Behavioural or competency-based interviews

Questioning types

There are skill-based questions – focus on technical skills and learned capability

The interviewer will need to see evidence of your experience and examples of work performed with outcomes.

There are behavioural-based questions – focus on attitude, judgement and approach

The interviewer will want to see how you manage situations of difficulty, conflict, pressure and stress, tight

deadlines and accuracy etc.

Behavioural interviewing is based on three major components that have been proven by research and practical

experience to support more accurate hiring decisions.

Three key points:

• Past behaviour is an accurate predictor of future behaviour.

• The STAR concept – demonstrating the what, why and result.

• Probing e.g. applying effective interviewing skills to achieve the strongest predictive validity.

As a candidate, you can prepare for this. Let’s specifically look at what the STAR approach is:

• Situation or task

  Every behavioural example should contain information that lets the interviewer know why an action took place and what had occurred to warrant your action.

• Action 

  Actions are what you did.

• Result

  A result is the outcome of actions – the evidence of your actions.

A compelling and well-structured interview response should not include:

• feelings and opinions

• theoretical or future-oriented statements

• vague statements.

Here are some examples

I believe the reason this happened was because the Operations Team didn’t know how to track the detail (feeling/opinion - subjective).

If that happened in our team, I would develop a way to analyse it differently, possibly using LinkedIn, and consider some new metrics to determine what stage marketing get involved. This would possibly reduce the risk of overspend (theoretical only – an assumption/not proven).

It was a really good outcome once we had made a change to the size of the team (vague – subjective, what is good, what outcome, and through what type of change?).