Competency Profiles

What is a competency profile (aka competency based job profile)?

A competency profile is the collection of relevant competencies at specific proficiencies, which define the requirements for a job in concrete, measurable terms.

Traditionally, competency profiles are created through a competency profiling process. This multi-step process can entail the use of surveys, interviews, card sort activities and focus groups to determine the relevant competencies for an organization and individual jobs.

In the modern HR environment, many organizations are turning to AI-driven competency profiling software to help them build competency profiles for their jobs in a fraction of the time. Contact us for more details.

How do competency profiles work?

A competency profile can include several layers. For example, all jobs in an organization may share common core competencies that embody the key values and behaviors that everyone needs to have.

Below that, all jobs in the same department or job family may share common competencies; as an example, all jobs in your sales job family might share "client focus" as a competency.

But individual jobs within the same family can be quite different; and for this, there are job-specific competencies -- the most individually-oriented competencies on a competency profile.
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The specific mix of competencies and proficiency levels is what makes competency profiles unique to individual jobs, and an important tool to define the behaviors and skills needed for success. Competency profiles bring greater clarity, focus, and levels of understanding throughout the wide variety of jobs and roles in your organization.

Why use a competency job profile?

Competency job profiles are foundational, adaptable tools for managing talent and can be used for the following:

• It can improve your recruitment and selection process 
  By using competency job profiles, your organization can give potential candidates more clarity and detail about the true expectations of a job opening. This is especially important as job postings and ads are one of the initial points of contact between your organization and its potential candidates.
  
• It can enhance your interviewing practices
  Based on research published in the Journal of Occupational Studies and Personnel Studies, behavioral questions have been shown to outperform situational questions in identifying successful candidates for hiring.
  
  Competency based job profiles can be used to create competency-based interview questions which are able to better identify a candidate’s ability to perform well on a job position.  
  
  This is mainly possible because competency-based job profiles help describe the behaviors necessary achieve success in a specific job position.
• It can help with employee development programs
  Utilizing employee competency profiles for future development programs can yield considerable benefits for an organization.  
  
  An organization can now give its workforce a straightforward learning path to help rectify any job-related skill gaps, train for a future job position or improve an employee’s overall performance.  
  
  This is done by aligning the behavioral indicators for each competency in a competency job profile with the informal, formal, and on-the-job learning opportunities.