Please give me a positive pep talk re competency interview

[KeithLeMonde]

I've never done a competency based interview before. Been in my current job for 9 years so it's a long time since I last did an interview. Usually I'm not too nervous, I feel confident in my abilities and experience and comfortable talking about them. However, I have found competency based questions difficult on application forms and the idea of having to do them "live" is literally keeping me awake at night.

I haven't been given any kind of list of competencies. There's a bullet pointed list in the person specification but that is very skills/experience based. So I feel like I am preparing answers with no real idea (beyond intelligent guessing!) of what they might ask.

I believe myself to be a genuinely good candidate but I can freeze up under pressure.

Please can you share positive thoughts and advice about competency based interviews to get me into a more positive mindset? And can I ask nicely please for no horror stories or negative comments - my brain is providing quite enough of those at 2am.

Think of a couple of good work experiences/situations and have the wording prepped in your head in terms of how you'd explain it... Then think of how you could fit it to a few different questions. I. E. If they ask about how you work with/in a team or work under pressure etc, this could be the same situation depending how you word it.

I find this really helps rather than always thinking on my feet.

Also don't be scared to use the same example to answer different questions, if you can go into more detail on an example already given to show it applys to both questions that's fine. Obviously you don't want to just have one experience to draw on for it all, but a few is enough.

Don't be scared to ask them to clarify the question or ask them for an example etc to buy yourself thinking time.

Good luck and trust in yourself!

Thank you :) Its really thrown me how much this has affected my confidence!

One good thing about an online interview is I can have notes stuck up behind my laptop screen (i.e. out of their sight) with my case studies on them.