Hiring for competencies: predicting performance in your business
You need to understand your company to predict how someone will perform in it.
Unstructured interviews default to ‘easy’ mode
Most hiring discussions move quickly towards experience and familiarity. Has this person done the job before? Have they worked in our industry? Do they come from a brand we respect? Do we like them? If yes, they feel like the low risk option and those questions feel sensible. They are just not, by themselves, strong predictors of performance. You need to assess competencies.
What is a competency?
A competency can be defined as applied performance. It is the combination of skills and traits, expressed in your specific context, to achieve a defined outcome. If either the outcome or the context is vague, the competency cannot be defined and the assessment becomes guesswork.
What outcome do you need and in what context?
· Step one is outcome clarity. What must this role actually deliver? Not a list of tasks, but tangible results. Revenue growth. Cost control. System implementation. Cultural shift. Client retention. Whatever it is, it needs to be specific.
· Step two is context clarity. Under what conditions must those results be delivered? High pace or steady state? Resource rich or constrained? Stable market or volatile? Supportive stakeholders or conflicting agendas? Culture and operating reality shape what performance really looks like. So the context is specific to your company and two companies in the same sector may have wildly varying contexts.
Only once outcome and context are agreed does it make sense to define the skills required. And only then can you identify the traits that allow those skills to show up consistently, particularly under pressure.
Don’t mistake signals for substance
When this groundwork is skipped, hiring defaults to pattern recognition. Someone has done something similar before in your sector, maybe in a well-known brand (even better). They communicate well. The conversation flows and they ‘feel’ credible. After an hour, everyone is comfortable. Comfort, however, is not evidence.
Plan ahead
A more reliable approach is structured. Align stakeholders on outcomes and define the operating context in advance. Agree what good and great look like. Then build the interview around testing for the skills and traits that drive applied performance in your context. Without that logic, hiring becomes a search for familiarity rather than performance. Over time, that is ironically the highest risk and threat to performance.
We partner with businesses to design, build and scale high-performing finance teams, from transactional accounting through to CFO leadership. Contact us today ↓
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