Competency-Based Interviews, Revised Edition: How to Master the Tough Interview Style Used by the Fortune 500s

Competency-Based Interviews

Competency-Based INTERVIEWS

REVISED EDITION

How to Master the Tough Interview Style Used by the Fortune 500s

Robin Kessler

Copyright © 2012 by Robin Kessler

All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.

COMPETENCY-BASED INTERVIEWS, REVISED EDITION

TYPESET BY EILEEN MUNSON

Cover design by Jeff Piasky

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kessler, Robin, 1955-

Competency-based interviews: how to master the tough interview style used by the Fortune 500s / by Robin Kessler. --

Rev. ed.

p. cm.

Rev. ed. of: Competency-based interviews. c2006.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60163-221-0 -- ISBN 978-1-60163-594-5 (ebook) 1. Employment interviewing. 2. Core competencies. 3. Self-presentation. I. Title.

HF5549.5.I6K47 2012

650.14’4--dc23

2012013332

This is for my mother,

with love and thanks.

Acknowledgments

As always, a huge thank you to everyone who helped with this book. I would, however, like to give a few people some special recognition.

To Paula Hanson: Thank you for doing the initial editing and providing advice when I came up against problems. Any kind of problem. And for hanging in as a good friend for a very long time.

To Steven Lait, graphic artist for Costco and the former editorial cartoonist for the Oakland Tribune and ANG Group, who drew the cartoons for this book: Thank you for doing great work and being the best editorial cartoonist on the planet—as well as one of my favorite cousins.

I’d like to thank the consultants Ed Cripe, Cybelle Lyon, Cara Capretta Raymond, Michael Friedman, Dr. Kay Lillig Cotter, and Ken Abosch for sharing your expertise, time, opinions, and personal competencies. Having the opportunity to talk with each of you helped me make this book considerably stronger.

To David Heath, Dessie Nash, Blake Nolingberg, Mindy Wertheimer, Erica Graham, Chip Smith, Kalen Phillips, Stephen Sye, Diane Schad Dayhoff, Mary Alice Eureste, and Bill Baumgardt: Thank you for being subject-matter experts in your professional areas and answering all my questions for the book.

To Ron Fry, Michael Pye, Adam Schwartz, Kirsten Dalley, Laurie Kelly-Pye, and the rest of the staff at Career Press: Thank you for doing a great job of making my words look good, the book look better, and being great to work with.

To my other friends and relatives: Thank you once again for putting up with my leaving early, not calling as often, and not being as available to go out to dinner, the movies, or anything else. Since this book is now finished, please call me.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: Understand Competency-Based Interview Systems

Chapter 2: Identify Key Competencies

Chapter 3: Know What Interviewers Are Trained to Look For

Chapter 4: Expect Competency-Based Behavioral Questions

Chapter 5: Prove Competencies With Examples

Chapter 6: Present Yourself as a Strong Candidate

Chapter 7: Consider Other Important Interview Tips

Mid-Book Review

Chapter 8: Look at Case Studies for Ideas to Make Your Interviewing Stronger

Chapter 9: Understand How a Typical Competency-Based Interview Flows

Chapter 10: Learn From Other Interviewees 123

Chapter 11: Stay Current With Interview Technology and Practices

Chapter 12: Develop Global Competencies for the Future

Chapter 13: Send a Thank-You Note, Follow Up, Get the Offer, and Negotiate

Chapter 14: Actively Manage Your Career in Competency-Based Organizations

Chapter 15: Use Competency-Based Resumes to Get Your Next Interview

Chapter 16: Think Long-Term and Make Change Work for You

Appendix A: List of Core Competencies

Appendix B: Competencies for Case Studies

Appendix C: Examples of Illegal Interview Questions

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Introduction

What can you do today to be a star at interviewing and improve your career? How can you get the offer you want from the organization you want to work for? How can you move forward in your career?

The first step is to think strategically. Why do publishers choose to offer on certain book proposals and not others? Why do certain products do especially well and others don’t? How did Oprah become a star, and what does she do to make sure she stays a star? How can she be so good at interviewing, acting, and developing and publishing her magazine? What made Nelson Mandela from South Africa and Aung San Suu Kyi from Myanmar so admired worldwide that they both won Nobel Peace Prizes? Why did you—or someone you know—get into a prestigious college? Why do certain people get selected for the best assignments and the best jobs, and what causes other qualified candidates to be rejected?

