Wychwood Consulting offers training courses, workshops and consultancy including sales training, customer service training, competency based interviewing skills, management development, leadership development, appraisal skills, team building, recruitment services, and train the trainer.

Competency Based Interviewing Skills - with added values

We offer open and in-house courses in Competency Based Interviewing Skills - with added values. This means we give you and your people the skills to rapidly and effectively assess candidates' knowledge, skills, behaviours and their values and motivations, and the implications these have for how they will behave and perform in their role within your organisation.

Typical course content includes:

• What makes interviews effective, and what makes them ineffective
  
• Being clear on what you are looking for - the relevant factors - knowledge, behaviours, skills & values
  
• Writing a realistic Job and Person Specification
  
• Evaluating CVs and documentation from agencies
  
• The psychology of interviews - what is really going on
  
• Common fears of the interviewer and how to avoid them
  
• The structure of an effective interview
  
• Building rapport
  
• Projecting a professional image of you and your organisation
  
• How to ask effective questions - how to devise them, and sample questions
  
• Total listening techniques
  
• The legal issues and how to ensure you are protected
  
• Note taking and record keeping
  
• Evaluating the evidence
  

Full and friendly documentation (paper and computer based) is provided to support your interviewing.

Competency Based Interviewing - what it is, and how we add even more value to it

Commonly, many people when interviewing ask a lot of 'what would you do..?' questions. These are good for testing specific knowledge of procedures, but the answers to these hypothetical questions have been shown through much research to be a very poor guide to what people will actually do in reality.

This research brought about the development of competency based interviewing (sometimes called criteria or behavioural based interviewing), which has two main characteristics:

1. Candidates are asked for actual past examples of what they did. Not what they would do (hypothetical), nor even what they do (abstract), but what they did via examples of past actions.

2. In addition to knowledge, the necessary behaviours to do the role effectively are identified in advance, and examples of their presence (or absence) in a candidates descriptions of their experiences are sought and assessed.

This competency based approach to recruitment has been used extensively by organisations for the last fifteen years or so.

However, W Y C H W O O D has for the several years been 'Adding Values' to the competency based approach, through our recognition of the limitations it does have, and addressing these effectively. For example:

• How can you tell if a canidate is simply making up a story?
• How will you know how to motivate and manage this candidate if you understand how they do things, but not why?
• How will this candidate fit in to the team?
• How will you know if the candidate's behaviours will continue to be displayed when they are under greater pressure?
• What if your organisations culture is very different from their previous experience?
• What if the candidate has not worked in a role very similar to the one they are applying for?

The Competency Based approach teaches you to reliably discover the knowledge, skills and behaviours of your candidates. Our training also gives you the "added values" of accurately finding out the candidates' values and motivation, which make it much less likely that a candidate to mislead you, and will enable you to know much more about their likely behaviours in your particular environment.

The Benefits of the Competency Based Approach, with added values

		A much more complete picture of the candidate is established.
		Prediction of the candidate's actual behaviour and performance is greatly improved.
		You will be significantly better equipped to know how they will best be motivated and managed.
		There will be fewer surprises, especially when there are times of increased stress and pressure.
		Candidates can much more safely be recruited where there may not be the opportunity to attract people with precisely the level of experience and skills that you would ideally have liked.
		The candidate themselves will know that they have had the opportunity to reveal (and in many cases learn) much more about their own qualities, and their depth.

Our experience

Our people have many years experience of recruitment and selection, including interviewing, assessment and development centres in both professional HR and Personnel functions, but also as line managers in various functions, recruiting their own people.

These same people also provide our outsourced recruitment service, where we do the bulk of the interviewing and selection for you, once again demonstrating that all our people continue to do as well as teach.

Our services to you

Values Based Interviewing Skills

Values Based Interviewee Skills

Values Based Assessment Centres

Values Based Development Centres

Recruitment Services attracting and selecting high quality candidates using our professional HR service

Copyright © 2008
Wychwood Consulting.

"This course was brilliant. It really gets the best out of people."

"Only wish I had attended a number of years ago"

"Really enjoyed the course and gained a lot from it. Very professional."

"Thoroughly enjoyed it. Learned a lot about interviewing and about myself"