What is a competency framework?

A structured description of the behaviours, skills and knowledge an organisation expects at each level — used for recruitment, promotion, development and performance management, so that the same standard applies across teams.

What it contains. A set of competencies, each defined and described at several levels of increasing scope. "Influencing" might run from communicating clearly within a team, through persuading across an organisation, to shaping external opinion — with observable behavioural indicators at each level rather than abstract adjectives.

Why organisations use it:

Consistency. Without one, "leadership potential" means whatever each manager thinks, and promotion depends on which manager you have.

Transparency. People can see what progression requires, rather than inferring it.

Fairer assessment, since defined criteria reduce the scope for unstructured impression — the evidence on structured versus unstructured assessment is clear that structure improves both fairness and predictive validity.

A common language for feedback and development.

Defensibility, where selection decisions are challenged.

How it is used in recruitment. Competency-based questions ask for specific past examples — "tell me about a time when..." — on the reasoning that past behaviour predicts future behaviour better than hypothetical answers do.

The STAR structure — Situation, Task, Action, Result — is the expected form of answer, and the Action is what is being assessed. Candidates routinely spend most of their answer on context and almost none on what they personally did, which is the single most common failure. "We" is the wrong pronoun in a competency answer.

Where frameworks go wrong:

Too many competencies, so nobody remembers them and assessment becomes a paperwork exercise.

Vague behavioural indicators that cannot be observed, which reintroduces the subjectivity the framework existed to remove.

Describing an idealised manager rather than what the organisation actually needs.

Encoding existing culture, so people who resemble current senior staff score well — which can entrench rather than reduce bias if the framework is not examined for it.

Becoming a compliance ritual disconnected from actual decisions.

Public sector frameworks — such as the Civil Service Success Profiles — are published, which makes preparing for those processes considerably more tractable.