Getting the Job You Want — Prepare Now for Your Next Interview

• How do employers make the hiring decision, and what role does the interview play?

• What are employers really looking for in the job interview?

• What are competency-based interviews (CBIs), and why are they important to you?

• Why do 75 to 95 percent of Fortune 1000 organizations use competency-based interviews?

• How can you prepare for competency-based and other types of employment interviews?

What Are Competencies?

Before I provide you with the definition of competencies, I want to provide you with two central points that you should keep in focus as you read this book.

1. Your future interviewers are motivated by a single objective in the vast majority of cases, namely to select someone for the job who will effectively perform it.

2. Maximizing your effectiveness in your next interview is a learnable skill.

Competencies are individual attributes and characteristics that differentiate outstanding from average performance in a job. Employers use competencies for a variety of different purposes: to define skills and ability requirements of jobs; to design employee hiring programs and interview questions; to structure performance appraisals; to organize training and development efforts; and to identify leadership potential and manage succession plans.

They are the DNA of interviewer preparation. Interviewers use them to prepare for their interview, and this book shows you how to do the same thing in preparing for your next employment interview. As an example, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) provides information on their credo — their set of principles and values that guide business decision making and action, as well as the characteristics and skills that make up their Global Leadership Profile on their website. The characteristics and skills are essentially competencies that include:

• integrity and credo-based actions

• results- and performance-driven mind-set

• sense of urgency

• strategic thinking

• big-picture orientation with attention to detail

• intellectual curiosity

• prudent risk-taking

• organization and talent development (where applicable)

• collaboration and teaming

• self-awareness and adaptability

These competencies serve as a foundation for many of J&J's human resource and talent development activities and programs. This site also provides a three-paragraph, detailed explanation of the types of questions you can expect in many of the organization's interviews. The key point to understand here is that companies are looking for particular competencies when they conduct interviews as part of a selection process for a particular position.

Part of your challenge in preparing for your next interview is to understand what competencies are important for the job you are seeking. I will return to this point in later chapters, but suffice it to say that competencies play a key role in the interview process for a large percentage of companies. Employers are looking for your demonstrated effectiveness in the interview relative to specific competencies!

Interviewer Steps

(1) Identify the Job-Specific Competencies

(2) Create a Question for Each Competency

(3) Conduct Interview

What Is a Competency-Based Interview (CBI)? Why Are They So Widely Used? How Do They Differ from More Traditional Interviews?

Now that you understand a bit more about competencies, let's talk more specifically about competency-based interviews. But before I get into the specifics of what makes up a competency-based interview (or CBI), a brief description of why the CBI is so widely used today will provide you with an increased understanding of it.

The short answer is that there is a large body of research that demonstrates that using the CBI as part of the process for making hiring decisions, as a rule, increases the rate of accurate hiring decisions (McDaniel et al. 1994). Also, the CBI is less likely to be challenged legally, in part due to the research just mentioned. Finally, the CBI is far less subjective than was the employment interview format that preceded the CBI, referred to here as the traditional employment interview.

The fact is that the employment interview has been used for centuries. Prior to the appearance of the CBI, the hiring party would have someone meet with the job candidate and speak with him or her. This traditional employment interview was typically preceded by an assumption of the decision makers that everybody who was conducting interviews for that target job knew what was being looked for in the interview, so there was no need for an agreement on what the important characteristics were to be successful in the job.

Consequently, different interviewers were looking for different characteristics for the same job, and each interviewer had his or her own special questions that he or she would ask in the interview. The impact of this phenomenon was that there was little consistency in what questions were asked of candidates for the same job. If you were a candidate for a sales job, you could be asked questions dealing with your sales experience by an interviewer.

A second person interviewing another candidate for the same job may have been a strong believer in astrology and asked you what month of the year you were born. Although this is an extreme example to demonstrate the amount of subjectivity in the interview, it should be said that questions like this were asked before the CBI.

While many questions in the traditional interview did pertain to the job, the interview itself was more often than not based on an individual interviewer's picture of what characteristics were important for success. In fact, there was a belief by some that there was only one factor that was important for the job. Some decision makers have expressed this point in different ways when telling me what to look for in my interviews and in my employment test results: "Just get me somebody who is smart. I can teach him or her the rest that is required for the job." Or: "The way I evaluate people in an interview is with my gut impression. That's all I need to know. It's either good or bad, and that's how I make my...