Competency-based interviews, also known as structured, behavioral, or situational interviews, are designed to test one or more skills or competencies. The interviewer has a list of questions, each focusing on a specific skill, and your answers will be compared against pre-determined criteria and marked accordingly. These interviews are based on the premise that past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior. Competency-based interviews use questions that aim to find out how you have used specific skills in your previous experience and how you approach problems, tasks, and challenges. They are particularly useful for employers looking for "raw" talent, such as graduates for training schemes where prior knowledge may be less important than having the right aptitude, and for selecting those seeking promotion within an organization.

Here are some key points about competency-based interviews:

• They are more systematic than normal or unstructured interviews, and each question targets a skill needed for the job.
• They allow recruiters to easily compare lots of candidates based on their existing experience as an indicator of future performance.
• They differ from normal or unstructured interviews, which tend to be more informal.
• Key competencies regularly sought after by employers include adaptability, commercial awareness, communication, conflict resolution, decisiveness, independence, flexibility, leadership, problem-solving, organization, resilience, and teamwork.
• Competency-based interview questions are designed to reveal the extent to which the candidate exhibits the knowledge, skills, abilities, or characteristics of the desired behavior/competency.

To prepare for a competency-based interview, you should list the competencies for the specific job, trawl your CV for two examples for each competency, and for each example, write a bullet point for each of the STAR headings. The STAR headings are Situation, Task, Action, and Result.