How to Build a Competency Model
October 18, 2024
Based on decades of experience building a reviewing hundreds of competency models, we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t. Follow these 10 Best Practices.
Competency Modeling Expertise
Competency models are the foundation of your talent processes. We help you build them the right way.
What is Competency Modeling?
Competency Modeling is the process used to define the unique sets of skills, abilities, and behaviors that employees are expected to exhibit. Competency models are essential building blocks for critical HR processes, including recruitment and hiring, learning and development, performance management, and succession planning. They are tools for communicating what success looks like in your organization. And, because they are used at every step of the employee life cycle, they serve to define your culture. That’s why every word in every competency definition matters. If you want to ensure that you are sending the right messages to candidates and employees, we’re here to help.
Our Approach to Competency Modeling
We’ve built hundreds of competency models and every one is different. However, all of them were guided by the same 4 principles.
1. Purpose and Impact
It’s important to clearly define what you want your competency models to do. In other words, what problem, are you trying to solve? What impact do you want the competencies to have on your business results? We engage you in discussion to help you identify how you will measure the impact of your competency models. For instance, you may want to improve your hiring decisions by training managers on how to use competency-based interview guides. Or, you may want to establish a competency-based framework for your performance management system to improve your managers’ understanding of how to use it. Identifying evaluation metrics, and a baseline, will help you to show the impact of your work.
2. Cultural Alignment
We start with conversations with your senior leaders to understand your Mission, Vision, and Values. Every competency will tie to your organization’s purpose, aspirational future state, and core principles that guide your culture. This is where an off-the-shelf competency model falls short. If your competencies don’t sound like your culture, they can’t help build it.
3. Distinct & Measurable
We draw upon our expertise in behavioral science and psychometrics to ensure that every competency is precisely defined and distinct. Remember – competencies should be observable, not aspirational. That means no “fluff”! You also need to be able to measure them via multiple methods (e.g., interviews, performance reviews, personality and ability assessments, etc.). This is where we see many competency models fall short. If you can’t measure it, it won’t be useful.
4. Relatable & Memorable
When it comes to competency modeling, streamlined and simple is best. Overdone competency frameworks and unwieldy definitions are too difficult to understand and implement. Everyone in your organization will be able to understand and appreciate the utility of the competency models we create. This is where expertise is critical. We’ve created and reviewed hundreds of competency models. So, we know what works and what doesn’t.
Applying Your Competency Model to Talent Processes
We recommend introducing your competency model to the company a few months before you apply them to your HR processes. The purpose is to introduce it to all employees in a way that builds understanding and excitement. Then, a staged approach tends to work well, where you roll them out to one process at a time.
Structured Interviews
We have decades of experience writing structured, competency- based interview questions.
Structured interviews are twice as predictive of job performance as those that aren’t structured, so this is a great process to start with!
360 Feedback Tools
We design custom online surveys and interview-based 360 tools that measure your competencies.
This ensures people are given feedback on behaviors they need to start, stop, and continue doing to support your culture and be successful.
Objective Assessments
We design customized assessments for hiring, development, and succession planning.
By measuring your competencies, you can make talent decisions based on what’s most important to success in your company.