Competency based interviews for contracts

[radish2008]

Are these more popular now for contracts ? Just got an interview for Friday and was told by the agent that the first 45 mins will be a Q&A session where the first question will be about my strengths and weaknesses.

Having been off the market for a couple of years and having only had 2 interviews recently (one was competency based) I was just wondering ?

Now I've mastered the STAR method I should be ok though ....

[Brookster]

Try and be in a positive mood, I turned up after a 4 hour drive 5 mins late to one of these and lets just say I had an negative experience was totally out my comfort zone.
You really can't prepare unless you know for certain question specs so being in a good frame of mind helps or would have helped me

[Antman]

I've had these and I've never passed one yet!

So I can't confirm whether these places were run by numpties who after so many years interacting with the world at large can't trust their own instincts above some test product they've bought but I'm guessing that they are.

So it may be sour grapes on my part but I think that you're better off out then in. If I ever pass one of these and actually work in one of these places I'll let you know.

[radish2008]

Yeah I seem to be attracting them at the minute. I do struggle with them.

Although I also <gasp> struggle with technical tests. Been in IT 13 years so have been around a bit and done some very technical roles (middle tier C++ dev work etc etc).

Today someone asked me how I would go about auditing a trigger in SQL. I didn't know having never done it, so I that's what I said. It went a bit pear shaped from then.

[tomtomagain]

The secret is to prepare ....

The purpose of the questioning style is to find out what you did by asking a serious of direct questions rather than the interviewer just reading your CV and asking you about things of interest or relevance on it.

So you will get questions that say

"Tell me about a time YOU did ......." OR "Give me an example about how you did ...."

And they are expecting them to be answered in a fairly formulaic manner. Describe the Situation, the Task required, Actions you took and the Outcome ( or result ) Aka STAR.


So far example the question

"Tell me about a time YOU demonstrated leadership in your current project"


You say something like

"The project manager was sick and we had an important deadline" ( Situation )

"The project status report needed to be completed and submitted to the governance board" ( tasks )

"So I took the lead to write the report and worked with the rest of the dev. team to ensure the release was made on time" ( Action )

"The outcome was everyone was happy" ( Result )


So the key is prepare 3 or 4 "scenarios" and memorise them. You will find that you only need one or two decent examples of what you have done to cover most likely things.


They are going to ask you:

How you :
Made a difference
Dealt with a difficult customer
Made a difficult decision
Had to compromise with a team member
Dealt with confrontation
Had a difficult deadline to meet.
Came to a technical agreement with a team-member.
etc.

There's not that much they can ask ..... but if you haven't thought it through and someone says

"Tell me about a time that you resolved a conflict with a team member" and you haven't thought it out before hand you'll be stammering like an idiot saying guff like "..... but, but I get on with everyone!"

[SandyD]

Competency based interviews is just a fancy name for an interview, they just want to know when you did something similar to specific situations in a previous project.

Key is to know your previous projects (especially one that is relevant to the role you are being interviewed for) inside out, so whenever they ask you a question about an example of something that you have done, you are ready with an answer (but appear thoughtful). I usually write a summary of every project I worked on, lessons learned, pros/cons etc and revise the summary before interviews.

Another trick is to let the interviewer talk a lot, so if a tricky question, say hmmm that's tricky, give a vague answer answer to his/her question, then ask him/her a question back something as simple as :'and what's your opinion on this' the more your interviewer talk the better, you have to nod your head, illusion you create is that you are in total agreement and harmony when exchanging experiences.