Often, when selecting an applicant, it turns out that the candidate has no experience for a vacancy. To assess its potential, use a situational interview. A case interview allows you to find out the degree of aggressiveness or conflict of the applicant, the tendency to redirect responsibility, because when choosing an answer, the specialist relies on his preferred model of behavior in a stressful situation.
Unfortunately, this also has disadvantages. So, often templates for such interviews can be found on the Internet, which is why the applicant, having spent time on, comes already knowing how to answer. How to competently conduct a situational interview, and what should be remembered when compiling it?
What is a situational interview?
A situational interview is a method of conducting, during which the applicant is offered a simulated situation with a designated problem, and the applicant must find an independent solution or choose one of the prepared options. This is far from being a novelty in recruitment, the method is widely used in an independent version or in a complex of a standard biographical interview.
It is believed that this type of interview significantly reduces the possibility of socially desirable decisions and gives a real forecast of the degree of compliance of the applicant with the core competency profile.
Evaluation is carried out according to the evaluation criteria and professional profile. In the course of making a decision, they do not always evaluate their correctness (such a decision may not exist in a particular case).
The main thing is to understand to what extent the knowledge and personality traits of a future colleague can be in demand for this organization and vacancy.
What does an employer evaluate when conducting a case interview:
- Professionalism.
- The ability to get rid of problems.
- Thinking
- Creativity.
- Stress resistance.
Conditionally, cases are divided into groups:
- To test the specific skills of the applicant.
- To clarify the values and views of the applicant.
- To clarify the patterns of behavior and individual qualities of the candidate's personality.
What is a situational interview - watch the video.
In what cases is the express method used and what are its problems?
It is highly likely that you will encounter an interview where you are asked to present a problem situation and find its solution in the following cases:
- If the applicant needs communication skills (consulting, marketing, sales, business analysis, technical support) in their future job.
- If decisions have to be made individually (designer-layout).
- If the candidate is applying for a leadership position.
- If the company has its own strict corporate culture.
The situational interview is never used for interviews with young professionals without work experience, as well as in the case when mass recruitment is carried out.
The main issues of the case interview can be summarized as follows:
- How to write case studies and conduct interviews.
- How to evaluate decisions and what to look for additionally.
- What are the limitations of this technique.
How are cases compiled?
Professionally prepared case studies are the key to this type of interview, otherwise the chance of a rehearsed answer will be as high as a simple “Why did you leave your previous job?” or "Where do you see yourself in our company in 5 years."
Come up with original terms without using banal cases like “how to sell snow to Eskimos”. If there is no opportunity for modeling a tool adapted to its conditions, it is better to refuse this method, since all its advantages will be nullified.
Topics for creativity when compiling exclusive cases:
- Real cases in the work of the company.
- Help colleagues in a similar position.
- Professional organizations of specialists.
Can complicate cases with a lack or excess of initial conditions, to find out:
- The activity of the applicant: questions for clarification, clarification of details, clarification of the situation.
- Responsibility level: whether he himself admits that there is too much (or little) information.
- Possession of the “subject”: if a potential employee does not have professional experience and knowledge, it will not be easy to navigate and quickly understand the situation.
Put in cases several options for the correct results, to assess the flexibility of the applicant's thinking and his willingness to work under various scenarios.
Introduce a conflict of values into the situation (an option is decency and profit in business), where the choice of the applicant will determine his motivation, and the lack of a ready-made answer and the inability to navigate the company's values will reduce the possibility of adjustment.
Offer to the applicant cases unfamiliar to him from previous work. This method gives the recruiter maximum information, since the applicant will not be able to rely on his own experience.
Do not use the situational interview as the only method of assessing the applicant, but check your guesses with other tools. The diversity of methods will greatly reduce the likelihood of error.
How to evaluate solutions?
Cases with prepared correct answers.
Cases, in principle, cannot have the correct answer (it is important to determine the criteria of the company - for one, the creativity of the applicant is important, for the other - the sequence of presentation, for the third - the internal focus of control; each criterion must be given a specific weight of importance and take into account points in the assessment).
When using any method, be sure to pay attention to:
- activity of the applicant;
- degree of constructiveness of answers;
- non-standard thinking;
- number of options developed;
- speed reaction.
The entire list will give a picture of a person who meets or does not meet the voiced requirements for applicants and be a reliable tool for making the right choice.
