How To Respond To Skill Based Interview Questions

How To Respond To Skill Based Interview Questions

Skill based interviews are one of the most common interviews that a candidate will face during the application method. Like most things, practice makes perfect, and there are many things you can do to improve your chances. Skill based questions focus on of course the skills, behaviour and knowledge that you can bring to the role. So, this will be focussed on your previous experience in work.

These questions will be very broad and open, allowing you to develop an open answer, representing how you dealt with a specific situation in the past.

Examples Of Competency Questions

These questions will lead you to describing a certain project or task, these examples are:

• When was the last time you showed…
• Have you ever been in a certain situation where…
• Can you tell me about this…

This will then focus on a specific skill:

• Tell me about a certain period of time you took charge of a project
• Determine a time you vary your communication approach according to the audience you’re addressing
• How do you plan or give ideas to ensure you complete a number of tasks successfully?

The areas will focus on certain skills that are crucial for the role. You will need to take a look at the job description and person requirement to get an idea of the types of questions that will be asked in the interview.

How To Answer A Competency Question

The most common advice is to use the STAR interview technique. This allows you to plan your answers out, giving you the best chance of joining all of the information. it breaks into four parts:

Situation – This is finding who you worked for at the time, your role at the company and any other vital information. It only needs a few seconds to give your example of some context.

Task – What was your duty or task you were asked to complete.

Action – Define in more detail of the steps you took to report the task. Try to mention the exact skills and how they could be useful to the role.

Result – How did your actions resolve the situation, and what was accomplished as a result of them?

Final Tips

The important way to successfully answer those questions is to develop some examples that you can adapt depending on the certain question. Use the same example, but just change the focus of it. One of your equipped answers could be used to reply to a question. Attempt to use as many different examples as you can and try not to repeat, this will help to give an extensive overview of your skills and experience.

We wish you all the luck if you have an interviews lined up for that all important job. Don’t forget to check out our other blogs here