Effective interviewing is a critical part of the hiring process, specifically because it enables you to know your candidates beyond their resume. This, in turn, lets you predict how well they’d handle their tasks, responsibilities, and even challenges that might arise in the role. Ultimately, it comes in quite handy for gauging job fit.
However, for your interviews to be effective, they must include situational interview questions. These questions are structured to empower you to assess how well your candidates can handle various scenarios relevant to the open role, giving you more control and confidence in your hiring decisions.
In this article, we will explore situational interview questions and why they are so important. We will also guide you on using these questions to find and hire ideal candidates for your company.
What are situational interview questions?
Situational interview questions are inquiries that assess a candidate’s ability to handle a specific situation stipulated within the question. These questions form a specific segment of structured interviews and focus on evaluating the candidate’s problem-solving skills.
Typically, situational interview questions describe a hypothetical scenario relevant to the job and ask the candidate how they would respond. In doing so, these questions can give the interviewer a clear picture of how quickly and attentively candidates can think on their feet to proffer solutions.
Situational interview questions help obtain responses that reveal how the candidates think in certain situations. As such, beyond problem-solving, these questions also evaluate the candidates’ decision-making and behavioral tendencies in a particular context.
Situational interview questions have a structure that first provides a clear and concise scenario using straightforward and understandable sentences. Then, a direct question follows to urge the candidate to give their response. The following are some examples of situational interview questions for various roles:
- For the role of graphics designer: Imagine you are working on a critical project with a rapidly approaching deadline, and you are behind on your task. What steps would you take to make sure you complete your task on time?
- For the role of a software developer: You’re working on a team project, and you were paired up with another developer who has written a code that conflicts with yours, causing integration issues. How would you handle this situation and still maintain your collaboration with your partner?
- For a sales representative: You’ve been working with a potential client for months. However, while your company has shown how well they can cater to their needs, they are hesitant to commit. How would you convert them into a loyal customer?
Situational interview questions are valuable in assessing a wide range of skills, depending on how well you craft the scenario. They can also be tailored to any role, making them highly adaptable.
What do situational interview questions tell you?
The main focus of situational interview questions is to tell you how your candidates would respond in specific situations. However, this interview technique has a lot more to bring to the table. In this section, we will explore some of these benefits, especially regarding hiring the perfect candidate.
1. Future behavior
Situational interview questions work by allowing the candidate to express how they’d react in various situations. This insight lets the interviewer compare the candidate’s responses to common challenges or experiences of prior employees in the role. From this comparison, the interviewer can assess whether or not the candidate’s response is the best one in the situation.
As a result, they can predict how well they’d respond to experiences faced in that role. Additionally, from the candidate’s responses, you can pick up clues about their personality, which you can apply to predict their future behavior, giving you more assurance about the future performance of your hires.
2. Decision-making capacities
Painting a difficult situation to a candidate, which requires them to make critical choices in their role, lets you see how effective their decision-making skills are. Moreover, there’s no limit to how creative you can be with the challenges as long as they’re relevant to the role.
As such, you can analyze their responses to see how well they can apply critical-thinking skills to handle even the worst-case scenarios.
3. Interpersonal relationships
With situational interview questions, you can craft your interview inquiries to paint scenarios that demand interaction with other employees or customers. Based on the candidates’ responses, you can tell how strong their interpersonal and communication skills are.
4. Adaptability and flexibility
Since you can create any scenario, you can test practically any skill using situational interview questions. With them, you can also determine how well the candidate can adapt to new changes and situations.
Ultimately, this evaluation technique allows recruiters to identify flexible candidates who can thrive in dynamic environments subject to change.
5. Cultural fit
You can tweak your questions according to past situations within your company that required employees to align their goals with the company’s. This allows you to test cultural fit and see if the candidate can fit into your company’s environment and whether their values align with yours.
What is the best time to use situational interview questions?
You can use situational interview questions at any point in the candidate evaluation process. However, they are most effective when validating your candidate’s skills, specifically their problem-solving and behavioral skills.
