Getting the Job You Want — Prepare Now for Your Next Interview

• How do employers make the hiring decision, and what role does the interview play?

• What are employers really looking for in the job interview?

• What are competency-based interviews (CBIs), and why are they important to you?

• Why do 75 to 95 percent of Fortune 1000 organizations use competency-based interviews?

• How can you prepare for competency-based and other types of employment interviews?

What Are Competencies?

Before I provide you with the definition of competencies, I want to provide you with two central points that you should keep in focus as you read this book.

1. Your future interviewers are motivated by a single objective in the vast majority of cases, namely to select someone for the job who will effectively perform it.

2. Maximizing your effectiveness in your next interview is a learnable skill.

Competencies are individual attributes and characteristics that differentiate outstanding from average performance in a job. Employers use competencies for a variety of different purposes: to define skills and ability requirements of jobs; to design employee hiring programs and interview questions; to structure performance appraisals; to organize training and development efforts; and to identify leadership potential and manage succession plans.

They are the DNA of interviewer preparation. Interviewers use them to prepare for their interview, and this book shows you how to do the same thing in preparing for your next employment interview. As an example, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) provides information on their credo — their set of principles and values that guide business decision making and action, as well as the characteristics and skills that make up their Global Leadership Profile on their website. The characteristics and skills are essentially competencies that include:

• integrity and credo-based actions

• results- and performance-driven mind-set

• sense of urgency

• strategic thinking

• big-picture orientation with attention to detail

• intellectual curiosity

• prudent risk-taking

• organization and talent development (where applicable)

• collaboration and teaming

• self-awareness and adaptability

These competencies serve as a foundation for many of J&J's human resource and talent development activities and programs. This site also provides a three-paragraph, detailed explanation of the types of questions you can expect in many of the organization's interviews. The key point to understand here is that companies are looking for particular competencies when they conduct interviews as part of a selection process for a particular position.

Part of your challenge in preparing for your next interview is to understand what competencies are important for the job you are seeking. I will return to this point in later chapters, but suffice it to say that competencies play a key role in the interview process for a large percentage of companies. Employers are looking for your demonstrated effectiveness in the interview relative to specific competencies!

Interviewer Steps

(1) Identify the Job-Specific Competencies

(2) Create a Question for Each Competency

(3) Conduct Interview

What Is a Competency-Based Interview (CBI)? Why Are They So Widely Used? How Do They Differ from More Traditional Interviews?

Now that you understand a bit more about competencies, let's talk more specifically about competency-based interviews. But before I get into the specifics of what makes up a competency-based interview (or CBI), a brief description of why the CBI is so widely used today will provide you with an increased understanding of it.

The short answer is that there is a large body of research that demonstrates that using the CBI as part of the process for making hiring decisions, as a rule, increases the rate of accurate hiring decisions (McDaniel et al. 1994). Also, the CBI is less likely to be challenged legally, in part due to the research just mentioned. Finally, the CBI is far less subjective than was the employment interview format that preceded the CBI, referred to here as the traditional employment interview.

The fact is that the employment interview has been used for centuries. Prior to the appearance of the CBI, the hiring party would have someone meet with the job candidate and speak with him or her. This traditional employment interview was typically preceded by an assumption of the decision makers that everybody who was conducting interviews for that target job knew what was being looked for in the interview, so there was no need for an agreement on what the important characteristics were to be successful in the job.

Consequently, different interviewers were looking for different characteristics for the same job, and each interviewer had his or her own special questions that he or she would ask in the interview. The impact of this phenomenon was that there was little consistency in what questions were asked of candidates for the same job. If you were a candidate for a sales job, you could be asked questions dealing with your sales experience by an interviewer.

A second person interviewing another candidate for the same job may have been a strong believer in astrology and asked you what month of the year you were born. Although this is an extreme example to demonstrate the amount of subjectivity in the interview, it should be said that questions like this were asked before the CBI.

While many questions in the traditional interview did pertain to the job, the interview itself was more often than not based on an individual interviewer's picture of what characteristics were important for success. In fact, there was a belief by some that there was only one factor that was important for the job. Some decision makers have expressed this point in different ways when telling me what to look for in my interviews and in my employment test results: "Just get me somebody who is smart. I can teach him or her the rest that is required for the job." Or: "The way I evaluate people in an interview is with my gut impression. That's all I need to know. It's either good or bad, and that's how I make my decision."

These were some of the beliefs and interviewing practices of decision makers who had asked for my help. I want to be clear that many others who were making hiring decisions based on the interview were more thoughtful. But there were many who justified some rather unorthodox questions by stating their belief this way: "I know some of my interview questions are a little strange, but no one has any proof at this time (prior to the use of the CBI) that any specific series of questions are demonstrably valid, so I might as well use questions I think might help."

The net effect was that the employment interview before the CBI was inconsistent, subjective, and with a wide variety of questions among different interviewers who were interviewing for the same job. Frequently there was no agreement among the interviewers about what characteristics were needed to perform well in the target job. Furthermore, there was little agreement regarding what questions were to be asked in the traditional interview.

As a result, the job candidate would have little awareness of what questions would be asked in her interview or what the questions had to do with the job. Finally, there was usually no method of scoring the candidate's performance in the interview other than an overall score of good or bad. This was frequently referred as the interviewer's "gut impression."

In contrast to the very subjective traditional interview, the CBIs are more objective, standardized, and job related, and they are grounded in the notion that past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior. That is, if an interviewer wants to understand how a person might react and behave in a future job situation, you can get a good idea by asking about how the candidate dealt with similar situations in the past. CBIs are tools that help employers gather information that they use in making hiring decisions.

