Competency Based job interviews

Does anyone have any tips on how to do well with these sort of interviews. I've had 6 interviews since the turn of the year but have been unsuccessful each time due to not giving detailed enough answers to these sort of questions. Problem is I am a "head down" kind of guy at work so don't really "influence" as such and that is the kind of thing that they are looking for. I am also a terrible liar and have tried making up answers on the spot but just get lost in the detail. Have looked on the net and there is a lot of information about the STAR system but I don't really have any examples.

I'm a graduate accountant with 1 years experience and the jobs I've been going for are in the financial services industry.

Any help would be appreciated

 

what i done the last time is I took some emails of when people have thanked me for doing something for them, written a log of important events in my working life, any experiences relevant. This makes it easier in the interview to show or bend your answer to fit their question, the questions are all generic so with a bit of a sense you should be able to answer almost anything

 

Competency based questions can be really tough to answer, but that's why they're so popular in job interviews.

My advice would be to take a minute to think about your answer. You won't get penalised for just taking a moment to think about what you are going to say and it will save you from rushing yourself and getting muddled up.

Also, even if you aren't very good at lying, there's no harm in bending the truth a little to make you seem better in a situation. Take something that you do at work that doesn't seem very impressive and stretch the story until you sound like a model employee.

The most important thing though is to try not to get stressed out over it. Don't work yourself up about the interview. Every time I've went for an interview for a job I didn't want I've been successful in the interview, whereas if it's a job I really want I tend to go in a bit nervous and sometimes I haven't been offered a job at the end. That's because if you have the attitude that there's nothing to lose you can just relax and as long as you feel relaxed you're going to have a much better chance of having a good interview.

Good luck mate.

 

Just google the questions, they're all generally the same or can be manipulated in such a way that you can fit an example into them.

Have a couple of answers for every scenario you can find and write them down, then bullet point them and take them into the interview. (I'd double check with the interviewer that this is ok but I have never been for a job that it isn't)

I've got jobs with Barclays, LTSB in Glasgow and also Air Traffic Control which was a 3 hour competency based interview.

Make sure you have a couple of negative examples there too, such as "tell us about a time you failed to influence a situation and how did this make you feel" these are frequently the questions people struggle most with, the important thing is to show that although something went wrong there was a positive outcome (such as you went back and found an alternative solution to a problem).

Hope this helps and good luck with the job hunting.

 

just make a story up in your head first its that easy

 

Whatever the job is your going for make up scenarios and question you would expect to be asked about this job and then either make up a story/ or tell them of a time you had to do something along those lines in another job. Lie through your teeth, unless your a back stabbing loud mouth you get no where in jobs....learned what over the last year of interviews and temporary jobs.