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Step 5: Assess What You Heard

Immediately after each interview, review your notes or confer with your colleagues about the following:

What evidence did you hear for each competency that you specifically probed for? What were the actions, thoughts or feelings that you think provided evidence of each competency? How strongly did you hear that competency (i.e. did you hear some ambiguous evidence once, or clear evidence several times)?

Remember that listening for competencies in this sort of interview is as much art as science (though there is a great deal you can do to increase your skill at it–see Next Steps: Enhancing Your Competency Interviewing Skills). There will very likely be some evidence that you can't clearly match up with a competency, or is ambiguous or unclear. That's okay. If something seems significant anyway, take note of it.

What other competencies from the core competency model did you hear evidence of? Sometimes you might hear more about a competency you weren't specifically looking for than about the competency that your question was aimed at. That's fine, and can be important information in itself.

What other things of interest did you hear? Within the stories that the candidate told, there will likely be information about skills, abilities or expertise that may be relevant to the position.

NOTE: Some people aren't good at being interviewed for competencies. A particular candidate may have difficulty remembering relevant stories, or may have difficulty giving good, concrete, first-person information from which you can infer competencies. If that happens, you can't necessarily conclude that the candidate does not demonstrate those competencies. The best you can do is to say that you are not sure, and to rely on other sources of information.

 

 
Step 4: Conduct the Interviews

 
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Last updated January 2000


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