Welcome to the 50th episode of HR coffee time. It is wonderful to have you here. And it’s an exciting feeling to have hit the 50th episode, if we haven’t met before. Hello, I’m Fay Wallis career coach and outplacement specialist with a background in HR. And I’m also the founder of bright sky career coaching. I usually make this HR coffee time podcast, especially for HR and people professionals to help them have successful and fulfilling careers. But last week, this week, next week, and possibly the week after, I haven’t quite decided yet.

Fay Wallis: 00:00:41

I’m doing something a little bit different by making this mini series of episodes for anyone who’s partway through their career, and looking for their next role and wants to do brilliantly in job interviews. So if you’re listening to this and thinking, I don’t work in HR, or why had Fay or someone else suggested I listened to this episode, don’t worry, you are in the right place, I promise. At bright sky, one of our main services is interview coaching. And we also run a lot of interview workshops as part of our outplacement and redundancy support offering. So I’m hoping that this will be a really helpful resource for you, no matter why you’re listening to it, or what your background is.

Fay Wallis: 00:01:28

So whether you listen to the podcast every week and want to use it to get your next HR role, or whether you’re an interview coaching client and want to listen to this as a bit of a refresher of what you’ve got to talk about with your coach in your session, or whether you’ve attended one of our interview workshops, and just want a resource to refer back to afterwards, or none of those things apply. And you’re listening just because you’re interested and quite keen about getting your next job. Whatever your situation is, I really hope this episode is going to help. So for the episode, my focus is going to be on how to impress in a competency based interview and get your ideal job.

Fay Wallis: 00:02:10

Because research by the CIPD last year showed that although competency based interviews have been around for a long time, they are still the most popular type of interview questions with 60% of companies using them. So it’s well worth getting to grips with how to answer them really well. Also, just to let you know, most of the tips that I’ll be sharing with you are not only great for competency based interviews, they work for a whole range of different interview question types as well. So hopefully, this episode is going to help you in a whole host of ways when it comes to your next interview.

Fay Wallis: 00:02:50

Let’s start by getting to grips with what competency based interview questions are. Competencies are skills, knowledge or behaviours that you have, and that you can apply at work to be successful in your role. The most popular competencies that are assessed in competency based interviews are to do with behaviours. So this means that the interviewers are looking to see how you behave in different situations, and how you apply the skills and the knowledge that you have. Because I’m sure we’ve all probably worked with people who are brilliant at the technical aspects of their role.

Fay Wallis: 00:03:28

They have all the knowledge they need to do that part of it. But who may find other aspects of their work challenging or who have behaviours that upset or annoy their colleagues. To give you some examples, these can be things like dealing with a difficult customer or tricky colleague badly, finding it hard to handle and take onboard constructive feedback, or irritating their team by micromanaging them. So when you take a moment to think of it like that, you can see why companies like using competency based interview questions. Because when someone doesn’t work out in a role, it isn’t usually because they don’t have the technical skills needed.

Fay Wallis: 00:04:10

Although of course, that does happen sometimes. But normally, it’s because of the way that they’re behaving that the company ends up regretting hiring them. In fact, because behaviours are the most popular thing to assess for some companies now just use behaviour, behavioural can’t say that properly. Interview Questions, they just want to see how you behave. Instead of worrying so much about the technical skills that you have. They’ll check for the technical skills in another way. So that might be checking your qualifications or giving you a separate task to complete away from the interview.

Fay Wallis: 00:04:48

For example, if you’re applying for a software engineer role that gives you a coding test before inviting you to the interview. If you’re applying for an admin role, they might give you an entry exercise to complete will ask you to carry out a task using Excel. If you’re applying for a finance role, they might ask you to do some financial analysis. And if you’re applying for an HR role, they might ask you to give recommendations about an existing or an imaginary challenge they have in the business at that moment.

Fay Wallis: 00:05:19

If you listen to last week’s episode of the podcast seven tips to help you feel more confident for your next job interview, you’ll have heard me recommend that you ask what format the interview will be when you’re invited along to it. If the company hasn’t already given you this information, they should share it once you’ve asked them for it. And if they tell you it’s going to be a competency based interview, your next step is to ask if they’re happy to share the competencies that you’ll be being assessed against. Some more enlightened and inclusive employers have started sharing competency based interview questions ahead of the interview, to give people more time to absorb the questions and prepare for them, which I think is just brilliant.

Fay Wallis: 00:06:04

If you’re neurodiverse, or you have a disability, that means you’d benefit from having the questions in advance. Please do let them know this to increase your chances of getting your hands on the questions, which will then help you to prepare for the interview. But if you’re not lucky enough to be given the interview questions in advance, or you’re not told what the competencies are, that you’ll be assessed against, your next step is to try to figure this out for yourself. If you’ve been put forward for the interview by a recruitment agency, you can ask the recruiter if they know what questions other people going for the role have been asked or which competencies they think are the most important ones for this particular job.

