« In international recruitment, one of the most common mistakes is to place too much importance on the job titles listed on a CV.
Managing Director, Sales Director, Chief Financial Officer, Project Director, Country Manager, Business Development Director, Head of Operations: these titles provide an initial indication of a candidate’s career path, but they do not always reveal precisely what the candidate has actually achieved.
The same job title can conceal very different levels of responsibility.
A Managing Director may have led an organisation of 15 people or a subsidiary employing several hundred people. A Sales Director may have inherited an existing client portfolio or built a market from scratch. A Project Director may have supervised investments worth a few million euros or managed complex infrastructure projects worth several hundred million.
For Phénicia Conseil, an international recruitment firm operating particularly across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, the real question is therefore not simply:
“What position did you hold?”
The more important question is:
“What did you actually achieve in that position?”
This is precisely the purpose of competency-based interviewing. »
-
What is a competency-based interview?
A competency-based interview is a recruitment technique designed to identify concrete evidence of a candidate’s skills through real professional situations they have experienced.
The principle is simple: a competency becomes far more meaningful to a recruiter when it can be linked to an action, a responsibility and a measurable result.
Instead of asking:
“Are you a good manager?”
the recruitment consultant might ask:
“Tell me about a situation in which you had to take over a struggling team. What was the context? What decisions did you make? What results did you achieve?”
Instead of asking:
“Do you have business development skills?”
the consultant will seek to understand:
“What revenue did you generate? Over what period? In which markets? With what team? What was your personal contribution?”
This approach fundamentally changes the recruitment interview.
Candidates no longer simply describe what they believe they can do.
They demonstrate what they have already done.
This distinction is particularly important when recruiting international executives.
Job titles are not standardised from one company to another, and even less so from one country to another.
A Country Manager in one organisation may have full autonomy over financial results, teams, business development and investments.
In another company, the same title may refer primarily to a representative or commercial role, with strategic decisions made at headquarters.
The title alone is therefore not enough.
International recruiters need to identify the candidate’s actual scope of responsibility.
| CV Element | What Should Be Verified |
| Job title | Actual level of responsibility |
| Management | Number and profile of employees managed |
| Revenue | Actual scope of responsibility |
| Budget | Level of autonomy and accountability |
| Business development | Results personally achieved |
| Project management | Size, complexity, deadlines and results |
| International experience | Responsibilities actually exercised in each country |
This approach makes it possible to move from a declarative CV to a demonstrated track record.
-
Look for achievements rather than statements
CVs frequently include expressions such as “team management”, “business development”, “strategic leadership”, “project management” or “change management”.
These expressions are useful, but they remain insufficient to accurately assess a candidate.
Take “business development”, for example.
It can cover very different realities.
Did the candidate develop an existing portfolio?
Open a new country?
Build a sales team?
Win major accounts?
Respond to international tenders?
Increase margins?
Grow revenue?
Develop a distributor network?
Recruiters must therefore turn every claimed competency into a search for evidence.
This is what makes competency-based interviewing so powerful.
One of the most widely used methods for structuring behavioural interviews is based on four dimensions: Situation, Task, Action and Result.
The Situation establishes the context.
The Task clarifies the candidate’s responsibility.
The Action identifies what the candidate personally did.
The Result measures the impact of their intervention.
Consider an example.
A candidate states:
“I turned around a struggling subsidiary.”
The statement is interesting, but insufficient.
The recruiter must investigate further.
What was the subsidiary’s financial situation?
How many employees did it have?
What was your personal responsibility?
What decisions did you make?
What changes did you implement?
Over what period?
What results did you achieve?
The results can then become much more concrete: improved margins, reduced costs, increased revenue, lower employee turnover, shorter delivery times or expansion into new markets.
The candidate’s account becomes verifiable and comparable.
-
Measure the depth of a competency
Not all competencies are demonstrated at the same level.
A candidate may have been exposed to an issue without actually managing it.
They may have participated in a project without being responsible for it.
They may also have personally led a complex transformation.
At Phénicia Conseil, competency-based interviews can therefore assess several levels of proficiency.
| Level | Meaning |
| 1/5 | Theoretical knowledge |
| 2/5 | Participation |
| 3/5 | Independent implementation |
| 4/5 | Management of complex situations |
| 5/5 | Demonstrated expertise and significant results |
This approach helps avoid a common confusion between “having participated in” and “having led”.
Management is probably one of the competencies most frequently claimed on executive CVs.
But what does “managing a team” actually mean?
How many employees?
Direct or indirect management?
What types of profiles?
Across how many countries?
Was the team already in place?
Did the candidate build it?
Did they recruit their team members?
Did they have to manage a restructuring?
How did they deal with underperformance?
What was the employee turnover rate?
How did they develop their teams?
A competency-based interview transforms a general statement into an in-depth analysis of leadership capabilities.
When recruiting international executives, this level of analysis is essential.
-
Assessing business development
For a Sales Director or Business Development Manager, the assessment must also be fact-based.
Simply stating “business development in West Africa” is not enough.
Which countries?
What was the starting position in the market?
What was the initial revenue?
What was the revenue at the end of the period?
Which clients were acquired?
Which contracts were won?
What margins were generated?
What sales team was built?
Which results can be directly attributed to the candidate?
This approach makes it possible to distinguish between simply being present in a market and having a genuine ability to develop it.
Competency-based interviewing takes on an additional dimension in international recruitment.
Job titles can vary considerably between France, Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Organisational structures differ.
Company sizes vary.
Levels of autonomy also differ.
