Healthcare and life sciences employers often write job descriptions around functions: manage a service, support a study, analyse data, coordinate patients, maintain compliance or lead a team. Yet the work that determines whether those functions succeed usually happens between them. People interpret incomplete information, resolve handoffs, escalate concerns, adapt to changing priorities and keep accurate records while the day continues around them.

That “messy middle” is difficult to assess through a conventional interview. A candidate may have the right qualifications and relevant sector experience, but employers still need to understand how that person behaves when priorities conflict, instructions are unclear or another team depends on their work. Competency-based interviewing provides a practical way to examine those behaviours without relying on vague impressions or unstructured conversation.

Start with the work, not the person specification

A strong interview begins with a clear view of the role’s critical work. Before listing competencies, the hiring team should identify the situations in which performance matters most. These might include coordinating across departments, maintaining documentation, responding to a service disruption, explaining technical information to a non-specialist or making progress when a decision is delayed.

This exercise helps separate essential capabilities from attractive but non-critical preferences. It also produces a more realistic job description. Instead of describing an ideal candidate as “proactive,” “dynamic” or “a strong communicator,” the employer can explain what the person will need to do:

• Identify missing information before acting on a request.
• Make dependencies visible when work moves between teams.
• Raise a concern early and provide enough context for a decision.
• Adapt a plan while preserving required controls and documentation.
• Explain a process clearly to colleagues with different levels of technical knowledge.

These statements are more useful to candidates and easier for interviewers to assess consistently.

Choose a small set of observable competencies

Interview frameworks become unwieldy when they attempt to measure everything. Most roles need a focused set of four to six competencies linked directly to the work. The mix will vary, but healthcare and life sciences employers may consider the following:

Judgement and escalation

Can the candidate distinguish between an issue they can resolve independently and one that requires timely escalation? Listen for how they assess risk, gather relevant facts, document the situation and involve the appropriate person.

Coordination and handoff discipline

Many operational failures begin when ownership is assumed rather than confirmed. Ask how the candidate transfers work, checks understanding, tracks open actions and handles a missed dependency.

Adaptability with control

Healthcare work changes frequently, but flexibility does not mean abandoning process. Look for evidence that the candidate can adjust priorities while preserving appropriate approvals, records, communication and quality checks.

Evidence-based communication

Strong communication is more than confidence or fluency. Candidates should be able to tailor a message, separate facts from assumptions, explain uncertainty and make a clear request of the recipient.

Learning and improvement

Employers should explore how candidates respond to feedback, learn unfamiliar systems and turn recurring problems into better ways of working. This is particularly important when roles span technology, operations and professional practice.

Turn competencies into structured questions

Each competency should have a small number of questions that invite a specific example. “How do you handle pressure?” is too broad to produce comparable evidence. A better question asks about a defined situation and the candidate’s actions.

Useful prompts include:

• “Tell us about a time when two teams had different expectations of your work. How did you clarify ownership and reach an outcome?”
• “Describe a situation in which you received incomplete information but still needed to move a task forward. What did you check, and what did you communicate?”
• “Give an example of a change to a process or system that affected your work. How did you adapt while maintaining required controls?”
• “Tell us about a concern you escalated. What made you decide to raise it, and how did you present the information?”

Interviewers should ask follow-up questions about the candidate’s individual contribution, the evidence available at the time, the trade-offs considered and what happened next. This prevents the discussion from staying at the level of general principles or team achievements.

Use a scoring guide, not an impression

A scoring guide makes the interview more reliable and gives the panel a shared language. It does not need to be complicated. For each competency, define what limited, acceptable and strong evidence might look like.

For example, a candidate demonstrating sound escalation judgement might:

• Recognise the boundary of their authority rather than waiting until a problem becomes urgent.
• Gather relevant information without creating unnecessary delay.
• State the issue clearly, explain its significance and identify the decision or support required.
• Record or communicate the outcome so that responsibility and next steps are understood.

The panel should score each competency independently before discussing an overall recommendation. This reduces the risk that one impressive answer, a shared background or a confident presentation dominates the decision. It also helps identify where further evidence is needed.

Add a realistic work sample where appropriate

Past behaviour questions are useful, but some candidates have limited experience with the exact setting. A short, job-relevant exercise can show how they think without requiring unpaid project work. Examples include asking a candidate to prioritise a set of competing requests, review a fictional handoff, draft an escalation note or explain a process change to a mixed audience.

The exercise should reflect the role’s actual demands and be designed so that there is no need to disclose confidential information. Assess the reasoning process, clarity, assumptions and questions—not whether the candidate guesses a preferred answer immediately. Employers should provide the same instructions, time expectations and assessment criteria to every candidate.

Train the interview panel

A structured framework cannot compensate for an unprepared panel. Interviewers need guidance on asking consistent questions, probing respectfully, avoiding leading prompts and separating evidence from personal preference. They should also understand which topics are relevant to the role and which may create unfair or inappropriate comparisons.

Panel members should agree in advance who will ask each question, how notes will be recorded and how conflicting evidence will be handled. A brief calibration exercise using sample answers can reveal that interviewers interpret “strong communication” or “good judgement” very differently.

Make the process useful to candidates

Candidate experience is part of hiring quality. Employers can explain the interview structure in advance, identify the main competency areas and clarify whether there will be a work sample. This does not give away the assessment; it enables candidates to prepare relevant examples rather than guess what the panel wants.

Questions should also allow candidates to describe transferable experience. A professional moving from laboratory operations into clinical research, or from service delivery into a healthcare technology role, may have strong evidence of coordination and judgement without having held the exact job title before.

Review the framework after hiring

The interview should not be treated as a finished product. After several appointments, hiring teams can review whether the competencies predicted the work people actually perform. Were important capabilities missing? Did the questions favour polished storytelling over practical reliability? Are new starters struggling with expectations that were never assessed or explained?

Feedback from hiring managers, new employees and, where appropriate, colleagues who work closely with the role can improve the next recruitment round. The goal is not to create a perfect prediction of future performance. It is to make decisions more evidence-based, more transparent and more closely connected to the realities of healthcare work.

When employers hire for the work between the functions, they look beyond credentials and job titles without disregarding them. They assess how people think, communicate and act when the operating environment is complex. That produces better information for the hiring decision—and gives candidates a clearer opportunity to demonstrate the capabilities they will actually use.

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