At a competency based interview a prospective employer is going to be looking for examples where you may have challenged existing levels of service or strived to improve the overall standard. You will no doubt be meeting service levels (including time lines and dates) and deliver quality in what you do – including understanding quality. To do that you would need to consider how you can verify that what you’ve achieved is to the right standard.

Business is increasingly about standards and certifications, certifications help you to measure your own or teams level of competence against an industry norm. The company you work in may bench mark themselves against industry norms – if they do – what did you do wit the information? Do you seek out ways of improving the scores? talk to the team? Seek out customer perspectives?

In a management or leadership role you may be developing plans – which you will revisit – to improve a team’s level of performance. You are going to have to set the standards and also their measurement – how can the team perform if they don’t know what good or great looks like?

Critical to all of this is the customer perception of high performance; you need to develop ways in which you can find out those perspectives. It may be just as simply as asking the customer or sending our and survey, you may have undertaken some role play to put yourself in the customers shoes.

So I’ve covered some of the positive behaviours, what would be negative behaviours ?

Accepting current standards and doing nothing about improving them when you know the standard is not up to the level you or your team need to hit. Not seeking out ways to look for continuous improvement in the work that you do or ignoring bench marks that are important to your business.

Example competency based interview questions for achieving high performance

Can you give me an example when a performance did not meet the required level ? How did you identify that their was under performance ? How did you decide what to do ? How did you measure the effectiveness of the change ? What was the outcome ?