7/19/23, 10:50 AM
FranklinCovey
Determining a role’s key competencies
There are many different aspects that contribute to a person’s performance in a job.
Since you only have limited time to do your assessment, it’s important to prioritize.
Consider focusing your assessment on three things: key competencies for the
particular job, value fit, and potential.
What to look for in a candidate
1. Competencies
Competencies are skills or attributes that affect performance. For example, crosscultural sensitivity is a useful competency for an international logistics coordinator,
since the person will be frequently working with others from a wide variety of
backgrounds.
Competencies are useful in your assessment because they look very directly at what
the candidate will be doing on the job. Since each job is different, you’ll have to
spend some time selecting the 4 or 6 most important competencies for the particular
role you are hiring for.
2. Values.
It’s also important to assess a candidate’s values and mission alignment. Team
members who don’t share core values and an excitement for the mission can hurt
your culture and be difficult to manage.
3. Potential.
Finally, in most cases it’s important to look at a candidate’s long-term potential.
While it’s easy to focus only on your short-term needs, you’ll be doing yourself and
your organization a huge favor by finding candidates who bring skills you’re missing
and are excited to grow and contribute to the organization over the long term.
How to determine the key competencies
https://app.franklincovey.com/explore/hiring/how-to-decide-what-to-look-for/
1/4
7/19/23, 10:50 AM
FranklinCovey
Use our Hiring: Role Template (PDF and doc) to answer the questions below for the
role you’re filling.
1. Define the job’s priorities, objectives and benchmarks for success.
Your first step is to establish the position’s priorities by answering the following
questions:
• What do I expect the hire to do, and how will the person do it? Susan wants
to hire a marketing analyst. She expects the analyst to provide her with insights
based on the company’s marketing campaigns and general activities in the
marketplace.
To do this, the analyst will have to collect marketing campaign data, process that
data, create insights based on the results and present those insights to Susan.
The analyst will also need to perform research on the market and the company’s
competition and customers. Susan thinks the analyst can do this through web and
news searches, reading reports, attending conferences, speaking with the sales
team, speaking directly with customers and doing occasional customer surveys.
• What initial objectives should the hire have? Susan decides that the analyst’s
two initial objectives will be to analyze the billboard marketing campaign that
the company has been running all summer for its new product to see how costeffective the campaign really is, and to also prepare a weekly email newsletter for
the entire company that is a summary of important market developments.
• Two years from now, how will I tell if the new hire has been successful?
Two years from now, Susan’s analyst will be a success if he or she has been able
to greatly improve the cost effectiveness of the company’s marketing efforts,
identify at least a few new marketing opportunities, and ensure that the
company’s managers have been kept aware of all major market developments.
• If I were to implement an incentive plan for this position, what key
variables would matter most? Susan concludes that an incentive plan for the
job would be based on a combination of the strength of the analyst’s insights and
recommendations, the overall performance of the marketing team’s campaigns,
and the consistency and quality of the weekly market newsletter.
https://app.franklincovey.com/explore/hiring/how-to-decide-what-to-look-for/
2/4
7/19/23, 10:50 AM
FranklinCovey
The last question is helpful even if you aren’t planning to have an incentive plan
because it forces you to consider the most important measurable results of the
position.
2. Define 3 to 5 critical situations the hire is likely to face and must master to be
considered a high performer.
After thinking about the role for some time, Susan concludes that the most critical
situations for her hire are as follows:
• Collecting data — both for market campaign data as well as general market
research. At times it will be hard to find the data needed, or some data may not
exist, and a good analyst will be able to find creative and practical solutions.
• Working with large amounts of data from the marketing campaign and surveys.
The data will be both quantitative and qualitative.
• Providing recommendations to her on ways to improve marketing campaigns,
based on the data the analyst has gathered, knowledge of different marketing
options, and the company’s strategic goals.
• Writing clear, concise and insightful weekly newsletters based on the market
research collected.
3. Identify the job’s key competencies.
Review your answers to steps 1 and 2 and start to extract the 3 to 5 most important
competencies. If you are having trouble coming up with a good list, it might be
helpful to discuss potential competencies with your manager, or with someone else
inside or outside the organization who has hired for a similar position.
In Susan’s example, she reviewed her notes carefully to identify 5 key competencies
for the marketing analyst job:
• Resourcefulness. Good data is hard to get (and vital), so the marketing analyst
needs to be resourceful, particularly when it comes to data collection.
• Analytical thinking. The person must also be analytical to process that data
logically, arrive at sound conclusions and form insights from market research.
• Writing skills. Since part a large part of his job involves preparing a highly
polished newsletter, writing skills are critical.
https://app.franklincovey.com/explore/hiring/how-to-decide-what-to-look-for/
3/4
7/19/23, 10:50 AM
FranklinCovey
• Information synthesis. To prepare the newsletter, the analyst will have to read
many articles and talk with many people, and then synthesize that information
into a coherent story — so synthesizing information is important, too.
• Technical marketing knowledge. Finally, Susan decides the analyst needs to have
some technical marketing knowledge in order to make solid recommendations
about how to improve existing campaigns and what new campaigns to try.
4. Define the competencies as clearly as possible in behavioral terms.
Different people have different definitions for competencies like “strategic vision”
or “team player,” so it’s important to write out exactly what you mean.
For example, Susan has decided to define “resourcefulness” as “the ability to work
over, through and around obstacles that may appear when trying to collect
information in the real world.”
5. Set and define the required skill level for each key competency.
We suggest rating each competency on a scale of 1 to 6. For skill levels, a 1 represents
a beginner and a 6 an expert.
Susan decides that the minimum skill levels for resourcefulness and analytic
thinking should be 5 since they are hard to train.
She thinks writing could normally be a 3, but since Susan isn’t a particularly strong
writer herself she decides to increase the required skill level to 4. She might be
willing to accept a 3 but she’d then have to enroll the candidate in an external
writing training course. Susan also determines that a skill level 4 means: “Written
communications are nearly or totally error free, have a positive tone, and would
generally require one round of editing.”
For more examples, see this list of employment competencies with ratings.
After you’ve figured out what you’re looking for, it’s time to create a job description.
Next: How to create a job description
https://app.franklincovey.com/explore/hiring/how-to-decide-what-to-look-for/
4/4