What Every Employer Assesses for When They Hire

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

What does a company want to find out about you when they interview you? What are they trying to find out when they evaluate and assess you? In most cases, hiring staff or temporary workers starts out with a job description. Someone sat down and consciously thought of what skills and experience they needed on their staff.

Competence

Can you do the job and deliver results? Companies want to know you have the right skills, education, and experience to succeed in the role. Be prepared to discuss specifics from your background that make you qualified. Show mastery of the required abilities and highlight relevant accomplishments from past jobs. Competence builds confidence you’ll perform well once hired.

Most firms hopefully start off by assessing for competence. I say “hopefully” because so many people report that they work with incompetent colleagues. Hopefully, an employer has developed a series of questions that help them evaluate and assess skills competency for the skills that are needed.

But skills competency is only one element of what a company is evaluating. The rest all fall into the category of soft skills — hard to assess for qualities that differentiate one person from another.