COMPETENCY-BASED RECRUITING: GS-0511-14 Audit Manager

By Ms. Christina A. Cheman, Chief, Human ResourcesOctober 29, 2020

COMPETENCY-BASED RECRUITING: GS-0511-14 Audit Manager

The following competencies are a product of a series of agency efforts by employees and subject matter experts to identify the critical knowledge and skills to successfully perform in the position of Auditor, GS-0511-14. Deploying a competency-based recruiting approach, these competencies will be reviewed and assessed through a combination of tools including USA Staffing, internal agency evaluation criteria, and standardized interview and reference checking questions to select the best qualified and most highly competent candidates. Applicants should address these competencies where appropriate and to a fitting extent in their resume and application materials.

 Leadership Competencies (Weight: 30%)

 1.    Leadership:  Interacts with others to influence, motivate, and challenge them.

2.    Team Building:  Inspires, motivates, and guides others towards goal accomplishments. Consistently develops and sustains cooperative working relationships. Encourages and facilitates cooperative working relationships.  Encourages and facilitates cooperation within the organization and with customer groups. Fosters commitment, team spirit, pride, trust. Develops leadership in others through coaching, mentoring, rewarding and guiding employees.

3.    Teaching Others:  Helps others learn through formal or informal methods; identifies training needs; provides constructive feedback; coaches others on how to perform tasks; acts as a mentor.

4.    Self-Management: Sets well-defined and realistic personal goals; displays a high level of initiative, effort, and commitment towards completing assignments in a timely manner; works with minimal supervision; is motivated to achieve goals; demonstrates responsible behavior.

5.    Influencing and Negotiating: Persuades others and develops networks and coalitions. Gains cooperation from others to obtain information and accomplish goals. Negotiates to find mutually acceptable solutions and builds consensus through give and take.

6.    Decision Making:  Specifies goals and obstacles to achieving those goals, generates alternatives, considers risks, and evaluates and chooses the best alternative in order to make a determination, draw conclusions, or solve a problem.

Professional Competencies (Weight: 20%)

1.    Diligence: Thorough and conscientious when performing work, such as editing; catching the avoidable; including complete, relevant, and accurate data; meeting milestones; and prioritizing resources.

2.    Teamwork:  Encourages and facilitates cooperation, pride trust and group identity; fosters commitment and team spirit; works with others to achieve goals.

3.    Written Communication: Expresses facts and ideas in writing in a clear, convincing and organized manner.

4.    Oral Communication: Comfort with public speaking. Ability to make clear and convincing oral presentations to individuals or groups using appropriate diction (choice and pronunciation of words). Ability to facilitate an open exchange of ideas and fosters an atmosphere of open communication.

5.    Project Management: Knowledge, capabilities, and practices associated with formulating, planning, implementing, managing, tracking, and evaluating work and its associated requirements and risks—ranging from one-time projects to program-level work. Critical abilities are to define customer and stakeholder needs and constraints, reduce ambiguity in objectives, develop and manage an efficient project organizational structure, and apply system architecture principles to develop and manage technical requirements in order to achieve the appropriate balance between resources, schedule, and technical requirements. Includes knowledge associated with system architecture, finance, budgeting, risk assessment, schedule, configuration management, contract technical management, and project controls.

Technical Competencies (Weight: 30%)

1.    Elements of Finding and Recommendation:  Ability to fully develop and identify condition (problem or material weakness), root cause, effect, and recommendations addressed to the appropriate activity that can fix the problem.

2.    Criteria for Audit Evidence:  Knowledge of the criteria (sufficient and appropriate) for audit evidence.

3.    Audit Programs: Knowledge of principles used in developing audit programs for audit execution during financial and performance audits (i.e., steps/tests designed to measure condition, criteria, cause, effect; and to develop recommendations and estimated time requirements).

4.    Audit Reporting: Ability to incorporate sufficient details to support full condition, cause, effect, conclusions, and recommendations. Application of appropriate report format with required administrative information. Appropriate cross-referencing to working papers and final report package.

5.    Critical Thinking: Skilled interpretation and evaluation of observations, communications, information, and argumentation to come to a reasonable conclusion. Includes asking questions, analyzing assumptions and bias, avoiding emotional reasoning, distinguishing between fact and opinion, and considering other interpretations.