In some definitions, human resource consultants refer to “competencies” as the entire range of skills, technical knowledge, behaviors, performance indicators, and motivations that will help predict if a candidate is best qualified for the job and will succeed in it.

For the purpose of simplicity, I find it useful to make a clear distinction up front between the skills, knowledge, and experience required for the job, and those traits that are more related to character—traits such as persistence, resilience, initiative, and a positive attitude. These are the traits that enable an individual to make the most of his or her skills, knowledge, and workplace experiences now and in the future. Typically, competencies that are character-based are also the traits that enable high performers to adapt to the stress that often accompanies difficult challenges.

Clearly, you and your colleagues have a critical role to play in helping to establish simple, bedrock benchmarks of success of the job you are trying to fill based on your own knowledge. I will refer to these as company-specific or organizational competencies.

An excellent book that can be used as a guide to studying, building, and implementing competency-based interviews is Lori Davila and Louise Kursmark’s How to Choose the Right Person for the Right Job Every Time (McGraw Hill, 2005). Mirroring themes I presented in the beginning of this book, the authors suggest keeping it simple by describing the “must-have competencies” needed for success in a particular role. The authors also suggest that one simple success match template would assign competencies to three categories:

Competencies that predict success are different depending on the job, but you can start by asking your top performers to review a list of general ones, and then add other behavioral competencies that they think are also important.

Employee-Driven Competency Worksheet Three competencies the top performer(s) feel are most important from this list (if they apply):

In analyzing the cultural competencies that underlie performance, it is useful to engage current high performers who hold the same job. The goal is to help us ask candidates questions that our front-line champions know are important. Before we provide examples of how your employees can help you analyze the qualities that are part of their portrait of success, let’s take a step backward and anticipate a critical moment in the interview process—what will be a moment of truth.

One of the most important moments in the interview is when you ask the candidate to describe his or her most significant recent accomplishments—as you attempt to discover whether those accomplishments shed light on the match between the candidate’s entire skill set and the goals you need to have accomplished. Although everyone realizes that it is important to talk to candidates about their recent accomplishments, it is not always taken into consideration that questions about recent accomplishments must be broken down into at least four distinct component parts, if we are to get a clear portrait of the candidate’s level of involvement in those accomplishments. Because genuine accomplishments are never achieved in the absence of challenges, it is important to anticipate such “moment of truth” questions this way:

If you drilled down on these questions and these questions only in the interview process, many of the competencies for which you would be looking in an ideal candidate would reveal themselves—qualities such as planning and organizing, negotiation skills, delegation, detail orientation, interpersonal skills, adaptability, and so forth.

In interviewing candidates about their accomplishments, trained behavioral interviewers often use the following model, known as the SPAR approach.

Ask the candidates to describe a particularly difficult situation or challenge they were able to successfully address in their previous job; get the candidate to describe the problems that were associated with that challenge; discuss with the candidates in detail the actions they took as individuals and team members to address those problems; and obtain detailed information from candidates about the results.

In order to create greater efficiencies in the interview process when the subject of prior accomplishments is addressed, I have found that two research techniques used in advance can be very helpful.

To reiterate: There is seldom a need to put either the candidate or yourself on the spot by asking questions about previous accomplishments robotically with no advance preparation. Asking the candidate to submit as much of this kind of information as possible in advance, as a written document, enables him or her to provide you with more facts than you will be able to talk about or substantiate in a face-to-face interview. Poor candidates (those who are unqualified or lacking in seriousness) simply won’t respond to the opportunities you present for this kind of self-assessment. They will deselect themselves. Moreover, it is difficult, if not impossible, to make up specific, fact-based, and genuine-sounding answers to the kind of questions described here, especially if the candidate is given a tight deadline, such as three to four days. In this way, you can prepare yourself for an efficient, focused, and highly structured interview. The interview time then does not become a ritualized chore, but a chance for the well-prepared interviewer (in a compact time frame) to ask a confident, relaxed, and prepared candidate to help fill in the gaps of information that need clarification—as opposed to starting from scratch with no reference points.

What makes this process even stronger is the stage at which you ask your top performers to help you set clear benchmarks of the job description that you can compare with the candidate’s written self-assessments.

Before interviewing candidates and asking them about their accomplishments, it may be helpful to ask several of your top performers to complete the following two-stage process that links the SPAR analysis methodology with a simple SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunites, threats) analysis of your current challenges. The two-part analysis put to your top performers first could be as follows.

The goal and purpose of this exercise is to help provide a window into the most important goals and concerns shared by management and top performers in order to refine both the job description and the interview process connected with it.

This was also the overall goal of the chapter. By asking your top performers, in essence, to tell you what they would ask of candidates if they were doing the interviewing, you are getting the view from the trenches.

In the next chapter we will discuss an approach that is not used as often as it could be—asking candidates to tell you what they would ask if they were interviewing themselves.