Competency Assessment: Guide and Best Practices

Competencies are behavioural characteristics which underpin performance, fit, engagement, and satisfaction in specific organisations. Typically, to help structure talent management processes, organisations will develop a competency framework, identifying the competencies that matter most. Employing organisations spend significant time, resources, energy, and money on developing these comprehensive competency frameworks, representing a significant investment. Upon developing these competency frameworks, HR teams then dedicate a larger proportion of their time training, informing, and championing the use of this competency framework across the organisation, hoping to standardise talent management.

Tragically though, after all this hard work, when it comes to actually measuring these competencies in employee selection, the organisation resorts to relying solely on interviews. Research clearly shows that interviews are effectively just interpersonal skills tests, and charismatic candidates always come out on top. As a result, if your competency framework measures competencies beyond just social skills, i.e. resilience, work ethic, integrity, strategic thinking, organisational skills, etc., interviews simply won’t measure your competencies, making your competency framework completely redundant.

In this article, we will outline how to actually assess competencies in employee selection and assessment, without having to rely solely on interviews.

Competency assessments are, in essence, any assessment designed to measure the behavioural competencies outlined by an organisation's competency framework. Consequently, competency assessments tend to be designed specifically for employing organisations, as every organisation’s competency framework will differ. Alternatively, an off-the-shelf competency assessment designed to measure a generic competency framework could be applied, especially if that generic competency framework closely matches that of the employing organisation.

Typically, these will function like personality questionnaires, displaying Likert scale-style multiple-choice questions. These questions will either count towards the measurement of traits, which then collectively comprise a competency in aggregate, or towards the direct measurement of the competency itself. These can then be scored psychometrically, using Sten scores, percentile scores, z-scores, or any other standardised score to represent the latent trait.

The main benefit of competency assessments is that they measure characteristics which cannot be effectively measured using interviews, offering what psychologists call “incremental validity”. This means that an assessment process that includes competency assessments and interviews at different stages will result in a better quality of hire than either assessment format individually, adding significant value.

Because competency assessments are scalable online tools, using them early in the selection process gives the most value. This is particularly true when dealing with high volumes of applicants, as organisations often struggle to fairly and effectively shortlist. Using competency assessments for early screening dramatically improves quality of hire, as you can be highly selective and progress only the best-fitting candidates. This also reduces reliance on old-school CV sifting, which is a notoriously ineffective and bias-prone process.

Ideally, organisations should run a validity study internally to identify which particular behavioural characteristics underpin their competency frameworks.

This can be done in a number of ways, but the crux of the process is to identify an outcome variable which indicates behavioural fit, i.e. job performance, employee engagement, tenure length, organisational citizenship, etc. Using these data, specific traits can be linked back to the outcome variable, identifying the traits which are most predictive. These can then be included in the competency assessment, boosting its predictive power.

Although most organisations will attempt to measure competencies using interviews, this approach is almost certainly not effective. Interviews themselves are fundamentally social skills tests, measuring charisma, interpersonal skills, and charm as the defining characteristics. These characteristics overpower anything else. For example, if your competency framework includes “resilience” and you ask interview questions about resilience, the most charismatic and charming candidates will inevitably perform the best, not the most resilient.

However, if your competency framework does include social skills and related constructs, then those could conceivably be measured using interviews. Naturally, having social skills does help candidates do well in interviews, regardless of the intended competency. Consequently, the whole interview could be considered to be a measure of a social-skills-related competency, and would likely prove effective. Rarely though, will a competency framework comprise only social-skills-related competencies, meaning that a significant portion of the competency framework will be unmeasurable with an interview.

As a general rule, interviews are able to measure “interpersonal” competencies well, those which are expressed interpersonally. However, “intrapersonal” competencies, which exist only within people, cannot be expressed interpersonally and thus are inaccessible via interviews. When attempting to measure competencies using interviews, always consider whether each competency is inter- or intrapersonal, and then decide whether or not interviews are the best mechanism for this. Behavioural assessments, however, are reliable and valid tools to measure both inter- and intrapersonal competencies, making them far better suited for the task.

Competencies are an excellent way of identifying and operationalising the behavioural indicators of success within employing organisations.

For more information on how Test Partnership could help introduce competency assessments into your selection processes, feel free to book a call with us to discuss your requirements.