Here are some of the best times to use situational interview questions:
1. During the main interview phase: Whether you’re applying in-person or online interviews, you can integrate situational interview questions into the process. Applying the questions at this stage is best because it allows you to assess critical job skills while getting to know the candidates on a personal level.
2. In the application process: Including situational interview questions in the application process is an excellent screening practice. It helps you filter through applications from the beginning of your recruitment, saving time, effort, and resources by focusing on those who better understand your organization and the role.
While applying these questions at this stage, ensure that you do so moderately. This is because the application process should be seamless and quick so that the candidates have a great first experience with your company. So, it’s highly advisable to add only a few situational interview questions here and include them more comprehensively in your interviews.
3. During pre-employment testing: You can apply situational interview questions when using traditional methods like in-person exams or even online skill tests. You can either do this by creating a section for situational screening. Doing this allows you to test candidates for crucial skills and situational judgment simultaneously.
What are the shortfalls of relying on this method alone?
Although situational interview questions are reliable, relying solely on them to validate candidate skills isn’t ideal. This is because as effective as these questions are, they have their cons as well. Tag along as we discuss the shortfalls of relying on situational interview questions alone:
1. It can be time-consuming
Creating your situational interview questions requires time and effort, which might not be available after prior recruitment processes such as resume scanning. For context, a 2023 survey from Zippia says that a single corporate job opening receives around 250 resume applications. So, screening these applications alone can be time-consuming, especially if you want to check for fake employment references and confirm their skills.
Additionally, depending on how you craft the questions, it could take candidates longer to respond. So, you might only conclude very few screenings each day, which can delay the recruitment process.
2. Candidate responses might not translate into actual performance
In situational interviews or evaluations, it’s easy for candidates to say things that are different from what they can actually do. On the one hand, the candidate could give correct answers according to your standards and perform differently when hired.
On the other hand, some candidates may fail to portray their skills and personalities properly due to stress and pressure from the evaluation. In both cases, the candidates’ responses might not match their actions if hired.
3. It can be subjective
Evaluating responses to situational interview questions can be subjective, and you can observe this on a panel of interviewers. Different interviewers could have varying interpretations of what response would be best in the situation specified.
So, if one interviewer screens candidates based on their interpretation of a correct answer, another could use other criteria when evaluating other candidates in the same recruitment process. Consequently, without applying other methods to validate skills, inconsistency and hiring bias might arise in candidate evaluation.
A more complete way of evaluating candidates
Situational interview questions are undeniably a valuable addition to your candidate evaluation process. Imagine combining them with powerful technology to eradicate this technique’s shortfalls and streamline your entire hiring process.
That’s where Vervoe comes in. With this tool, you get the effectiveness of a scenario-based candidate evaluation process with little to no pitfalls. This platform is an AI-powered pre-employment testing solution that uses carefully designed tests to evaluate how fit a candidate is for a specific role at your company.
Vervoe comes with an assessment library with over 300 compliant and valid tests tailored to different roles. These tests come in video, text, and audio formats and comprise realistic job simulations that give the candidate a day-in-the-life experience of the role. Plus, they’re fully customizable, so you can tweak the questions to portray your company’s culture. As such, you can check for soft and hard skills, culture fit, and interpersonal skills.
You can also optimize Vervoe’s AI to recognize correct answers according to your company’s standards. This leaves no room for hiring bias or inconsistency in skill evaluation, as the platform uses the same metrics for all candidates.
Moreover, at the end of your skills testing process, the system automatically grades and ranks candidates based on their performance. This allows you to see the best-performing candidate at a glance. So, identifying talented candidates takes less time and effort.
Find the ideal candidate for the job with Vervoe
Hiring the perfect candidate is never a walk in the park. Thankfully, situational interview questions make the process much more effective. When implementing these questions through, it’s always best to use a more comprehensive approach to skill evaluation, such as Vervoe.
In addition to Vervoe’s features, it uses an intuitive interface to set up your assessments. You can also add your company’s logo and colors to the assessment to improve the candidates’ experience with your company.
Ready to hire your next star candidate with effective skill evaluation? Register for a free trial today and get started!
