Guide and best practices for competency assessments
3 minutes
Ben explains what competencies are and what the best tool is to assess them.
If your organisation has a competency framework, you already know what you want from your future employees. The problem is measuring these behavioural traits effectively in your candidates.
A competency framework is only as valuable as the tool used to measure it, so let's compare the different competency assessment methods to find the most effective approach.
What is a competency assessment?
A competency assessment is any standardised process used to measure whether candidates demonstrate the behaviours required for a role. While technical tests measure what a candidate knows, competency assessments measure how a candidate behaves.
Competencies are behavioural characteristics such as resilience, work ethic, integrity and ethics. A competency assessment aims to measure these behaviours in a consistent, objective way, in order to help hire employees who meet the desired competencies for the role and company.
An effective competency assessment must meet these four criteria
Before evaluating the different methods, it's important to be clear on what an effective competency assessment should look like.
All competency assessments are generally trying to uncover the same thing, but their different approaches often cause them to fall short in certain areas.
An effective competency assessment should:
- Measure underlying behavioural traits: Competencies are intrapersonal constructs - internal characteristics that drive behaviour. A good assessment measures these directly, rather than relying on what a candidate says or demonstrates in a single interaction. A candidate who can articulate what resilience looks like isn't necessarily a resilient person.
- Predictive of performance: The assessment method should be empirically linked to job performance in order to predict success in the role.
- Structured and objective: Every candidate should be evaluated against the same criteria, scored consistently, and free from any bias.
- Scalable: As these competencies are core to the role and company, a good method should work across large candidate pools and be deployed early in the hiring process.
These four criteria provide a consistent basis for evaluating each of the main approaches below.
Evaluating the different competency assessment approaches
Unstructured interviews
Unstructured interviews have no fixed format, no defined questions, and no scoring criteria. The conversation goes where it goes, and the hiring manager forms an impression.
They are fairly common as they feel natural, but their predictive validity for job performance is consistently poor (compared to structured interviews). Without a structured set of questions, interviewers end up assessing how well they got on with the candidate, increasing the likelihood of bias affecting the results.
Unstructured interviews are heavy on assessing interpersonal skills, which have little effect on the intrapersonal traits like resilience, integrity, or attention to detail that we are looking to assess.
Competency-based interviews
Competency-based interviewing is a more rigorous approach. A structured set of questions, typically using the STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, Result), is designed around the competency framework and applied consistently across candidates.
Interviewers are trained to probe specific competencies and score responses against defined criteria. It's the dominant method in organisations that take their competency framework seriously, and it's a meaningful improvement on unstructured conversation.
The problem is that structure solves for consistency between interviewers, not for the fundamental limitation of the format. Competency-based interviews are still interpersonal assessments being used to measure intrapersonal traits. They measure how well a candidate performs in a social interaction - how articulate, confident, and persuasive they are under structured questioning - not the underlying behavioural characteristics the framework describes.
A charismatic candidate can convince you they are resilient and organised even if they have none of those traits. Conversely, if your framework required someone lazy and disorganised, a charismatic candidate could convince you of that, too. There is no association between interview performance and true behavioural competencies.”
A well-coached candidate gives compelling STAR answers for every competency they're asked about, regardless of whether they actually possess the underlying trait. The interview is detecting how convincingly the candidate can describe the competency, not the competency itself. A charismatic candidate can convince you they are industrious even if they have no work ethic. Research supports this: structured personality measures and general mental ability tests consistently outperform interviews in predicting job performance (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998).
Both interview formats also fail on timing and scale. They're resource-intensive and can only realistically be conducted with a small shortlist, which means competency fit gets evaluated after significant time has already been spent on candidates who may not meet your behavioural requirements. Interviews have genuine value - they're well-suited to assessing interpersonal skills, communication, and how a candidate navigates a social situation - but that's a reason to position them later in the process, not to rely on them as your primary competency screen.
