The Devil is in the Detail - The Technical Competency Interview.
Being the best person for a job and getting selected for that job are unfortunately two every different things in this market place. Over the years firms, their HR teams and their hiring managers have built their own unique ways of trying to identify if someone can do the job, whether they are someone who they want to do the job and, if they can overcome those hurdles, does that person want the job and are they willing to commit to that long term. Sounds simple but in fact the reality is far more complex that it may first seem.
One of the most recent phenomenon to affect even the most technical of hires has been the competency based interview. This style of interview has ended many an applicant’s chances of their dream job simply because they were blindsided with the type of questions, and moreover, questions that demand the need for recollecting a specific situation to showcase how you react to things.
Competency questions allow the interviewer to assess how you have conducted yourself within a team or in a standalone individual speaking with other areas of the business. Culture and environment fit is becoming increasingly important within the technical interview especially in environments that promote positive challenge within the team to encourage constant growth and communication.
The typical preparation for this type of interview is the STAR technique and please follow this link to what that entails and how the answers should be tailored around Situation, Task, Action and Result.
A competency based interview will typically involve questions around specific examples where you have struggled with team members or a particular task and how that was resolved quickly and efficiently. Every time the choice of scenario and the details that follow it determine how confident the interviewer is in your ability to get to a solution with minimal disruption to the team. Typical questions include:
- Describe a time when you were a member of a team and witnessed a conflict within the team. What did you do? What were the results? What could you have done better?
- Give an example of how you dealt with a difficult or sensitive situation that required extensive communication.
- Give me an example of a problem you have faced in the past, either as part of a team or as an individual. How did you solve the problem?
What many people fail to prepare themselves for is the thought process around how problems were solved and how the outcome was positive even if the particular scenario was negative. When answering these questions, you should consider the following:
- Choose the best example for you, don’t pick an example that will be difficult for you to explain the scenario or, even worse, someone else’s example as you won’t be able to explain the thought processes you went through to solve the problem – “what a tangled web we weave, when first we set out to deceive!”
- Make sure they are real and you have the detail behind the story
- Know what you could have done in hindsight to get to a quicker or better solution
- Practise telling the scenario to someone out loud (be sure to choose both a technical person and then someone non-technical to prepare for your varying audiences)
- Think about how your audience or team around you perceived you through this situation – is that how you wish to portray yourself now?
- Everything you say will paint a picture of you make sure you are truly happy with every detail