Disadvantages and advantages of the technique
Any situation that is modeled for an interview far from reality(anxiety of the applicant, insufficient time at the interview with a large number of candidates, the desire to appear better). All this can only give information about the intended steps, and not guaranteed behavior in reality. True competencies and personality characteristics remain inaccessible. It is also necessary to take into account the candidate's tendency to inadequate self-perception (many are sure that in case of fire they are ready for a feat to save people, but in life everything turns out the other way around). Do not exclude the fact that the applicant may deliberately give out false arguments, hiding significant facts.
Limited use way. There are situations when it is not worth modeling cases to test professionalism ─ lawyers, HR inspectors are assessed by a professional, and this is a completely different way of assessing.
Candidate preparedness. There are many cases with ready-made transcripts in the worldwide network and thematic literature, and they are available not only to personnel officers. So it is quite realistic for an inquisitive applicant to prepare for a meeting with a potential employer. Even if he prepares non-standard cases, they are then replicated on specialized sites, which means that you can forget about the spontaneous answers of potential employees.
Human able to change. The applicant is a living organism capable of changing the model of behavior, developing skills and abilities, he may experience a reassessment of values and worldview. In this situation, it is more important what the candidate will be tomorrow.
Adaptation to working conditions. The applicant's behavior in a previous job may be determined by the "rules of the game" of the company, and not his own. With a change in the environment and the specifics of the enterprise, the employee will behave differently.
All applicants are provided with one interview material, this helps to compare answers and make the right choice.
The objectivity of the applicant's assessment is relatively high, since the degree of correspondence between the applicant's answer and the prepared correct version of the company is determined.
Significant reliability, as real working conditions are simulated in the interviews.
Applicants understand the situation and the requested information, this increases the reliability of the response and demonstration of behavior patterns.
The express method used by many domestic and foreign recruiting companies allows you to quickly make a decision on a specific candidate, but a 100% guarantee can only be achieved with an integrated approach using everything from resumes to situational interviews.
In conclusion, watch another video dedicated to this type of interview.
Case interview
Recently, a technique for evaluating candidates, known as case interviews, has become widespread.
You may be asked to prove yourself in a hypothetical situation, evaluate it, describe your behavior and effective solutions. The case interview has a number of features and advantages over traditional methods of assessing candidates, the main of which is a reduction in the risk of receiving a socially desirable answer. In addition, cases help demonstrate not only your important professional skills, but also motivation, honesty, and responsibility. The meaning of the case interview is that the employer understands how much the decisions given by the candidate coincide with those made by them.
Case example: “You are a sales manager, you have closed a deal for a million dollars with post factum payment, but the goods are out of stock. What will you do?"
The candidate begins to tell how he would behave. Perhaps he would start looking for a product from competitors? Would you agree on a payment plan? Would you take a deposit? Would you go to the logistics department to swear? Would you take out a loan to buy a product?
The employer at this time understands whether a person suits him or not.
There is no universal answer, this is the beauty of a case interview. There is an answer that suits the company or not. You will not be able to sell yourself to a company if your behavior does not match what the employer needs. You do not need to sell yourself to an employer for whom your decisions will be unacceptable, you need to find an employer who suits exactly your experience, your examples and who likes what you do.
Candidate for the position of HR Director, for a salary of 200 thousand rubles. The general director says: “The situation is this: we are ready to receive you, you leave on Monday, but on Monday I fly away for two weeks on a business trip. What are you going to do these two weeks? This is also a case.
The candidate said that on the first day he will get acquainted with the documents that are in the HR department, get to know his employees, then he will start to audit the situation and communicate with key top managers to understand what personnel problems or tasks arise, what works and what does not work. Prepare a work plan, send it by e-mail to the general. It will receive confirmation that this plan can be acted upon and will begin to implement it. Moreover, he painted his plan in detail. Was hired, working successfully.
At the interview, you may be asked open-ended questions, that is, those that require a detailed answer. For example, talk about your successes at your previous job. In order to properly answer this question, you need to understand what success is for this company. If the company works with, say, foreign clients, then it is better to give examples of how you have worked with foreign companies.
Sometimes the HR says: “I won't ask you any questions, just tell me what you think is right about yourself. Complete freedom for you, where you want, start from there.
This waste of time testifies to the unprofessionalism of the HR. Nevertheless, this happens. If the candidate was given such an opportunity, you need to tell just about examples that are close and interesting to the employer.