Assessment centres
Assessment centres combine multiple exercises - role plays, group discussions, in-tray tasks, presentations - observed and scored by trained assessors against competency criteria. When designed well, they offer stronger predictive validity than interviews alone, particularly for competencies that involve observable interpersonal behaviour like leadership, teamwork, and communication.
Their limitations are largely practical. Assessment centres are expensive to design and resource-intensive to run. They require trained assessors, careful scheduling, and significant candidate time. Most organisations reserve them for senior hires or final-stage selection, which means they don't address the core problem: competency fit still isn't being assessed early enough to affect who makes the shortlist.
They're also poorly suited to measuring purely intrapersonal traits like integrity, work ethic, or emotional resilience, which are difficult to reliably surface in a half-day exercise.
Situational judgement tests
Situational judgement tests (SJTs) present candidates with realistic workplace scenarios and ask them to select or rank possible responses. They're scalable, candidate-friendly, and can be deployed early in the funnel, making them a practical screening tool. They can be particularly valuable for roles where decision-making judgement is a core competency.
Their limitation is construct validity. SJTs measure what a candidate believes the right answer is - which reflects their knowledge of workplace norms, not their actual behavioural tendencies. A candidate who correctly identifies what a resilient response looks like isn't necessarily resilient.
Personality questionnaires
Psychometrically validated personality questionnaires measure the underlying behavioural traits. Because competencies are behavioural constructs, this makes them the most direct method of measurement.
When mapped directly to a competency framework, each competency is measured through the specific traits that underpin it: resilience, for example, maps to dimensions including emotional stability, stress tolerance, and perseverance.
Against the four criteria above, personality questionnaires perform consistently well. They measure underlying traits rather than self-presentation. They're structured and objective, scored consistently across every candidate. They scale to any volume. And they're fast enough to deploy at the screening stage, before shortlisting decisions are made.
Their main limitation is that, as self-report instruments, motivated candidates can sometimes identify socially desirable responses. Well-designed questionnaires mitigate this through forced-choice formats and consistency checks.
If you don't have an existing competency framework and are interested in assessing generic competencies, our off-the-shelf competency assessment measures eight common competencies including resilience, integrity, work ethic, problem solving, and teamwork. It's a great starting point for teams who aren't ready for a custom assessment.
| Method | Measures underlying traits? | Structured and objective? | Scalable? | Suitable for early screening? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unstructured interview | No, measures rapport and likability | No | No | No |
| Competency-based interview | No, measures self-presentation | Partially | No | No |
| Assessment centre | Partially | Yes | No | No |
| Situational judgement test | Partially, measures norm awareness | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Personality questionnaire | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Turning your competency framework into a bespoke screening assessment
If your organisation already has a competency framework, the behavioural specification is done. The question is how to turn it into a screening tool that operates at the top of your hiring funnel, so that competency fit shapes your shortlist rather than being discovered too late to matter.
A personality questionnaire mapped directly to your framework is the most effective way to do this. Test Partnership builds bespoke personality assessments designed specifically around your organisation's competency framework.
Here's how the process works:
- We discuss your competency framework and identify the psychometric traits that underpin each competency.
- We build a bespoke competency assessment based on those psychometric traits that produces score values for each competency and an overall competency fit score.
- You can use this competency assessment early in your hiring process to shortlist candidates based on your competency criteria.
The result is a shortlist of candidates who've demonstrated the right behavioural profile for the role, before your hiring managers have looked at a single CV. Interviews then do what they're actually good at: helping you choose between already-qualified people.
Your competency framework is already the hard part. We make it usable at scale.
Conclusion and next steps
You’ve done the hard work of defining what "good" looks like. In order to make your competency framework functional, you must activate it by turning it into a custom screening tool. If you're interested in a bespoke competency assessment based on your competency framework, book a call with our team to understand more and get started.
Or check out our pre-built competency assessment that covers eight common core competencies.
Primary author
Ben Schwencke
Chief psychologist at Test Partnership. MSc in Organisational Psychology with over ten years experience in psychometric testing.
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