{"id":201,"date":"2016-04-15T10:21:47","date_gmt":"2016-04-15T10:21:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.adzuna.co.uk\/career-tips\/?p=201"},"modified":"2022-11-15T17:13:46","modified_gmt":"2022-11-15T17:13:46","slug":"how-to-answer-competency-based-interview-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adzuna.co.uk\/blog\/how-to-answer-competency-based-interview-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"How to answer competency based interview questions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tell me about a time when you had to make a difficult decision \u2013 and your answer has to be better than choosing between cereal and toast this morning.<\/p>\n<p>Competency-based interview questions are in vogue at the moment. Interviewers probe your skills and experience with a series of \u2018tell me about\u2019 prompts. The idea is to gain a better understanding of your behaviour as an individual and how you might react in future situations, but the thought of a competency-based interview often brings people out in a cold sweat.<\/p>\n<p>Feared for being vague, open-ended and tricky to answer, you shouldn\u2019t be scared of competency-based questions. With these handy tips, you can turn them into a golden opportunity to tell a captive audience just how great you are.<\/p>\n<h2>Tips for answering competency based interview questions<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Prepare yourself \u2013 <\/strong>These are highly structured interviews which follow a script. The same questions come up time and time again, whatever the job and whoever the interviewer. Get to know the sort of prompts they use and have a few ready answers. Just try not to sound like a robot if you\u2019re asked to recite them.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Have a structure in mind \u2013<\/strong> All good stories have a beginning, middle and end, and all they\u2019re asking you to do is tell them a story. In response to a \u2018tell me about a time\u2019 prompt, tell them \u2013\u00a0 in order \u2013 about the scenario, what you had to do about it, the action you took and the result of that action. Easy.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Never resort to fiction \u2013<\/strong> There\u2019s no point lying. Going all Pinocchio to try and impress them won\u2019t work, and you\u2019ll eventually get caught out. If you have no answer to hand, tell them you can\u2019t think of a specific incident at this particular moment, and would it be alright by them if they returned to that point in a couple of minutes. Buy yourself some breathing space and rack your brains.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Turn things into a positive \u2013<\/strong> They quite often want you to tell them about failures, but you can spin these into positives. If you failed to deliver a project on time, don\u2019t get defensive in justifying your actions but explain clearly the other pressures which meant the deadline slipped and the steps you took to overcome any consequences.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Remember, these are not trick questions. They want to get to know you and hear about your experience and skills, not trip you up.\u00a0 Simply try to relax, be yourself, be prepared and tell them a few good stories \u2013 there\u2019s really nothing to fear.<\/p>\n<p><em>Looking for tools to help your job-seeking journey? Check out <a href=\"https:\/\/www.adzuna.co.uk\/jobs\/value-my-cv\/upload\">ValueMyCV<\/a>\u00a0to find out how much you&#8217;re worth on the job market and see job vacancies picked out based on your skills and experience.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tell me about a time when you had to make a difficult decision \u2013 and your answer has to be better than choosing between cereal and toast this morning. Competency-based interview questions are in vogue at the moment. Interviewers probe your skills and experience with a series of \u2018tell me about\u2019 prompts. The idea is<a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/www.adzuna.co.uk\/blog\/how-to-answer-competency-based-interview-questions\/\"> Continued \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1111],"tags":[1112],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adzuna.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adzuna.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adzuna.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adzuna.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adzuna.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adzuna.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adzuna.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adzuna.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adzuna.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}