One of the key mistakes that top managers make at the interview, after the HR offer “Tell me about yourself”, they talk about themselves, starting from the school family, from their parents, from their native factory of the Order of the Red Banner of Labor ... Oddly enough, but sales assistants when hiring in a regular store in a shopping center do not make this mistake, because they do not have this colossal experience. And the director is used to being always listened to. But the interview is a different situation, you need to be able to switch and focus on the main thing.
The right candidate should tell exactly what the employer needs.
One day we were looking for the head of the personnel department. For wages 144 thousand rubles. This is above the market, the head of the personnel department is usually not paid such salaries, but here they offered it.
Candidates are asked to introduce themselves. Some recall how they organized the holidays, others - how they conducted office work, and still others - how they settled labor disputes and the dismissal of employees. The employer, meanwhile, is interested in the experience of working with labor disputes, difficult layoffs, staff reductions. It is clear that only those who focus on what the employer needs have chances ... Moreover, the paradox is that the experience of each of them is approximately the same. Not because the first one organizes holidays poorly, but because the employer needs exactly the third experience.
Recently, recruiters have begun to use various unique technologies in their work. One of these technologies is - Case-interview. Case from English is translated as a case, a case. A case interview is a job interview in which a job seeker is asked questions, a situation or problem and is asked to solve this situation (problem). The problem often relates to a business situation, or a situation that the applicant has already encountered in real life.
After the candidate has received information about the situation, he can ask questions to the interviewer to try to better understand the situation and find the right solution. Companies using this method do not evaluate how correct the answer was, but how much the candidate as a whole understands the situation and how he tries to solve it.
The main task of the Case-interview is to assess the candidate's abilities:
- analytical, mathematical, the ability to select words and speak on the merits of the problem;
- communication and presentation;
- business and commercial skills.
Basically, the case interview is used in the selection of senior positions or positions related to consulting, marketing or business analysis. It will also be effective for evaluating specialists whose position involves logical thinking, organizational skills and public speaking.
In order for the Case-interview to have the maximum effect, it is necessary for the candidate to identify the situation that will allow him to check what the recruiter is most interested in at the moment. And it is important to remember that this situation must have a solution.
With the help of a case-interview, you can check:
- specific skills;
- behavior model and individual-personal views;
- values and views of the candidate.
When evaluating a candidate's way out of the situation, it is important to correctly analyze what solution he offers and whether there are other, better options that he could also offer, but did not offer. Ideally, when the candidate himself immediately asks all clarifying questions, and, based on this, offers several solutions. Most often, the topics of situations for conducting a Case-interview are taken from communication with company employees, applicants, colleagues in the profession, from their own past experience. With the help of well-structured situations during a case-interview, a candidate can be tested for stress resistance, creativity, conflict, aggressiveness or goodwill, the ability to achieve goals in different ways and be responsible for the result of their work. Since the moment in solving the situation, the candidate shows his preferred model of behavior. The ability to solve problems under very limited time conditions is also tested.
It is very important to correctly evaluate the methods by which the candidate is trying to solve the problem (on his own, with the help of friends, using business contacts or something else). It is very important how he will interact with colleagues, if it is written in the situation, whether he will have a desire to help, support some employee in order to reach the desired goal together.
This is a very interesting and effective way to conduct an interview, but it also has its drawbacks:
- preparing and conducting such an interview takes a lot of time;
- materials must be constantly updated, since situations must always be “fresh” and relevant for today;
- a recruiter conducting a case interview needs to have sufficient experience to correctly analyze the results.
If your company is interested in recruiting candidates for case-interviews, but you do not know what situation to choose, how best to organize this interview and evaluate it. Contact Us and our team of professionals will help you to solve the situation with the Case-interview in the most competent way.
Difficulty: moderate. 1. Read in detail all the details of the job you are applying for. Try to find out specifically what responsibilities await you in this position, what are the criteria for evaluating your work by the company. Knowing what they are looking for will point you in the right direction when answering questions. Be honest, but tailor your responses to the qualities they want in an employee. 2. Look at the list of sample questions that are asked in case interviews and practice giving good answers to them. Have several different people critically evaluate your answers. An outsider is also likely to be able to point out to you other positive qualities about you that you have not remembered, and information about which you can insert into your answers. 3.
