Practical Exercise: Identifying Competencies (Case Analysis)

Purpose of the Exercise

The purpose of this exercise is to put into practice what was learned in the previous point. It consists of analyzing a candidate's response to a behavioral interview question, breaking down their narrative into specific behaviors and identifying which competencies demonstrate those behaviors.

Scenario and Case Question

A candidate aspiring to a position as Head of Admissions at a university is asked the following question, designed to assess his or her ability to be collaborative and customer (in this case, student) oriented:

"Describe a situation in which you should have involved other people to ensure adequate customer service."

The Candidate's Response (The Case Study).

The candidate, a head of admissions, provides the following response:

We had a critical situation on the last day of enrollment. The payment portal crashed unexpectedly at 3:00 p.m., and the final closing was at 5:00 p.m. We had hundreds of applicants unable to apply. We had hundreds of applicants unable to finish the process.

The phone support team was totally understaffed for that volume of calls, so I decided to activate a contingency plan.

I immediately placed two document processing analysts to focus exclusively on answering urgent emails, freeing up the phone lines.

Anticipating that the portal would crash again if everyone logged on at once, I had new registrations temporarily suspended to prioritize those who had already failed payment.

At the same time, I assigned the systems supervisor to contact the payment gateway provider directly to resolve the bug and gave her the autonomy to approve the solution.

Finally, I coordinated the rest of the staff into groups to proactively contact those affected and expedite the manual enrollment process.

Breakdown of Observed Behavior

Analyzing the candidate's narrative, we can extract several key behaviors (actions) that the candidate executed to manage the situation:

Created a contingency plan immediately in the face of an unexpected and time-critical (two-hour) situation.

Resolved the lack of support staff by reallocating resources from other areas (two analysts).

Anticipated a future problem (new portal crash) and to