in the past workplace and tell me how you overcame them?

❓ Describe a time you created a goal and achieved it.

❓ Describe a time when you had to manage conflicting priorities.

❓ Tell me about a time you had to cope with pressure.

❓ Tell me about a time you were assigned a task you've never had before.

Since employers often use competency-based interviews to look for certain skill sets and capabilities of candidates, you'll need to invest more time and effort in preparing for your competency interview questions, other than just looking at examples and answers. For such reasons, here are three useful tips that you might need to increase your passing rate at the next competency interview.

💡 Identify the core competencies needed for the role

Each specific role requires a certain skill set and interviewers often make job-related questions to identify such skills in a competency-based interview. Therefore it's necessary that you do research beforehand to know the skill requirements of the position you are applying for. 

You might start with reading the job description thoroughly to see what specific skill set the employers are looking for. Knowing the core competencies of the position helps you get a sense of what you might be asked, and how your current skill set can meet the demand of employers.

💡 Think of specific situations where you’ve demonstrated those skills

Interviewers who ask competency-based questions usually want to know what kind of experiences and incidents from your past can help you deal with your new role’s tasks. So when you have a picture of what you might be asked in your mind, you should think of several real-life examples that you have been through. You can keep a list of those situations, then elaborate on how you use your skills to manage each situation and in what way it’ll also be helping you with taking the new role. 

💡 Use the STAR method

The STAR technique is a useful method for preparing for a competency-based interview. It helps you organize your ideas and content in a way that makes your response more cohesive to the interview manager. 

The STAR method represents four main content pillars that you should include in your competency-based interview answers, which are situation, tasks, action, and result. This is a guideline of how you should structure your response. It suggests that you should describe the situation to give employers a context, present the tasks, elaborate on your action, and finally state the result. Using this framework can help demonstrate the key competencies that you've gained in your experience while also presenting your performance tendencies for the future role.

--- Originally written by May Luong ---