A competency-based interview will assess skills and experience. But it won’t get to the heart of whether a candidate will enjoy or is passionate about doing the role.
Welcome to the Strengths Based Interview.
By focusing on someone’s strengths and motivate them, employers can identify candidates with the potential to become peak performers in their business.
But how do you construct a Strengths Based Interview?
By following some steps it can be achieved:
It can be quite a lot of managers used to conducting strengths-based interview to get their heads round. Competency-based interviews measure someone’s skills and experience and provide a way to measure and score a candidate against the requirements of the job. The first step then in developing your strengths based interview is to help your interviewers and managers understand the principle and the thinking behind using strengths instead of (or as well as) competency-based interviews.
Ø What does the job involve?
The next step is to break down what’s involved in the job itself. Let’s take a call center role as our example. The job is likely to involve:
Ø Talking to customers on the phone
Ø Following a set procedure or script
Ø Having an eye for detail.
Looking at that list, it’s easy to see that some people will love it and some people will positively hate it. And it’s obvious really, that if you can attract someone who likes detail, enjoys talking to people even if those people are unhappy, and is energised by structure then they’ll be good at their job, easy to train and great ambassadors for the business.
Ø Questions that explore the candidate’s strengths:
For the interview, you’ll need to create a question for each of those key areas or tasks. They need to provide the candidate with an opportunity to talk about a specific example of when they’ve performed that task previously. Your follow-up questions or probes should then dig deeper into how a candidate felt about that activity. In this way, you’ll start to gather evidence about whether a candidate pursued a task with glee or trudged despondently through it. The difference will make all the difference to whether they’re right for the role.