Competency-Based Recruitment – this is how it works

Competency and Facts Instead of Unconcious Bias and Gut Feeling

There are roughly two ways of recruiting new employees after a reasonable number of candidates have been selected through screening. Either, you go on your gut feeling and keep your fingers crossed for it to be right. Or, you use knowledge and facts to match the company’s needs, with the candidates’ skills. We firmly believe in the latter option and are proud to recruit with a competency-based recruitment.

The meaning of competency-based recruitment can be seen in the name. In other words, the focus should be on clearly defining the required competence. And this definition should be kept in mind throughout the whole recruitment process. Starting at the needs analysis, through the selection process (including interviews and reference taking), until the final evaluation. Without being affected by other factors.

The purpose is to thoroughly assess which candidate actually has the best possibility of succeeding in the new role.

At TNG we focus on the personal qualities, experience, and knowledge the new employee must have to succeed in this position. We don’t focus on anything else. And we do everything to avoid subjective input. In fact, we work in this way with both recruitment and staffing.

At TNG we see competency as made up of four components:

Knowledge and experience
Talent
Personality
Motivation

We start by making an analysis to determine which competencies are critical to success in the role. In order to find the candidate with the greatest potential. We then weight the selected competencies and use the selection methods that best measure potential and future work performance.

At TNG we see competency as made up of four components

All focus is on competence

When setting up the requirement profile, we rank the various relevant competencies. This ranking then governs how the interview template is designed. And then the standardized questions are determined by scientifically proven methods and linked to the desired qualities.

The latest research shows that an overly structured interview can have a negative effect on personal assessment. Therefore, we use a semi-structured interview, that is, a structured interview where the interviewer asks different follow-up questions depending on the candidate’s answer. However, in order to make the right assessment, this approach requires a great deal of experience in managing interview situations.

How do you make the right choice?

The same principle applies when collecting references as to when conducting interviews. A strict focus on the necessary competencies. When we later reach the final assessment, we are basing our decision on clear and straightforward material. So we don’t risk unconsciously comparing apples and oranges. Each candidate is assessed based on relevancy and to the position in question. More than 15 years of research show that the methods we are using have the most accuracy, and we are constantly refining them.

It’s always a good idea to continuously be reexamining the efficiency and reliability of our methods. This is how science works: constantly adjusting the theory when new data is available. But one thing is quite clear. The usual methods that rely heavily on references, previous professional experience and number of years of education show a large margin of error.

Malin Lindelöw has a PhD in psychology and has written the book ”Competency-based Personnel Strategy” (Kompetensbaserad Personalstrategi), which contains a summary of the validity of different methods. That is, how well they anticipate the recruited person’s performance in the new role. And this ability is indicated by a value between 0-1. 0 means that there is no connection at all between the choice of method and the actual performance. 1 is an ideal perfect foresight, which is never achieved in practice.

There is, in other words, no method that is completely reliable. Many lie somewhere between perfect and chance, and some are much closer to chance. One must, therefore, understand how the different methods work, and why. And then you realize that they all have their limitations. None of them suffice on their own. And they should all be seen as tools to be used in combination. That is how we get the best results and when used correctly they provide very useful support.

Predicting a persons performance graph

Competency-based recruitment is getting more common

It’s often a big and rather frightening step to deviate from what has long been regarded as the accepted way of doing this. But once you’ve taken the step, the many benefits quickly become apparent. In fact, everything indicates that competency-based recruitment is becoming increasingly more common and more important. Especially now, when having the right person in the right place is ever more decisive to a company or organization’s ability to successfully hold its own. In the United States, for one, the evolution is clearly moving towards recognizing the importance of treating all candidates equally and focusing strictly on the required and assessable skills.

Want to know more? Contact us!