The answers to these questions are complex, but if you really think about it, there are three basic steps you need to take to improve your ability to get what you want.

What It Takes to Win

1. Learning what it takes to win is the first step.

2. Doing the things that it takes to win is the second step.

3. Recognizing that what it takes to win can change—sometimes rapidly—is the third step.

____________________

The more quickly you identify how things are changing and adjust your approach, the more quickly you will be successful. Realistically, we need to expect changes. New tools, new approaches, and new strategies can cause decision-makers to make different decisions. If we adapt to these changes earlier than others, we increase our probability of winning. That’s all. Oprah may have strong artistic abilities, and Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi have demonstrated exceptional political skills. All three are obviously more intelligent than the average person, both intellectually and emotionally. But they have also overcome major life challenges. Oprah has dealt with child abuse, Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years, and Aung San Suu Kyi was released in 2011 after 15 years of house arrest. Clearly, all three figured out what it took to get ahead in their fields, and have mastered staying ahead of the game as their environments changed. Mandela went on to become the president of South Africa from 1994–1999, and as of this writing, Aung San Suu Kyi is running for parliament in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma).

One of the key abilities that will help you manage your career is learning how to interview more effectively and convince the interviewer that you are the best candidate for the job. Interviewing well is critical if you want to be successful. So how can you take the three steps that it takes to win and apply them to interviewing? This book will show you how to be more successful by:

Teaching you how to recognize the changes in interviewing that are being implemented at most sophisticated organizations.

Explaining what today’s interviewers are looking for.

Showing you how to emphasize how your competencies match the employer’s needs.

Developing a plan to ensure you perform well in every critical interview.

When systems change and grow, we need to be smarter than our competitors and recognize those changes as early as possible, the way Oprah and these Nobel Peace Prize winners have. If we aren’t aware, our own careers may be negatively affected. We need time to develop and adjust our strategy, because employers do periodically change the systems they use to select employees. If we don’t change our approach, we will eventually become less valuable to our current employer, as well. We all need to take responsibility for actively managing our career, and that includes changing our strategy to respond to the changes introduced by higher-ups. As we become increasingly astute, we may be able to anticipate some of these changes and prepare for them.

This book will give you a new—and better—strategy to interview more effectively and improve your ability to get the job you want. If you use this approach you will increase your chances of:

Being selected for the most competitive positions.

Winning the best job at a new organization.

Getting a great first job or internship.

Being chosen for that critical promotion in your current organization.

Taking control of your career path.

Increasing your salary.

Obtaining more satisfying assignments and more challenging work.

What’s Different?

Understanding exactly how human resources managers, line managers, and professionals approach interviewing and hiring has always given candidates an advantage in the interview process. If you know what the interviewer is looking for—and you’re savvy enough to know how to use that information—you’ll have an edge in the interview. More than half of the Fortune 500 companies and other major organizations all around the world are now using competency-based systems to help select and manage employees. Here are just a few examples: American Express, Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Bank of America, BP, Wells Fargo, General Motors, HP, Radio Shack, HCA, Carlson Companies, BHP, IBM, General Electric, PDVSA, Anheuser-Busch, Girl Scouts USA, the U.S. Federal Reserve System, and the province of British Columbia in Canada. Some of these organizations have worked with competency-based systems for more than 20 years, and they are becoming increasingly sophisticated in how they are applying them. Other companies, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations have adopted competencies more recently or are looking at the possibility of using them in the near future. Competency-based systems help organizations manage their human resources, everything from selecting employees to evaluating, training, paying, and promoting them.

Competency-based interviews and competency-based appraisals are the two most common ways companies are using competencies to help improve the caliber of their employees. More and more companies are including a list of competencies they need in ads on their own Websites and on Websites such as Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com. Since January 2003, when I first saw the need for my book Competency-Based Resumes, the number of job advertisements that specifically list the competencies the employer is looking for continues to increase significantly every time I check.

