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.
Most teams respond to this challenge by designing competency-based interview questions. It feels like a logical step, but it's the wrong tool for the job.
We'll talk you through how, and why, you should be using your core competency framework to build a custom competency assessment, so you can screen for behavioural fit at scale, before you've spent a minute of interview time.
Interviews don't effectively measure competencies and are used too late in the process
Competency frameworks tend to focus on intrapersonal traits: resilience, work ethic, integrity, adaptability. These are the internal characteristics that drive how someone behaves on the job. Interviews are ineffective at measuring these traits as interviews are fundamentally interpersonal assessments.
Interviews measure how well someone performs in a social interaction: how fluent, confident, and persuasive they are. A candidate with strong interpersonal skills will give convincing answers on every competency you ask about, regardless of whether they actually possess them. There's no correlation between interview performance and intrapersonal traits like industriousness, ethics, or emotional resilience.
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.”
The second problem is timing. By the time a candidate reaches an interview, your team has already invested significant time reviewing applications and shortlisting. If behavioural fit only gets assessed at that stage, you're discovering mismatches far too late in the process - it would be far more desirable for your interview shortlist to have already been screened for possessing your core competencies.
What should I use interviews for if not to assess our core competencies?
Interviews are excellent at assessing interpersonal skills, communication, and how a candidate navigates a social situation, which absolutely matters in most roles.
Structured interviews are great at exploring specific areas in more depth and validating the findings from any assessments. They're just not effective at uncovering core behavioural traits or as the primary mechanism for measuring competency fit.
To assess competencies effectively you need to use a behavioural assessment
To measure a behavioural construct, you need a behavioural assessment. Instead of asking a candidate to describe their work ethic, you use psychometrically validated instruments to measure the underlying traits that predict it.
An effective competency assessment should be:
- Structured: every candidate responds to the same standardised instrument.
- Objective: scored against fixed criteria, not interviewer impression.
- Consistent: comparable results across your entire applicant pool, regardless of volume.
- Trait-focused: measuring what drives behaviour, not how well someone describes it.
Crucially, it should also be used early in the hiring process. Using a competency assessment at the initial screening stage, rather than latter stages, means you're filtering for your ideal competencies right at the start, preventing you spending too much time on candidates who you end up disqualifying due to not meeting your behavioural requirements.
Turning your competency framework into a bespoke screening assessment
Test Partnership builds bespoke personality assessments designed specifically around your organisation's competency framework. Rather than asking you to adapt your hiring to a generic off-the-shelf tool, we start from your framework and build bespoke to you.
Here's how the process works
- We discuss your competency framework and we identify the psychometric traits that underpin each competency.
- A bespoke compency assessment is created based on those psychometric traits that produces a clear competency fit score.
- You can use this competency assessment (early) in your hiring process to shortlist candidates based on your behavioural desires.
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
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.
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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