This is where the Critical Incident Method helps you; it is an important technique for all those who work with competencies. It leads via "critical incident situations" to a prioritization of competencies in a requirement profile (which is also called or role description).

In the criticial incident interview, you ask for situations relating to the position for which you are creating your role description.

Which situations are challenging for the position holder (i.e. not routine), in which are they really challenged? How should he or she behave in these situations?

In concrete terms, I recommend the following questions to work out critical incidents:

• Please describe a situation that is critical for the position holder. What is the situation: Participants, environment, special challenge?
• What behaviour does a very good (or ideal) position holder show in this situation? What exactly does he or she do?
• What should he or she not do in this situation?

Make sure that you receive concrete descriptions of the situation and the desired behaviour. You should collect several critical incidents - the more complex the position, the more.

Here are three examples of critical incidents.

The Executive Assistant

An assistant to the board of directors should keep her or his boss's back free and organise the short time well; that is clear.

But a really critical situation is this: a caller puts pressure on the assistant. He states that he is known to the boss and must speak to it immediately.

For the assistant, the task now is to find out in a short time whether the caller is really important for the board. Should the assistant give the caller an appointment, consult with the boss or friendly reject the caller?

The assistant has to decide how he/ she wants to deal with the caller by asking specific questions. It is important to speak to him in a friendly and binding manner.

It is possible that a caller simply wants to "pick up" information; the assistant must prevent this in any case. At board level, external information is handled by corporate communications, not by the board environment. After all, it could be a potential hijacker on the phone who wants to learn more about the habits of the board of directors and their family members.

On the basis of this "critical incident", three competencies can be identified for the role of assistant to the board of directors: oral communication skills, standing/self-confidence and discretion. Please select these competencies fort he role description.

The General Practitioner

There are many routine tasks in the work of a general practitioner. One of the tasks of a family doctor, for example, is to give patients tips on how to get rid of their flu as soon as possible. This is routine and not a critical incident.

A critical incident would be the following: a specialist or family doctor has had a series of laboratory tests carried out on a long-term patient. The laboratory results have arrived and the suspicion has been confirmed: the patient is very likely to have cancer. Now the patient has to go very quickly to a hospital for treatment.

This is a challenging situation (both medically and personally) for the doctor and thus a good example of a critical incident.

What would you expect from the doctor? Certainly, that he or she communicates clearly on the one hand, i.e. that he does not talk around the findings. Nevertheless, it is also desirable that the doctor proceeds with sensitivity and can put himself in the position of the patient who is hit by a stroke of fate. It would also make sense for the doctor to inform his practice team about the situation. Then the team knows that the patient needs further information and organisation after the conversation (a new appointment, a referral to a specialist hospital, perhaps it would be useful to call a taxi or a relative).

This situation, a good example for a critical incident. Derived competencies for the doctor's job profile: oral communication skills and professional empathy. To this end, he leads his practice team, which means that disciplinary leadership is also a core competence.

The senior physician in a hospital

Let us consider the requirements for a senior physician in a hospital..

Since she works in an academic teaching hospital, one critical incident is as follows: she must repeatedly explain a patient case to different students in understandable way. The teaching university is becoming increasingly international, so it is important to take the cultural background of the students into account. For example, some students from cultures rarely ask questions out of respect for authority.

In this example again, your derived competencies from this critical incident for the senior physician are: oral communication skills, didactic competency (i.e. teaching competence) and intercultural competency.

The examples of general practitioners and senior physicians also show that not all physicians are the same. Critical situations help you to choose the necessary competencies for each role.

You should collect three, preferably five such situations for the requirement profile. If you do not know the position well, ask the decision-maker. Or get in touch with us; we have described hundreds of job profiles and know the requirements.

You can use the tool whenever you need a requirements profile/role description or a role description plus selection tools. Once you have created your role description, please pay the indicated amount by bank transfer

As soon as we have received your payment, we will send you the paid selection instruments as PDF files via e-mail.

With Fairselection you can create a role description for a position and, based on this, you can download a suitable telephone interview and a full interview guideline as final selection step.

The role description contains all the personal, social and entrepreneurial competencies that are decisive for success in the role; you select these competencies from suggestions made by Fairselection according to your priorities.

You can create your first role description/requirement profile on a trial basis; for this purpose we provide a freemium version for you. Please use the button "Start now" or "Register" on the start page https://fairselection.info/ .

Select "Create new document" and choose the free basic package; enter your data for the role description and complete the role description.

The freemium version offers you a role description with competencies, but without detailed behavioural anchors. However, you can convert a freemium role description into a complete role description with all behavioural anchors at any time. To do so, go to "My documents" and choose the professional version.

The tool will guide you through some additional questions that are necessary for a complete role description.

Plesas note: non-completed role description will be deleted after 30 days.

Your personnel selection is always as good as your role description; it is the linchpin of unerring selection.

First of all, you should be able to clearly describe which skills and which personal, social and entrepreneurial competencies you are looking for. You can then use Fairselection to check which of the competencies an applicant brings to the table.

Clearly: it is crucial to select the right competencies for a job profile. Fairselection supports you with various questions when you create your job profile.

Many requirement profiles are more of a problem than a solution: they are not very precise and overloaded, especially when it comes to personal, social and entrepreneurial competencies. Occasionally, one gets the impression that someone has simply put together a colourful list of desired competencies, ranging from the ability to work under pressure to teamwork skills.

Often it is like this: the author of the requirement profile was unable or unwilling to decide which competencies are really important for the position. He then writes a lot of more or less colorfully mixed competencies in the role description.

However, if the number of competencies is too high or if the competencies are too broadly scattered, hardly anyone can meet the exaggerated requirements. The search for a superman or a superwomen starts - with little chance of success.

To sum up: an overloaded role description is not a good starting point for a professional staffing process.

In Fairselection, the number of competences per role description is limited. The limitation is based on extensive data analysis of requirement profiles. We evaluated more than hundreds of requirement profiles for Fairselection.

Before you complete your role description, Fairselection will ask you to prioritise the selected competencies and thus reduce the number of competencies.

A well elaborated software like Fairselection should please prospective customers and bring benefits to our customers. But every now and then there are visitors who are not interested in using it. A registration therefore protects our work from unauthorized access.

We use your registration data only within the framework Fairselection and the data protection policy – this we promise.

We thank you for your understanding.

If you have decided to purchase a role description or a role description plus selection tools, please start with the button "Start Now".

Select the package you need on the start page.

After registering or logging in, work your way through the questions until you reach the "Buy" button. Afterwards you will see our bank details. Please pay the indicated amount by bank transfer

As soon as we have received your payment, we will send you the paid selection instruments as PDFs files via e-mail

Do you have further questions? Please contact Regina Bergdolt on bergdolt@fairselection.info .

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