Page 158 - You're Hired! Interview Answers

Hypothetical questions non-ComPetenCY-BaSed QueStionS knowLedge-BaSed QueStionS

There are a lot of reasons why these are not good questions for an interviewer
to use, but they do still crop up. The main reasons why they are not very
effective are that:

n they can assess only your intentions, not your actual behaviour
n they play into the hands of people who are verbally fluent but who may not

actually possess the competencies under consideration.

So, what is the best way to handle this kind of question?

tell me what you would do if you saw a customer
abusing one of your staff.

The first step is to assess whether this is primarily a task-, thought- or people-
based question; in this instance it is almost certainly a people-based question
(though the intent of hypothetical questions can be hard to identify). A big
temptation when faced with this kind of question is to say ‘Well, it depends …’,
or to ask a lot of clarifying questions, such as:

n How angry are they?
n Are there other people around?
n What form is the abuse taking, is it verbal or physical?

These are all valid questions (and another good reason why hypothetical
questions don’t work very well – they are not clear enough), but they run the
risk of your frustrating the interviewer. It is better to give your answer based on
some sensible assumptions about the situation.

So you might answer as follows:

“Well, assuming the abuse was verbal, I would intervene, probably saying

something like ‘is there a problem?’ or ‘can I help?’ My aim would be to take

any heat out of the situation once I knew what the problem was.”

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