How to Run a Competency Assessment: A Step-by-Step Guide

Targets show what an employee achieved; competencies show how they achieved it. If two people hit the same sales target but one shares knowledge with the team while the other leaves everyone to fend for themselves, their long-term contribution will be very different. A competency assessment makes that difference visible.

Many well-intentioned competency reviews, however, quickly become a box-ticking exercise because of vague wording and forms where everyone gets the same score. The steps below help you build a process whose results you can actually use for development decisions.

Preparation: framework, questions, weights and relationships

The first four steps are groundwork to finish before any review begins. Time spent here pays off in results you can trust.

1. Build your competency framework

A competency framework is a list that describes, in a shared language, the behaviours your organisation values. It is usually split into three groups:

• Core competencies: expected of everyone, such as ownership, collaboration and customer focus.
• Leadership competencies: expected of people who manage teams, such as developing others, decision-making and delegation.
• Functional competencies: technical skills specific to a role or department.

It is tempting to make the framework long, but the more questions each rater faces, the lower the quality of the answers. A small number of well-defined competencies usually gives more meaningful results.

2. Write behavioural questions

Asking raters to score an abstract notion like "communication skills" means everyone scores against their own definition. Instead, break each competency down into observable behaviours:

• "Listens in meetings and asks questions without interrupting."
• "Shares important updates with the right people in writing and on time."
• "Focuses on the issue, not the person, when there is disagreement."

To discourage mechanical answers, you can phrase some items negatively. In HibritİK such items are reverse-scored in the calculation once flagged. See our article on weighting in 360-degree feedback for details.

Define the rating scale in behavioural terms. Just as important as the questions is what each score means. A "3" can mean "solid" to one rater and "mediocre" to another. A short behavioural description for each level narrows that gap. For "ownership", a low level might read "completes tasks only when reminded", a middle level "completes assigned tasks on time", and a high level "spots problems, proposes solutions unprompted and follows them through". Keeping these descriptions next to the form helps managers who are rating for the first time.

3. Set the weights

Not every competency is equally important. Customer focus may matter most for a customer service team, analytical thinking for an R&D team. Weighting competencies makes the result reflect your organisation's priorities. In HibritİK competencies are defined with weights and questions, and leadership competencies can be restricted to managers only.

4. Set up rater relationships

Deciding who rates whom is the most critical and most overlooked step. A manager-only model is quick but relies on a single perspective. A multi-rater model brings in managers, direct reports and peers.

Points to watch:

• Peer raters should be people who genuinely work with the employee.
• Assigning too many reviews to one person leads to fatigue and poorer scores.
• Announce the weights set for manager, direct report and peer relationships in advance.
• Hide rater names where needed to encourage honest feedback.

In HibritİK's 360-degree evaluation feature, relationship weights are defined separately for each review period.

5. Run the assessment

1. Brief raters before starting the period: purpose, timeline and anonymity rules.
2. Let raters complete reviews on the web or in the mobile apps.
3. Monitor completion and send a reminder before the deadline.
4. Once results are in, schedule a one-to-one conversation with each employee.

In the one-to-one, rather than reading out every score, focus on the two or three strongest and weakest competencies. Asking whether the scores match the employee's own view turns a one-way briefing into a two-way discussion. If raters left comments, summarise them without revealing identities and try to link each one to a concrete behaviour.

6. Link results to training needs

The real value of a competency assessment lies in turning low-scoring areas into concrete development steps. HibritİK's training needs report, one of its success reports, shows which employees need support in which areas. Export it to Excel and use it as input for your training plan.

Planned trainings can then be recorded with their participants in the training management of the Corporate Services module, with calendar invitations shared as .ics files. That way the question "we ran the review, then what?" has a documented answer.

Make development plans personal

The training needs report is a strong starting point for group training plans, but not every development need is met in a classroom. Some competencies grow by working alongside an experienced colleague, some by taking on a new responsibility, others through regular feedback. Choosing one or two priority areas with the employee in a one-to-one, agreeing the right method and reviewing the same competency score together next period turns the assessment into a cycle. You can also tie a development area to a measurable target, for example completing a specific certification programme during the period as a target card.

Common mistakes

• Scoring competencies by name only, without defining them.
• Using the same form for every role.
• Using results only for pay decisions and never turning them into development plans.
• Skipping the one-to-one conversation after the review.

Competency assessment with HibritİK

Competency definitions, weights, multi-rater relationships and the training needs report all work together in HibritİK's Performance Management module. Start your 14-day free trial to set up your process with your own data.