Fay Wallis: 00:06:48

Often the company will have spoken to them in detail about the role and what they’re ideally looking for. So hopefully, the recruiter will have some good insights to share with you. But if they aren’t able to help or you’ve applied for the role without going through a recruiter, the job description is the best place to look to to figure out what competencies they’re going to ask you questions about. If you don’t have a full job description, and only have a short job advert that you’ve applied for, ask the company if you can have a copy of the full job description, so that you can get yourself as prepared as possible for the interview.

Fay Wallis: 00:07:28

And I know that some people can feel nervous about doing this about asking for that extra information, because they worry that they’ll be bothering the other person by asking for stuff. But I promise that the opposite is normally true. I used to do all the internal recruitment for the company that I last worked for. And it was such a breath of fresh air to ever hear from a candidate asking for things like this, because it was then a clear sign to us that they were really serious about the role. And they truly want it to work that it shows that you’re organised and thorough and doing your best to prepare for the interview. So please don’t worry about asking for things like competencies or a job description.

Fay Wallis: 00:08:15

And once you’ve got the job description, you can then read it through and see what key skills or key competencies are needed. From that point, you can then start planning out your answers to any questions that you might be asked about them. Competency based questions will almost always ask you for an example of when you have done something in the past, they will often start with the words, tell me about a time when or give me an example of when. So if they want to assess your communication skills, they might say, tell me about a time when you were communicating with someone and they misunderstood what you said, what did you do next?

Fay Wallis: 00:08:57

Or they could say something like, give me an example of when you use written communication to successfully influence someone. The reason they’re doing this is because of the idea that past performance is the best predictor of future performance. If you’ve done something well in the past, it means you can do it again. So the interviewers want to hear evidence that you have successfully used the competencies before. And this means that you need to prepare answers based on your previous experience of using them. It’s no good saying in an interview, I know that I could be really good at leading a team because I’ve read these books on leadership or if I was to lead a team, this is exactly what I would do. Because you can say anything.

Fay Wallis: 00:09:46

Anyone can read a book on leadership, anyone can say they would behave in a certain way. The only proof that you really can behave in that way is if you’ve done it before. So your answers need to clearly show that you have got a proven track record of using these skills are of demonstrating the behaviours that they’re looking for. And don’t panic. If you can’t immediately think of examples of using the skills or behaviours that you think you’re going to be questioned on, you will nearly always be able to find examples, once you’ve just given us a bit more thoughts.

Fay Wallis: 00:10:22

For example, you may not have held a leadership role before. But the concept of leadership at every level shows that we can all demonstrate leadership behaviours, no matter what level we’re at, in the organisation we work for these leadership behaviours might include recognition, so thanking colleagues who have helped you at work and pointing out other people’s achievements and successes to them, it could include leading by example. So maybe you helped turn a negative meeting around by introducing some positive ideas into a discussion, they could include integrity. So being trustworthy, your colleagues know that they can come to you with a problem and that you’ll be discreet about it. Or you might be using these skills outside of the workplace.

Fay Wallis: 00:11:08

And that is where voluntary work and hobbies can come into their own, on both a CV and in an interview. If you don’t have any hobbies, or you don’t do any voluntary work, or you haven’t had the opportunity yet, to use some of the skills that you think you’re going to be assessed against, then it’s worth doing something about this in advance of the interview, or during your job search, particularly if a hobby or volunteering can help you to build the knowledge, skills or expertise in one of the key areas that are going to be required for the next step in your career.

Fay Wallis: 00:11:43

Or if you can ask at work to be given a bigger project or to be given the opportunity to develop some of those skills, then please do I know you might be listening to This Just In advance of an interview? But if you’re not, if you’re just interested in this generally, please do have a think about this. What role is it that you would like to move into eventually, and think about if there are any gaps there any skills gaps that you could be addressing right now and finding ways to build those skills?

Fay Wallis: 00:12:16

So once you have figured out the different competencies, started to think of some examples of when you have used these competencies and demonstrated them well, there is a brilliant technique to help you plan out your answers, which is called the STAR method. Now star is an acronym, the letter S stands for Situation, that just means that you start off by giving the interviewers some context for the answer you’re about to share. Otherwise, there’s this huge risk that they won’t fully understand what you’re talking about.

