Situational Interview

What a situational interview is

A situational interview (المقابلة الموقفية) is a hiring interview in which the candidate is presented with a situation of the kind expected in the job and is asked what the candidate would do in it. The answer is then assessed, preferably against a written scale prepared before any candidate is seen. The situation has not yet happened to the candidate, so the candidate describes an action intended rather than an event lived through.

The value of this interview lies in the fact that the situation has not occurred. It allows the interviewer to explore professional judgement when the candidate has no past to be asked about, or when the situation in question was never met in the candidate’s earlier work. Against that, it stops at a clear limit: the answer is an intention, not an action.

What a situational question looks like

A question has three parts: a specific situation, a constraint that makes it difficult, and a request for a decision. An example for a customer service job:

• A situational question. “A complaint arrives from an angry customer at the busiest hour, and the cause is an error in an invoice issued by a colleague. What do you do in the next hour?”
• The behavioural question set against it. “Tell me about a time you dealt with an angry customer. What did you do?”

The first asks for a plan for a situation that has not occurred, and the second asks for an event that did occur, with its details. The first suits someone looking for a first job, who has no event to draw on. The second suits someone with years of work behind them, who has something to draw out.

How a situational interview differs from the interviews and tools close to it

This interview is confused with neighbouring tools, and the line between them decides when each is used:

• The interview on past events. Behavioral interview questions ask the candidate to describe a situation that actually happened in earlier work, instead of asking what the candidate would do in a hypothetical one. They are the direct counterpart of the situational interview, and the difference is the direction of time: the past in the first, a supposed future in the second.
• Choosing among options that are shown. In a situational judgement test, a situation is presented with possible actions, and the candidate chooses among them according to instructions. The answer is then compared with a key prepared before the test is applied. In the situational interview the answer is open and produced by the candidate, and an assessor judges it against the scale.
• Actual performance. A work sample test is a short task taken from the job itself, which the applicant performs and does not describe. In the test the applicant works, and in the situational interview the candidate talks about work.
• Deliberate pressure. In a stress interview the interviewer deliberately creates discomfort in the candidate to see how the candidate behaves. A situational interview may be hard in the content of its situation, but the interviewer treats the candidate normally.

The situational interview is not a substitute for the structured interview, since the two describe different things. A structured interview describes how the interview is run: the same questions in the same order for every candidate, and an assessment scale fixed in advance. The situational interview describes the type of question, so an interview can be structured and its questions situational.

How a sound situation is built

A good situation is drawn from the work, not from imagination, and it meets certain conditions:

• Its source is the facts of the job. It is built from an analysis of what actually happens in the role, which is the work of job analysis: the systematic gathering of information about the tasks performed and the abilities they call for. A situation that resembles no real work measures the candidate’s ability to imagine rather than the candidate’s judgement at work.
• It is tied to a defined competency. It serves one specific competency among the competencies the job requires, described in observable behaviour, so that it is clear what the situation measures.
• It contains a real dilemma. Two acceptable courses pull against each other, and there is no plainly wrong answer set beside a plainly right one. A situation to which everybody knows the answer does not tell candidates apart.
• It asks for one decision. The candidate is asked to decide and to explain the reason, without listing everything that could be done.
• It holds back no information. The candidate knows what is needed in order to decide, since otherwise the question is about what the candidate cannot know.

Example: scoring two candidates on a scale of five

Suppose an interview for a customer service job has four situational questions, with a scale of five for each question whose levels were described in advance. Take the fourth question, the complaint one. A score of 1 goes to a candidate who ignores the complaint or passes it on without further action. A score of 3 goes to a candidate who contacts the customer and refers the matter to the specialist without a date. A score of 5 goes to a candidate who contacts the customer, names the person responsible, gives a date, records the case and reviews the cause of the error.