How to correctly answer the questions of a situational interview
Attention
A situational interview, or an interview based on the principle of a case study, is an interview technique based on the analysis of typical situations - cases. How to understand that you are being tested using the situational interview method? Certain conditions are offered, and you need to describe your behavior. The recruiter may ask you to "solve" an arbitrary situation or offer to tell you about some episode from the past. At the same time, situations can be both simple, "from two moves", and detailed, requiring study.
The popularity of this form of interview among HR specialists of large companies is primarily due to the fact that it can be used to make a fairly accurate prediction of the candidate's behavior in a new workplace.
Examples of case interviews that will clearly show who is who in the interview
Do you need a leader who can put himself in another person's shoes? Try to find out if the candidate can become one. Do you want the general public to know about your company? Ask if the candidate can get the message across. If you are looking for a job, tell us why you did what you did.
Explain why you left your previous job. Describe how the university was chosen. Tell us why you decided to study in graduate school. Do not forget to mention that you traveled around Europe for a year and about the experience that you managed to get during this time. When answering a question, do not limit yourself to listing the facts (they can also be read in the resume).
Tell the other person why you did certain things. 2. "Name your main weakness" Every candidate knows how to answer this question. It is necessary to choose an abstract weakness and turn it into dignity.
By the way, this uncertainty can become a big obstacle to building a career, such an employee will be afraid to convey his ideas to management and will not be able to build adequate relationships with the team. 3. On Friday evening your family moved to a private country house. Saturday is the World Cup final. It turned out that the house was provided with everything except a television antenna.
You apply to the local utility company for the installation of television antennas, but they refuse, citing the weekend. What are your actions? Candidates' answers: - I will contact an alternative commercial service, paying five times more; - I will study the installation literature and try to do it myself; - I will postpone the decision until Monday; - I will ask the new neighbors. Evaluation of answers: The first option is the most costly and easiest of the possible.
Although not creative, it is an effective and fast tool.
Examples of situational interview questions
Important
Elena GRIGORYEVA Going to an interview, you are waiting for standard questions: “Why did you choose our company?” and “What is your career vision?”. Instead, the HR manager asks you to talk about your most unusual client. Do not get lost: you are offered a situational interview that is quite popular today.
Is it possible to prepare for it and what conclusions will the employer draw from the conversation? Olga Tugushi, account manager of the CONSORT consulting group, advises, first of all, to specify the term “situational interview” itself. It is wrong to expand this concept to include professional testing, stress interviews, biographical interviews, and other techniques.
Tell us about your failure This request of the interviewer suggests that it is important for him to find out how his interlocutor perceives his own failures, including in professional activities, whether he knows how to analyze and correct his mistakes, and whether he quickly recovers. A competent answer to the question about failure, weakness is an example of how it was possible to draw the right conclusions from negative experience. You should not say that you never made mistakes, it sounds like a deliberate lie or inability to admit them.
Describe a problematic, conflicting work situation and how you dealt with it Many employers require subordinates to find a common language and effectively resolve conflicts with others, because disagreements are almost inevitable. Giving an example of a work conflict, you can rationally downplay it in an interview. 7 frequently asked interview questions and answers.
Interview questions - case interview
Situational questions asked in a job interview are a situation described by a recruiter, from which the applicant must find a way out, offer a solution. Modern recruiters are increasingly resorting to such questions, as they help to understand what the applicant is capable of, how quickly and adequately he can act in a non-standard situation. Examples of situational questions, as well as the correct answers to them, see below.
Info
Do not forget that you yourself can also ask questions to the employer - 10 important questions that must be asked at the interview. Of course, the situational question on the topic “sell me a pen” is in the lead. See the table below for how to answer it. It is usually asked during an interview when hiring sales professionals.
Think about past experiences in your previous jobs or situations in which you have had to take on a leadership role that you can talk about in an interview. Shake your memory of past problems and the exact actions you took to solve them. Consider writing down all significant experiences to refresh your memory before the interview.
If you are asked how you deal with an angry customer, your answer will seem more believable if you can honestly say that you have dealt with a similar situation in the past and handled it effectively. 4. Avoid bringing up questionable situations in interviews or pointing out your weaknesses in any way. Your responses should demonstrate that you are able to resolve the issue and minimize conflict in an ethical manner.
Successful interview: an example of competent questions and answers at an interview
But it can be changed: “What do you think we forgot to talk about?” or “If you had the opportunity to re-answer one of the previous questions, what would you say?” At the end of an interview, it's rare for candidates to think they've done their best. Perhaps the conversation went in an unexpected direction. Maybe the interlocutor emphasized the resume in his own way, focusing on some skills and forgetting about others. Or maybe at the beginning of the interview, the candidate was too nervous and could not correctly formulate everything that he wanted to talk about.
