Competency, wompetency

Unless you’re a masochist, applying for jobs these days, whilst never exactly being pleasant process, is a terrible experience from every point of view. Not only is the student dream of free(ish) money, big booty hoes and four months off a year over, you have to deal with the painful application process itself. First of all, why is it necessary to apply for a job starting next September a year in advance? Come on guys, it doesn’t take that long to skim read a couple of pages! Surely they can start things off a bit later on, giving us (and them) more time to ease back into things after summer. It’s bad enough dealing with labs, lectures and tutorials after a lazy summer let alone filling out a billion job applications on top of that. This brings me onto my main bone of contention.

Now I completely understand a firm can’t just hire any old chump, but there is no need for the fallacy that is Competency Based Interviews. The word itself, competency, is an abhorrent example of corporate-speak and, like most silly corporate terms, it was conceived in the 80s when most historians agree people were too busy doing cocaine and avoiding nuclear Armageddon (perhaps not at the same time) to think very logically. The purpose of an interview is to evaluate the candidate’s motivation, skills and knowledge to find the ideal candidate for the role (according to Wikipedia). This is precisely where a Competency Based Interview fails. The problem with them is that they strongly favour the people who have spent the most time preparing for them and not the people who are in reality most suited for the role. Especially when you consider that there is a plethora of books that you can buy (Amazon has over 700) and there are even week long interview training courses that train you up.

... the interviewer regurgitates a bunch of questions from a piece of paper and you regurgitate some prepared answers

Thinking about a “time when you’ve solved a problem in a group using initiative” or something similarly ridiculous is pretty hard to do on the spot when you’ve got a panel of grizzled interviewers, pens at the ready, waiting for you to open your cake hole. It’s a horrible moment. Your caffeine addled mind goes into overdrive, drudging up half forgotten memories of that group project you did in second year where you did… oh shit what was it exactly? It’s in that split second when you notice your interviewer has the remnants of a long digested croissant stuck to their tie (true story there) and your train of thought is gone. It’s now officially an awkward silence so you go “Basically, erm…” and out comes a mumbled, spluttering load of bullshit about how you somehow did something incredible like saving an African tribe from Ebola whilst furthering your dream of working in insert company here, when in reality you were probably more hungover than Charlie Sheen on New Year’s Day, nodding mindlessly to whatever the annoying, chirpy one in your group said, whilst dreaming of a Boneless Banquet. Oh, and if you don’t answer using the STAR technique, just leave – you’re done for.

Your only option if you want any hope of getting the job is to spend an unending numbers of hours, scratching your head trying to remember anything you ever did that was vaguely impressive, relating them to competencies like “Makes An Impact” and “Gets Things Done”. Those ridiculous statements are genuinely two of the competencies for a very well known bank by the way; I’m not making them, or the grammatically incorrect capitalisation, up. They’re also incredibly boring for people on both sides of the table: the interviewer regurgitates a bunch of questions from a piece of paper and you regurgitate some prepared answers. It’s like A-Levels where you won’t get the marks unless you put in the key words.

It’s a state of affairs that hasn’t escaped the attention of employers. Several, including Ernst and Young, one of the Big 4, who are collectively perhaps the oldest and greatest advocates of competency interviews, are moving to alternatives such as strength based interviews, which are designed to find what really motivates people, their true strengths and whether these make them suitable for the role. Many industries could also learn a lot from consultancy firms who frequently use case interviews. These test the candidate’s ability to solve a pseudo-real world problem, actively testing the same skills needed for the actual job. It’s a shame that these days to succeed in almost anything, from exams to interviews, there are few alternatives but to learn the script and follow it to a T. I guess it’s better than being unemployed in a ditch, drinking K Cider, which is apparently what the legions of unemployed graduates are doing now according to the Daily Mail. Anyway, I gotta go guys, I have to think of times I “drove things forward in a team”…