Fay Wallis: 00:12:50

I’ve had that happen to me, I remember years ago, interviewing someone, and they just dove straight into all this detail of a project they worked on without giving us any contacts. So all we were desperately trying to do is figure out what on earth he was talking about it, it was really, really difficult to get to the point where we fully understood the situation, and why he had been doing that project in the first place. So even if you’re talking about something that is clearly detailed on your CV, assume that the person interviewing you hasn’t noticed it or can’t remember it, you have to remember, they may be interviewing people back to back, they may have just looked at your CV once, they may have never looked at your CV, which I know can be depressing to hear if you spent a lot of time on it.

Fay Wallis: 00:13:40

It’s always best to just assume that the person interviewing you knows nothing about your career, until they are at this point of sitting in front of you. The T in Star stands for task. So you’re going to talk through what your specific task or what your specific role was in the situation, what it was that you needed to do.

Fay Wallis: 00:14:04

The A stands for the action that you took, and the R stands for the result of your actions. If you’re already starting to feel yourself panicking and thinking, Oh, I’m never going to remember this acronym. This all sounds so boring and overwhelming. I don’t want to do it. Please don’t worry, I’m going to talk you through a couple of ways that are hopefully going to help bring it to life and just feel a little bit less daunting and a little bit less boring. The first thing I want to reassure you about is the fact that you can do this, if you know how to tell a story, which you do because you’ve been telling stories your whole life ever since she came home from your first day at school and told everyone in the house all about it.

Fay Wallis: 00:14:51

You’re going to be fine at using the STAR technique. Because the way to tell a good story tends to follow a format and when you know that I and can recognise that that can really help you when it comes to answering interview questions. And I am going to use the latest Top Gun movie which was Top Gun Maverick as an example, just because it’s the most recent film I’ve seen at the cinema. And don’t worry, it doesn’t matter if you have or haven’t seen it at all. So my husband Ian, and I took our two youngest children to watch it. They had never seen the original Top Gun movie, so I was a bit worried they would have no idea what was going on in the sequel.

Fay Wallis: 00:15:33

But the writers and the director had this covered, they set the scene for us perfectly. If they’d been using the STAR technique that s for situation was provided in a whole range of ways. At the very beginning text filled the screen in the cinema, explaining that Top Gun is the nickname for an elite flying school in the US Navy. We were then shown fighter planes taking off from a huge warship, before cutting to a scene with the hero of the film Tom Cruise in a completely different location. And the camera pans across photos behind Tom Cruise showing him as a young pilot standing next to his best friend from the first film.

Fay Wallis: 00:16:16

So straightaway, the kids realised Oh, right. This is a movie about planes. And this Tom Cruise character is probably going to be important in it. It’s not long then until we got to the t part of the star acronym, where we found out what the heroes challenge was for the story. Tom Cruise’s character Maverick is tasked with training a group of pilots for a dangerous mission. In your interview example, you are going to be the hero of your story. So you’re going to explain what your task is.

Fay Wallis: 00:16:51

Then in the movie, we moved on to the A of the star acronym, the action, which of course, is the main reason anyone goes to watch an action movie. But often what I’ve noticed when people are practising the STAR technique is they tend to skip over this bit. They just say, Oh, yes, and I had to do this. So I did it without giving any detail at all. So in the movie, we see Maverick going through a series of actions to achieve the result He’s aiming for he starts off by assessing each of the pilots to select the handful who are going to be carrying out the mission. He then teaches them how to fly the exact speed and route they need to to successfully complete the mission without being shut down.

Fay Wallis: 00:17:38

We also see him setting up a team building activity to help them all bond together so that there’s trust built amongst them. And when an obstacle comes his way of his superior, saying that the speeds and timings are too dangerous and impossible to achieve. He demonstrates personally, the flight exactly to prove that his plan is doable, and to inspire faith in all of the pilots who had been doubting that it was possible. So when you get to the A part of your story, you’re going to explain the exact steps that you took to reach the result, you’ll talk them through the action. And finally, the movie came to an end. The result was no surprise. But the mission was accomplished successfully.

Fay Wallis: 00:18:27

There are some other subplots going on in the movie, there’s a love story, that I don’t want to ruin the whole movie, if you haven’t seen it, although I suppose I’ve just told you the end. There’s some other friction that happens. There’s some sad bits, but you don’t need to hear about them for this example. And that’s a reminder for you not to veer off into other stories and subplots.

Fay Wallis: 00:18:50

When you’re giving your answers in an interview situation, try and stay laser focused on just sticking to all of the information that’s important and relevant for the competency that you’re being assessed against. Hopefully, you can see from that example, that there is a basic formula that nearly every story or every movie follows. Set the scene, introduce the hero, give them a challenge, See them overcome any obstacles that get in their way, so that they then have a successful result at the end. It’s exactly the same as star. You can look out for it when you next sit down to watch a film and see if you can plot the different steps of the formula. And let me know. I would love to hear if you start noticing this or you may already have been well aware of it anyway. Hopefully it’s not going to ruin watching films for you now.

