Job Specific Competencies

With regard to job specific competencies your options are to design work sample tests that will test these skills. Alternatively, you could design a structured interview to assess job specific skills, or you could use a combination of the two. At EQ – IQ we do not involve ourselves with assessing job specific skills because these are best assessed by subject matter experts. Remember job specific competencies are those that are specific to the functional outputs of the job such as creating a balance sheet, knowing how to deal with a grievance, set up a production schedule, setting up a promotion, selling skills etc.

Generic Competencies

Your options with respect to assessing generic competencies are to use a well-designed structured interview, or carefully designed assessment center tools such as case studies, role play, in – baskets or a combination of the foregoing. Be warned though, that the effectiveness of assessment center tools are largely dependent on how well they simulate the job for which a candidate is being assessed, as well as on how well observers are trained to observe and evaluate candidates’ behaviours and responses. For this reason, we do not advocate off the shelf assessment center tools as they tend to fall short of internationally accepted standards for assessment centers.

Another option is to use our online Competency Appreciation System. Essentially this system functions as an online “interview” where a candidate is thoroughly probed on his past behaviours with respect to a competency. The candidate responds online to the questionnaire, we receive his responses and then forward them to our clients in a neat Competency Appreciation Protocol which they can then evaluate. We provide a formal rating system for “scoring” the candidate’s responses. We also provide a companion interview system to our clients in the event that they wish to probe the candidate’s behaviour on any competency further in a final interview.

We have already given some insight into these tools in the previous module but click below if you would like to explore them again:

Competency Appreciation

Competency Appreciation Score

We will elaborate more on how to do this in the last section of this module.