The first candidate scored 4, 3, 5 and 4, and the second scored 5, 5, 3 and 2. The first candidate’s total is 4 + 3 + 5 + 4 = 16 out of 20, which is 80%, and the second candidate’s total is 5 + 5 + 3 + 2 = 15 out of 20, which is 75%. The gap between the totals is five percentage points. What matters more is that the second candidate scored 2 on the fourth question, the one that goes to the heart of the job, and that the first candidate did not fall below 3 on any question. If the fourth question concerns what happens in the work every day, the total alone hides what a decision needs.

For that reason each assessor scores each question separately before seeing the views of the others, and the scores are combined afterwards. An assessor who rates the whole candidate on a general impression has fallen into the halo and horn effect: one positive impression of a person carrying over into the assessment of all the person’s other qualities, as when fluent speech persuades the assessor that the candidate’s judgement is sound in every situation.

How the levels of the scale are written

The top level is not described with the word “excellent”, which does not tell different assessors the same thing. It is described by the elements the answer contains, which can be counted: did the answer identify who bears responsibility? Did it mention a date? Did it consider the effect of the decision on another party? The lowest level is described by the same elements being absent: an answer with no decision, or with a decision that harms the customer or a colleague.

The scale also records what counts as a risky answer even when it is fluent, such as a candidate who ignores a party affected by the decision, or who proposes something that contradicts a declared policy of the organisation. These markers are written down before the interview, not after the first candidate is heard, so that they are not shaped to suit whoever impressed the assessor.

How the session itself is run

1. The situation is presented once, clearly. It is repeated to the candidate on request, and nothing is added to it for one candidate and not for another.
2. The candidate is given time to think. The same period for everyone, because a candidate who is asked without being given time is at an unfair disadvantage next to one who was given it.
3. The candidate is asked for the decision and its reason. An answer without a reason is not assessed.
4. Further questions are written in advance. They are of the kind that does not steer the answer, and they are asked of every candidate.
5. The answer is recorded in approximately the candidate’s words. It is then assessed after the question is finished, not while it is under way.

The limits of a situational interview

• The answer is an intention. The candidate says what the candidate wants said about them, and may do something else when the situation arises. It is therefore wise to pair this interview with another tool instead of using it alone.
• It can favour those who speak well. A candidate who composes an organised answer in two minutes may be better at speaking than at working. The scale limits this, because it assesses the content, not the style.
• Candidates can rehearse. A question known in advance can be practised before the interview. A situation built from the facts of one particular organisation is harder to rehearse than a general one.
• Further questions limit this. “What might stop you doing that?” and “What if the customer refuses that?” test whether the answer carries the mark of thought or of memorising.

When a situational interview is suitable

It suits a case where the role asks for something the candidate has not yet practised. Take a technical employee nominated for a first supervisory post who has never supervised anyone, and so has no event to relate about assessing a subordinate or distributing work. The situational question is what reveals how that employee thinks about it: how would the employee distribute an urgent task across an overstretched team, and what would the employee do when a colleague who ranked equally a week earlier disagrees?

It does not suit being used alone for a job whose applicants have years of directly related experience. With them it is possible to ask what actually happened, and the situational question remains a complement for what has not happened yet.

Where a situational interview sits in the hiring process

It does not suit initial screening, because a prescreening interview is a short conversation before the actual interviews, in which the questions have brief and certain answers and any one of them can change the course of the application. A situational question needs minutes for thinking and explaining, so its place is in the assessment interview.

The questions can be put in a session before a committee, which is a panel interview: one candidate before several interviewers in the same session. In that case each assessor writes down a score before the discussion, so that the first opinion does not pull the others along. If the job calls for tangible performance, a work sample test is added to the interview, because the situational interview does not take its place.

How a situational interview is reviewed after use

The questions are tried on imagined answers before they are used. If assessors differ over the score for the same answer, the problem lies in the description of the levels, not in the candidates. After use, the scores are compared between assessors, and an assessor who gives everyone high scores or everyone low scores is spoken to about the scale before the next interview.

Each situation is also examined on its own. A situation that draws the same answer from every candidate does not tell them apart and is replaced, and one that assessors score differently from one another is unclear and is rewritten. The situations used and their scales are kept with dates, so that when the role changes the situations change with it and none is left over from an earlier job.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.