CBIs have the following four characteristics:

1. Questions are based on important job competencies.

2. Questions ask you for experiences that demonstrate you possess a specific job-related competency. If you have limited job experience you will be given an opportunity to tell the examiner(s) what action you would take in a hypothetical work situation. (More will be said about this later.)

3. There is a clearly defined set of scoring criteria that includes descriptions of the types of responses that might be expected at different levels of proficiency for a particular competency (for example: Below Expectations, Meets Expectations, or Exceeds Expectations).

4. All candidates for a particular opening are asked the same set of questions during the interview process to enable comparison of candidates in the applicant pool.

An example of the type of interview question that the candidate will encounter in her CBI is shown in exhibit 1. This example addresses the competency of teamwork: the ability to collaborate effectively with others in a group setting to achieve results. As you can see, our sample question fits most of the criteria we outlined for a competency-based interview quite well. It requires the applicant to provide an example of a team experience she has had in the past, and it includes specific guidelines for scoring the interviewee's response.

The final criterion of a CBI, as noted above, is the same questions are asked of all the candidates for the same job. It is important to standardize the interview, much like employment tests in which every candidate has the same questions on the test. If the interview is not standardized, it is less likely to be valid (i.e., effectively predict success on the job). It should be noted that interviewers could still ask for clarification of specific answers by a specific candidate. In addition, the interviewer can ask a candidate specific questions about a candidate's background that are related to the candidate's future work performance.

Exhibit 1. Example of a competency-based interview question

Competency: Team Work

Question:

"Tell me about a time when you worked on a team whose members were losing focus on the work to be performed due to disagreements about the tasks that needed to be completed. Describe the situation and your role on the team."

Probes:

• "What was going on?"

• "What action did you take?"

• "What was the end result?"

Use the scoring guidelines below to determine the effectiveness of the individual's response after reviewing your notes. Be prepared to explain the logic of your evaluation with examples and evidence from the interviewee's response.

Below Expectations

• withdrew from the team; took no discernible action

• took sides or otherwise behaved in a way that increased the disagreement

• made some attempts to resolve disagreements but did not persevere when resistance became evident

Meets Expectations

• provided some reasonable ideas to help the team resolve their differences

• suggested the team discuss differences as a means toward resolution

• encouraged team members by reminding them of team objectives and timelines

Exceeds Expectations

• facilitated dialogue to openly discuss differences of opinion

• helped the team identify areas of common ground

• persisted with attempts to resolve disagreement despite resistance from some team members

• plus one or more of the behaviors from the "Meets Expectations" category above

Another example of a competency that could be measured in a structured interview for a specific target job is due diligence (a.k.a. problem analysis).

In order to score the response at the Exceeds Expectations level, the answer needs to include some or part of the following items:

• a series of steps to determine the specific decision or recommendation that is being requested

• a number of logical steps are taken to gather relevant information from a number of sources

• a demonstrated willingness to persist searching out information needed to make the decision or recommendation

• provided a second example of this competency when asked

In order to score the response at the level of Meets Expectations, the response must include all or some of the following items:

• involves a series of steps to gather the information that is needed to make an informed decision

• includes a fact-gathering process that is less than extensive but includes a limited number of steps to obtain important information for the decision

• includes only one example of a fact-gathering process

In order to score the response at the level of Below Expectations, the response includes some or all of the following items:

• an inability to think of an example of a process that included systematically collecting information or the example involves a brief and minor decision

• a very limited fact-gathering process

• a fact-gathering process that was begun, interrupted, and not resumed

I have been conducting employment interviews for over three decades. During that period, I have interviewed hundreds of candidates, using CBIs as well as more traditional interviews. Prior to the 1990s, the vast majority of organizations were using the more traditional interview. This type of interview occurred in a climate that had an element of the Wild West. More specifically, there was a broadly held belief that there were few rules to be followed, and everybody used their own "favorite questions."

The result was that the interview questions used in different interviews for the same job were frequently different for each person conducting the interview. During this period, research that attempted to measure the effectiveness of the employment interview in predicting subsequent job performance (known as validity) resulted in the conclusion that the employment interview was not predictive of job success.

This picture of the ineffectiveness of the employment interview began to shift with ongoing research that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. More specifically, much of the major research was summarized and reported by McDaniel et al. (1994).

This body of research began to grow, and the outcome to date is a widely accepted and documented belief within the community of employment assessment specialists. This view, unlike the more traditional interview, is that the competency-based interview (CBI) is valid and predicts job success. This is based on a substantial body of research that clearly supports this conclusion. This has led many organizations to replace the traditional interview with the CBI.

So what are the elements that make a CBI a CBI? There are only a few. The first is the CBI content, which is based on the specific set of competencies that have been identified as important to perform the duties of the job to be filled (subsequently referred to as the target job).

As you have learned in the previous chapter, a competency is a worker characteristic (i.e., knowledge, skill, ability, or personal characteristic) that is important to do the job, such as communication skills, knowledge of current accounting practices, etc. Consequently, an organization's first step in preparing to conduct a CBI is to identify the competencies that are important to perform the duties of the target job. This is frequently accomplished by using a process known as a job analysis. These specific competencies form the foundation upon which the CBI is built.

How many organizations are using the CBI? When I searched for the answer to this important and timely question, I could not find it. So a colleague and I conducted a survey of human resources vice presidents of Fortune 1000 organizations (2007). The survey asked what types of interviews and tests the organizations are currently using. One result showed that 76 to 95 percent of the organizations reported using CBIs in four out of the five categories of jobs included in the survey (see table 3 at the end of the chapter).

This increased use of the CBI makes this book of substantial value. Knowing the types of questions that will be asked and that all candidates for the same job will be asked the same set of questions allows one to

• examine the target job and its related competencies;

• identify a series of behavioral questions that will approximate the type of questions that the interviewers will ask each candidate; and

• participate in your next employment interview as more of an informed and prepared job candidate.