Comparing two candidates solely on the basis of their job titles can therefore lead to misleading conclusions.
An international recruitment firm must reconstruct the candidate’s actual professional scope.
This is particularly important when recruiting Managing Directors, Country Managers, Chief Financial Officers, Sales Directors, Project Directors, engineers and senior executives.
-
Technical skills are only part of the equation
In international recruitment, Phénicia Conseil can assess several families of competencies.
| Dimension | Indicative Weight |
| Professional/technical expertise | 25% |
| Demonstrated achievements | 20% |
| Management | 15% |
| International adaptability | 15% |
| Intercultural skills | 10% |
| Leadership and communication | 10% |
| Motivation and career-project consistency | 5% |
This framework illustrates an essential principle: candidate assessment cannot be based solely on academic background or job titles.
Recruitment means understanding what candidates can do, what they have already achieved and under what conditions they will be able to reproduce or adapt those competencies.
Certain questions make it possible to move quickly beyond general statements.
“What professional achievement are you most proud of?”
“What exactly was your role?”
“What was the starting point?”
“What decisions did you personally make?”
“What obstacles did you encounter?”
“What measurable results did you achieve?”
“How many people did you directly manage?”
“What budget did you actually manage?”
“What difficult decision did you have to make?”
“What mistake did you make, and what did you learn from it?”
“If I contacted your former manager, how would they describe your contribution to this result?”
The sequence of questions is essential.
An interesting answer should lead to another question.
It is often by exploring the details that recruiters understand a candidate’s true level of competency.
-
Collective result or personal contribution?
This is a fundamental distinction when assessing executives.
Candidates naturally use the word “we”.
“We increased revenue.”
“We opened three countries.”
“We restructured the organisation.”
“We won this contract.”
The recruiter must then identify the individual contribution.
“What exactly was your role in achieving this collective result?”
The purpose of this question is not to minimise teamwork.
Quite the opposite.
A strong leader knows how to recognise the contribution of their colleagues.
However, the recruitment firm must be able to identify the candidate’s personal added value.
A competency-based interview should not focus exclusively on successes.
Professional failures can sometimes be even more revealing.
Asking a candidate:
“Tell me about a professional decision that did not produce the expected result.”
makes it possible to assess several dimensions simultaneously:
The ability to acknowledge a mistake.
Accountability.
Analytical ability.
The ability to learn.
Humility.
The ability to correct a decision.
When recruiting international executives, this capacity to learn from experience is particularly important.
New environments inevitably generate unexpected situations.
-
Competencies and potential are not the same
Competency-based interviews primarily analyse what candidates have already demonstrated.
But recruitment must also take their potential into account.
Candidates will not necessarily have already encountered every situation they will face in their next position.
Recruiters must therefore combine an assessment of past achievements with learning ability, adaptability, motivation and development potential.
This is particularly important when a company intends to move a candidate into a higher level of responsibility.
Past experience provides evidence.
Potential provides a perspective on the future.
An effective recruitment process must analyse both.
The CV remains an essential tool.
It provides an overview of the chronology of a career, companies, positions, sectors and principal responsibilities.
But it should be considered the starting point of the analysis, not its conclusion.
Two apparently similar CVs may conceal very different levels of competency.
Conversely, a candidate with a less prestigious job title may have assumed significantly greater responsibilities than someone with a more impressive title.
This is precisely why competency-based interviews add genuine value to recruitment.
-
Europe–Africa: compare competencies, not titles
In recruitment between Europe and Africa, this approach becomes particularly relevant.
International companies need to compare candidates who have worked in very different environments without artificially favouring one career path simply because the job titles or company names are more familiar.
An executive who has worked in Casablanca, Abidjan, Dakar or Douala may have developed significant responsibilities in particularly complex environments.
Likewise, a European executive may possess highly relevant expertise for an African project without having previously worked on the continent.
Competency-based interviewing brings the assessment back to what really matters:
What did you achieve?
In what context?
With what responsibilities?
What difficulties did you face?
And what results did you deliver?
This approach promotes a more objective assessment of international talent.
-
The role of Phénicia Conseil
For Phénicia Conseil, the value of an international recruitment firm does not simply lie in identifying candidates who match the keywords in a job description.
It lies in understanding what is behind the CV.
Our consultants therefore seek to analyse professional experience, actual levels of responsibility, achievements, technical expertise, management capabilities, intercultural skills, international adaptability and motivation.
This methodology is particularly important for international recruitment between Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
In Morocco, Phéniciafrica, Phénicia Conseil’s subsidiary based in Casablanca, also makes it possible to combine in-depth knowledge of the local market with international recruitment expertise.
The objective remains the same: to present companies not simply with CVs that correspond to a job title, but with candidates whose competencies and achievements have been assessed against the actual requirements of the position.
The evolution of recruitment techniques is gradually leading companies and Human Resources departments to move beyond an essentially declarative assessment of applications.
A job title creates an impression.
An achievement provides evidence.
A stated responsibility attracts attention.
A contextualised result makes assessment possible.
A claimed competency attracts interest.
A demonstrated competency enables informed decision-making.
This is the philosophy behind competency-based interviewing.
In international recruitment, where career paths, companies, professional cultures and job titles can differ significantly, this methodology becomes particularly relevant.
The best candidate is not necessarily the person whose CV contains the most prestigious job title.
It is the candidate whose experience demonstrates the competencies required to succeed in the role they will be entrusted with.
For Phénicia Conseil, this approach reflects one of our core convictions in international recruitment:
Do not recruit a title. Understand a career path, verify competencies and identify proven achievements.
Recent Comments