How to Hire Better: Improve Recruitment and Selection with Competencies

The job market is finally cooling off, but hiring managers are still struggling to find and keep quality talent. Almost a third (30%) of surveyed HR professionals consider recruitment and selection a key challenge for 2024.

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“If we don’t change what we’re doing, some of these jobs can remain vacant for a long period of time.” – Mark Coulter, Vice President Talent Management Solutions

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While over-hiring could put you in a deficit, strategic hiring can propel your business forward and keep you competitive. Despite economic uncertainty, hiring quality talent is important in creating efficient, creative, and happy teams. But to refresh your business with new perspectives, you must hire the right kind of talent. This means executing reliable, fair, and valid hiring practices.

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5 Benefits of Using Competencies in Recruitment and Selection

Because competencies differ from skills, they offer new ways to assess candidates. By evaluating candidates on innate qualities and observable behaviors in addition to skills, you can hire the individual who makes the most sense for the role on and off paper. Here are five ways competencies improve the recruitment and selection process:

1. Defining bona fide and unbiased selection criteria against which hiring managers can assess candidates. The criteria include observable behaviors, improving objectivity and equity in recruitment decisions.
2. Creating transparency in the selection process.
3. Improving efficiency with reusable selection tools, templates, and processes.
4. Giving clear evaluation metrics on which to base candidate feedback.
5. Presenting standards against which leaders can evaluate the effectiveness of the recruitment and selection process.

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How to Interview and Evaluate Candidates Effectively

The STAR model is based on the concept that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. In many cases, this is how people hire, for example, lawyers. People tend to hire lawyers who have a high success rate in similar cases. For the same reasons, interviewers can look at past behavior to evaluate candidates on how well they could perform on the job using the STAR model.

What is the STAR model?

The STAR model assesses the behavior of a candidate by asking them to describe:

1. A specific situation or task prompted by the interview question;
2. The action the candidate took or did not take; and
3. The result of the action taken or not taken (i.e., how effective or appropriate it was).

How to Create Competency-Based Interview Questions

To execute the STAR model, you must ask competency-based interview questions. Here’s how to develop them in three steps:

1. Using the job description for the open position, review the competencies and identify the behaviors associated with them.
2. Consider what obstacles an incumbent of the job typically faces and develop questions about those situations that will show these behaviors.
3. Working backwards, turn the behaviors or situations into a question or prompt. For example, for the competency Creativity and Innovation, a good prompt may be, “Describe the most complex problem that you were faced with and how you generated a new approach or explanation or solution.”

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How to Implement Competencies in Recruitment and Selection

To implement competencies in your company-wide hiring practices, consider the following two stages.

Stage 1

• Create policies and procedures for using competencies in recruitment and selection processes.
• Communicate considerations and guidelines for including information on competencies in job requirements.
• Develop sample job descriptions as the competency profiles become available for use.
• Customize or build an interview question bank organized by competencies.

Stage 2

• Develop and implement recruitment and selection processes, tools, and templates consistent with the policies you created in stage 1.
• Plan for and train managers and HR personnel on competency-based interviewing approaches.
• Design and implement an orientation program for employees on the new processes and tools.
• Collect data on the effectiveness of the new recruitment and selection process and adjust the process, as needed.

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Recruitment and Selection Best Practices

To ensure the implementation of your new process goes as smoothly as possible, follow these best practices:

• Ensure hiring managers are trained on competency-based selection;
• Prioritize efficiency in your selection processes to reduce time-to-hire; and
• Limit the number of competencies and skills in your job posts to only the must-haves, not the nice-to-haves. Our experts recommend a maximum of five competencies in a single job description; other competencies can be learned on the job.

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Save Time Executing Your Recruitment and Selection Strategy

Certain software solutions can help you save time, money, and effort throughout the hiring process. Quinto is a competency-first job description software that enables you to build job descriptions so they work within your competency framework. Quinto also accelerates time-intensive process so you can shred hours off your recruitment timelines. Request a demo to see how Quinto can help you:

• Turn a job description into a job post in seconds;
• Create interview guides based on the competencies within your job descriptions; and
• Create or update consistent job descriptions across your organization with content based on the latest market research.

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