WHO Behavioural Interview: Competencies & How to Answer

What a WHO behavioural interview actually involves

The World Health Organization, like most UN agencies, uses competency-based interviewing as its main method of assessing candidates beyond the CV. This typically means a panel (or, for some roles, a recorded/video screening stage) asking you to describe real past situations rather than hypothetical ones or technical trivia.

Panels are usually made up of the hiring manager, HR, and sometimes a technical expert or staff association representative. Questions are pre-agreed and scored against a rubric, so every candidate for that vacancy is asked broadly the same core questions and rated on the same competencies — this is standard UN system practice, not something specific or secret to WHO.

Because scoring is competency-based, vague or purely descriptive answers ('I'm a good communicator') score poorly. What scores well is a specific, verifiable example that shows the behaviour in action.

The core competencies WHO commonly assesses

WHO publishes its Global Competency Model, which groups expected behaviours into core competencies (expected of all staff) and, for more senior posts, managerial or leadership competencies. Exact competencies tested vary by vacancy notice, so always check the specific job posting — but these recur across most WHO roles.

• Communicating in a credible and effective way — clarity, tailoring messages to audience, listening
• Fostering integration and teamwork — working across teams, units, or cultures towards a shared goal
• Respecting and promoting individual and cultural differences — inclusive, unbiased collaboration
• Producing results — delivering quality work to deadlines despite constraints
• Building and promoting partnerships across the organization and beyond — working with external stakeholders, governments, or NGOs
• Creating an empowering and motivating environment (for managerial posts) — developing and motivating others
• Ensuring effective use of resources — prioritising, managing budgets or time under pressure
• Driving and managing change (for senior posts) — leading through ambiguity or organisational shifts

How to structure your answers: the STAR method

STAR is the standard framework competency panels expect, whether or not they name it explicitly. It keeps your answer concrete and time-efficient — both of which matter in a panel setting with a fixed number of minutes per question.

Situation: set the scene in one or two sentences — where, when, what was at stake. Task: state your specific responsibility or objective. Action: describe what YOU did, step by step — this is the longest part of your answer. Result: close with the outcome, ideally with a number, an evaluation, or a lesson learned.

• Situation — brief context, not a backstory
• Task — your specific role or goal, not the team's
• Action — what you personally did, in order
• Result — outcome, evidence, and what changed after

Worked example: 'Fostering integration and teamwork'

Question: 'Tell us about a time you had to work with colleagues from a different team or background to achieve a shared outcome.'

Situation: 'In my previous role coordinating a district health survey, our data team and the field operations team had conflicting priorities — data quality versus speed of collection.' Task: 'As the project lead, I needed to get both teams aligned on a single data collection protocol within one week, before fieldwork started.' Action: 'I organised a joint session where each team explained their constraints, then I drafted a compromise protocol that added one extra validation step but kept the original timeline. I circulated it for sign-off from both team leads before finalising.' Result: 'Fieldwork started on schedule, and the extra validation step cut post-collection data errors by roughly a third compared with our previous survey round — which the data team later adopted as standard practice.'

Notice the answer names the tension honestly, shows a specific action the candidate personally took, and ends with a measurable, checkable result — exactly what a competency scorer is listening for.

Common mistakes that cost marks

Most weak answers in competency interviews fail for the same small set of reasons, and they're easy to fix once you know what to watch for.

• Speaking about 'we' the whole way through, so the panel can't tell what you actually did
• Choosing an example that's too small or too old to feel credible for the seniority of the role
• Skipping the Result — leaving the panel to assume the outcome instead of stating it
• Rambling through Situation and Task for two minutes, then rushing Action and Result
• Giving a hypothetical ('I would...') instead of a real past example ('I did...')
• Reusing the same story for every competency — panels notice, and it suggests limited experience

Preparing in the days before your interview

Start by reading the vacancy notice's competency section closely — WHO job postings usually list the specific competencies being tested for that role, so treat that as your revision list rather than guessing generically.

Prepare four or five strong stories from your career that each demonstrate a different competency, and be ready to adapt the same story to slightly different angles if a panel asks a follow-up. Time yourself: most panel questions expect a 90-second to two-minute answer, so practise trimming your Situation and Task down and giving Action and Result the space they deserve.

Rehearsing out loud, under time pressure, is what actually improves delivery — reading notes silently doesn't translate to speaking fluently in the room. Tools like ScreenReady let you run a timed, one-way mock interview with AI feedback on pacing, structure, and clarity, which is a useful way to catch rambling or weak endings before the real panel does.