_________________________

In early March of 2012, Monster.com ran advertisements asking for competencies from organizations of all sizes. Companies with competency-based job advertisements shown that day included:

IBM

Google

Lockheed Martin

Prudential

KPMG

Sanofi

Konica Minolta

Invensys

Expedia

Massachusetts General Hospital

Ingersoll-Rand

Luminant

ConAgra

CareerBuilder ads specifically mentioning competencies around the same time included:

DuPont

General Mills

Schlumberger

Grainger

_______________________

Employees at the best competency-based employers now have the ability to look up information about critical competencies on their employer’s Website or in employee handbooks or manuals, which are now usually available online. The competencies for their current positions are almost always covered as part of their appraisal.

What Are Competencies?

Paul Green, in his book Building Robust Competencies (Jossey-Bass, 1999), defines an individual competency as a written description of measurable work habits and personal skills used to achieve a work objective. Some organizations define competencies slightly differently as underlying characteristics, behavior, knowledge, and skills required to differentiate performance. They define what superior performers do more often, in more situations, and with better results. Put simply, competencies are the key characteristics of the most successful performers that help them be so successful. Organizations benefit from working with competencies because it gives them a more effective and more sophisticated way to manage, measure, and improve the quality of their employees. Not surprisingly, the use of competencies is continuing to grow. According to Signe Spencer, a senior consultant with the Hay Group in Boston and the coauthor of Competence at Work (John Wiley & Sons, 1993), In the last 15 years, we have seen an explosion of interest in competency work at all levels worldwide. Competencies are not just a trend!

Competencies that are relevant for all positions organization-wide are called core competencies. Competencies used in interviewing and other applications may be identified at the departmental or functional level, or even at the individual level. Being successful as an accountant will require different competencies than those required for a sales position. In Chapter 2, I will spend more time explaining competencies and giving you the information you need to successfully identify the relevant competencies for the position you want, before the interview. Many organizations choose not to use the term competencies. They prefer to use other terms, such as success factors, attributes, values, dimensions, and so on. Each of these terms means something slightly different, and decision-makers have good reasons for choosing them. For candidates, though, it simply makes sense to look at all of these categories for information describing what the employer is really looking for—those key characteristics or competencies. Competency-based systems designed by consultants and corporations can be complex. This book will help you understand these systems and give you the tools you need as a candidate to navigate your way through them.

What Are Competency-Based Interviews?

Today, more and more interviewers at the best companies are using behavioral interviewing techniques to help determine how competent candidates are in the key areas most critical for success. Behavioral interviewing has been in use for more than 20 years in most sophisticated organizations, but behavioral interview questions targeting relevant competencies have only been in use in the last 10 to 15 years. Interviewers at many of the best organizations are being trained to use these new competency-based systems and evaluate candidates in a much more complex and comprehensive way than they did in the past. They are now taught to evaluate the candidate’s fit for the position based on his or her perceived competency level, and assess the candidate’s nonverbal and verbal communication in a more sophisticated way. Organizations may use different names (including targeted selection interviewing and evidence-based interviewing) to describe what is essentially competency-based interviewing. One approach to competency-based interviewing involves asking primary questions targeting each key competency. Another approach asks interviewers to identify evidence of competencies by listening closely to the answers to questions and follow-up questions (also called probes). In Chapter 1, we’ll be looking at both of these approaches in more detail.

Despite all of these changes, most career counselors and candidates haven’t updated their approach to interviewing, resumes, and other job-search techniques to include the competencies employers are now looking for. Instead, they are marketing candidate strengths and accomplishments the same way they always have. It’s time to accept that the job market has changed and adapt our approach accordingly. Competencies are becoming the way the most respected organizations measure whether to interview and hire candidates. For candidates trying to turn their interview into a job offer, it’s time to change and be more strategic. It’s time to learn how to use your competencies to convince employers you are the best candidate—because you can prove to them you have the critical competencies they need.

_______________________

As the saying goes, you don’t want to be fighting today’s war using equipment, strategy, and tactics from the last century.

_______________________

It’s up to you to learn how to interview the competency-based way. To do this, you need to:

1. Understand competency-based interview systems.

2. Identify the key competencies for the position.

3. Know what interviewers are trained to look for.

4. Expect competency-based behavioral questions.

5. Prove your competencies with examples.

6. Present yourself as a strong candidate.

7. Consider other important interview tips.

8. Make sure you are ready for the interview.

9. Look at case studies for ideas to make your interviewing stronger.

10. Understand how a typical competency-based interview unfolds.

11. Learn from other interviewees.

12.