Fay Wallis: 00:19:44

But now let’s come back away from movies and use star for a realistic example of answering an interview question. The question I’ve chosen for this example is Tell me about a time you had to manage conflicting prior receive. And here is the example. So s situation. In my previous role, I reported directly into the owner of the business who was very entrepreneurial and filled with new ideas that he had asked me to put into action. Although I really enjoyed working with him, I quickly began to feel overwhelmed, because new projects were being given to me all the time, and there always seemed to be a sense of urgency about them. We worked in a small office and work was often given to me verbally or over a quick email.

Fay Wallis: 00:20:33

My boss was very busy and liked to work informally, which meant snatch pieces of time, with him often replying to emails at the same time as he was actually talking to me, so it didn’t really feel like I had his full focus. So let’s move on to the task. Remember, this is where you’re the hero of the story, exactly what it is that you’re setting out to do. I realised I had to find a way of introducing some structure, so the quality of our communication could be stronger. And I could prioritise and set timings for the different projects that I was being assigned by my boss, then we’ll move on to a so the action.

Fay Wallis: 00:21:14

I began by putting a weekly 30 minute catch up with my boss in his calendar, and I explained why I was doing this. I chose a time slot for the end of the week, when I’d noticed that his workload seemed to be lighter, to increase the chances of him not cancelling me. For our very first meeting, I printed off a list of all the projects he’d asked me to work on, and I asked to go through them with him, so that he could help me prioritise them and talk through some realistic deadlines. I was surprised to discover that he was happy to take some of those projects and tasks off the list straightaway, he’d actually forgotten about giving some of them to me and didn’t want to go ahead with the ideas anymore.

Fay Wallis: 00:21:55

So that was a really important lesson for me, as it made me realise how important it was to double check priorities with him once he’d had a bit of time to let the excitement of a new idea cool off a little. And after that first meeting, I then created a Gantt chart to show him a visual representation of the different projects, and how long I expected them to take the different steps involved in them. I showed that to him in our next meeting. And he found that really helpful. And he agreed that I could then push back some projects until later in the year.

Fay Wallis: 00:22:27

Because when you looked at that visual representation of all of those projects, it was obvious from looking at the chart that it would be impossible to complete everything in the original timescales without bringing in some additional resources, which he didn’t really want to do. And from that point on, I then plotted all the deadlines into my Outlook calendar, which I use all the time. And I set myself dedicated time slots throughout the week to work my way methodically through the different projects. We continued with our weekly meetings as a way of keeping on top of everything, and reprioritizing as necessary as we went along.

Fay Wallis: 00:23:05

That then brings us to the art, which is the results. So the result is normally one of the quickest parts of the whole star process. The weekly meetings, list of projects, Gantt chart, and planning and Outlook all worked well. And it meant I was able to always hit the agreed upon deadlines. I was also given a financial bonus at the end of the year as a thank you for what I’d achieved, something I hadn’t expected at all. I hope that example has helped.

Fay Wallis: 00:23:37

And now I would love to encourage you to plot out some star answers of your own. It’s always helpful to save them somewhere. I’ve seen clients save them as Excel documents, so they can easily find them again for later interviews. But of course, you can save them in what ever way works best for you. And please, please, please, once you’ve noted down your examples, make sure that you practice them out loud, at least a few times, the only way to really get them to stick is by practising them.

Fay Wallis: 00:24:10

And I keep being asked how long these answers should be. Really, you don’t want to be going over four minutes, it’s really hard to listen to someone tell a story for more than four minutes. So you’re aiming really for the two minute to three and a half minute mark. But that is just a guide. If it is quite a complicated story, then of course, you may need a little bit more time but hopefully, as a rough guide that is going to be useful for you.

Fay Wallis: 00:24:39

And my final tip for you is to keep your examples as recent as possible. One small danger in saving your answers to refer back to is that if you put your answers away for a few years, and then bring them out again for an interview in the future, you’ll probably have more recent more relevant answers that you can Use, it’s always better to use more recent answers if you can.

Fay Wallis: 00:25:06

That brings us to the end of today’s episode. I’ve started including a transcript for the episodes on my website. So if it’s easier for you to scan through the transcript to remind yourself of the key points than it is to listen to the episode again, you can always find it on my website, which is bright sky career coaching.co.uk. Just go to HR coffee time podcast in the resources section, and you should find all the episodes in there. It’s only these recent ones that have the transcripts, but if I get myself super organised and find some time, I may be able to start putting in transcripts for the older ones too.