I've worked in recruitment for 8 years. Every once in a while a gem of an email drops in to my inbox that makes me laugh for hours, normally from a frustrated job applicant who's emotionally scarred from too many tortuous interviews. Here's one I received this morning:
"The interview... frankly I don't care anymore after flunking two first-rounds in 2 weeks. Wonder what happened to the times I could walk blindfolded into a final assessment centre. "Competency" questions have become so ridiculous they ask questions like "Tell me about a time where you had to fight off a feces-flinging 100 stone gorilla with your bare hands". Even bloody indiana jones couldn't answer that truthfully. And everything you say will be scribbled down by some guy with a barely indheligibbil accent. FFS instead of me dumbing down my words, just hand me the 3$@% paper and I'll write it down for you. Then you can award me an "Achievement Badge" for handwriting.
Tomorrow if I get another dumb-ass interviewer I'm going all out to have fun. For "Teamwork" I'm going to say how I slept with all 12 members of my team within 3 days of working on a project. That's right. Girls and boys. God help him if he asks me to elaborate on Problem-Solving Skills. And I'll make sure he gets every last detail on paper since he's obliged to do so.
I could go on and on but this thing is just going to come back to me one day. "
I'd be interested to know what other people think about "competency" questions and whether they really are a good indication of someone's ability to do a job???