UPDATE: This type of interview is no longer part of the EPSO selection process.
The Competency-based Interview (CBI) is a “structured” interview. This means that the questions are pre-defined and the assessors have to stick to them. Besides some follow-up questions, they cannot ask you anything else than what is in their scenario of the interview.
The CBI is “competency-based”, meaning that what the assessors are interested in is your behaviour under pre-defined circumstances (anchors) in your working environment. The main difference with the other exercises is that – during the CBI – they are trying to understand how you behaved in the past, by listening to “stories” you tell them from your own, personal history. In the other exercises your behaviour is observed “in situ”, in the CBI you tell them what you did, and how you did it. It may happen that your communication competency is also observed during the CBI. There will be no specific questions, but during the exercise you will be observed very carefully, and the assessors will give you a score for this competency, based on what they heard and saw during the interview.