What You Need to Know About Business

Asking Questions -- An Essential and Overlooked Step

Other articles:
Putting a Spin on Work Experience

[Chapter 20: continued from here]

The SITUATIONAL interview-"What would you do if ..."

The situational interview is a recently developed form of a structured interview. Essentially, these are just hypothetical questions-you are presented with a specific situation that you are likely to encounter on the job and asked how you would handle it. As with the highly structured interview, your answer may be compared to a series of benchmarks for each situation or it may be evaluated more generally.

If you've actually faced similar situations before, you can begin your answer with "Well, the way I have handled that before is to ...". In a pure situational interview it won't make any difference whether you talk about what you've actually done or what you imagine you would do. But many interviewers using hypothetical questions aren't following a strict situational interview evaluation procedure, and to them your answer may carry more weight if it's expressed as an actual experience.

A common reaction to such questions is to "fight the hypothetical" -- to ask the interviewer for details so you can give a more informed response. TRY NOT TO DO THIS. Your response will be far more impressive if you can just answer the question, qualifying your answer as you go. Instead of asking the interviewer to clarify the situation, outline the different actions you would take under different circumstances.

If you need clarification on some part of the question, you can ask. But too often, people try to squeeze more out of the interviewer until it becomes much easier to answer. That approach isn't likely to make much of an impression. It may be possible to keep asking for details until it becomes obvious what you should do under the hypothetical circumstances, but the interviewer isn't going to give you much credit for grasping the obvious.

When you answer hypothetical questions, mention any assumptions you're making in your answer. Then think if you'd go about things differently under different assumptions. Show that you can think through the situation and don't need to grovel for help.