Attracting and retaining staff has long been a top priority for most employers. To hire more effectively, interviewers are focussing less on applicants’ past job responsibilities and more on how they carried those duties out.

When faced with an interview the likelihood is you will be told it is ‘competency based’ or that the interviewer is looking for certain ‘behaviours’ or evidence of ‘emotional intelligence’. I want to make sure you know exactly what this means...

First of all a simple tip that most don’t bother to follow: find out the format of the interview. It’s fine to ask beforehand so give yourself a chance to prepare.

The interviewer will explore your skills – competencies – in all areas required of the job description. The focus will be on “open-ended” questions (“tell me about a time when”, “what would you do if ...?”) that relate to the job and company. Examples of competencies include communication skills, initiative, planning, team work and commercial awareness.

A competency based interview tries to uncover your skill-set (competencies) AND your personality (behaviours) – hence “behavioural interview”.

Interviewers place emphasis on specific behavioural patterns derived from the interview to determine future success habits of you as an employee. This is a powerful and effective approach, since the questions force you to explain how you approach, handle, deal with, or solve a situation, project or challenge that's relevant to the job.

So, think about recent examples that demonstrate your behaviours appropriate to the job description. When answering a question be specific and take a structured approach:

• (S) Describe the Situation or problem

• (T) Talk about the part YOU played in discovering the problem

• (A) Describe what YOU did to resolve it, the Actions YOU took

• (R) Detail the successful Result and use figures to illustrate

Behavioural interview questions are often designed to measure your “emotional intelligence”.This can be a valuable indicator of the type of employee you are and should uncover how you:

1. Know your emotions

2. Manage your emotions

3. Motivate yourself

4. Recognise and understand other people's emotions

5. Manage relationships, i.e. manage the emotions of others

Interviewing techniques have developed rapidly so it’s vital you understand the format of the interview and prepare properly. Most of all don’t be afraid to ask.