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Situational interview questions with answers Attention Focus on activities that allow you to develop - learn something new, achieve higher goals. For example: "My children are still very young, so there is almost no free time, but on the way to work and back I learn Spanish." 19.
The question is asked, as a rule, by students who have encountered this term for the first time. However, this concept is becoming popular in business communities. Before answering the question of what cases are and giving examples of their solution, let's delve into the history of the origin of the term.
The emergence of cases
The concept first appeared in 1924. Professors at a prestigious university realized that the textbooks of previous years were not capable of preparing graduates for modern professions. The manuals and manuals that are relevant at this point in time have not yet been created, and the previous ones are already outdated. Then the professors thought out business cases - the actual tasks of our time that graduates had to solve. To do this, business owners were invited to Harvard, who instructed graduate students in detail. Entrepreneurs at the seminars talked about the real problems that their companies faced. After that, graduate students had to find their own solution to these problems. The peculiarity of such training is that there are no correct answers. You just need to find the best way out of the current situation. In other words, everyone chooses the solution of cases individually.
The innovation of Harvard professors proved to be effective. Graduates already at the exit actually had a semblance of experience. They knew the problems and tasks of successful companies, they could easily cope with the tasks. In fact, the solution of cases by the student gave him real practice within the walls of the university. Therefore, since the middle of the twentieth century, this method has become widespread throughout the world.
Appearance in Russia
In our country, even with the collapse of the socialist system in the nineties of the last century, the education system for a long time existed on the knurled. The country no longer exists, but there are USSR textbooks. Even textbooks on the history of the CPSU with Lenin on the covers finally disappeared only by the mid-nineties of the twentieth century, not to mention other disciplines.
And only Messrs. management cases began to appear in the leading universities of our country. Today this method is actively developed in Russia. In addition, thematic case-clubs are opened. Particularly popular with schoolchildren and students are the MSTU club. E. Bauman, NUST MISIS Career Center, etc.
So what are cases? Let's move on to the concept itself.
concept
Case (from Latin casus) - an extraordinary situation, a problem whose solution cannot be found in textbooks. A more accurate interpretation of the term "casus" is a problem that needs to be solved, however, this term came to Russian from English, in which the Latin word casus is pronounced as "case".
Students simulate a problem situation that is as close as possible to the real one, and they must find a solution. The bottom line is that there is no right answer. There is only the opinion of teachers and a real way out of this situation, if the case, of course, was taken from life. Solution methods, reasoning, collective discussion, etc. are evaluated.
So, what is a case, we explained, now let's move on to the goals.
Goals
Although the topics of the cases may differ from each other, the modeling itself, as a rule, has common goals:
- Validate student intelligence and analytics.
- Develop an argument for your position.
- Developing resilience to stressful situations.
- Teaching time management skills.
- Development of communication
Cases during the interview
This method is used not only in educational institutions. Today, many firms use it during interviews. Every day, the employer looks less and less at the resume of the applicant, at the level of his education, work experience, etc. It is enough to offer a candidate for a position a few cases, and everything becomes clear about a person better than various pieces of paper and recommendations.
Of course, this does not mean that education and experience do not matter. Without them, you may not get to the stage of solving the case at all. However, it is the last stage that becomes the decisive factor when choosing an employee. In this regard, Google stands out, which develops its own case modeling techniques. They are specific to each job. Work experience, level of education will not help the candidate if he cannot solve cases. And they sometimes amaze the imagination with their deceptive simplicity.
Case examples
Let's take an example. The company faced the problem of the efficiency of employees in the sales department. Three people work. The first works with 70% of clients, the second - with 20%, and the third - with 10%. With these indicators, the second one shows the highest sales, but it only works with regular customers. The third, on the contrary, works only with new clients, while the first works with both new and regular ones. The task for the manager is to increase the sales plan and redistribute the flow of customers in such a way that the company receives maximum profit.
To solve this problem, you need to answer the following questions:
- What are the possibilities for improvement in this situation?
- What standards can help improve the results of each salesperson and the sales team as a whole in the long run?
Perhaps the first seller works best with new buyers, or with regular ones. It is also worth trying to swap the second and third seller. Those. the second one will only work with new ones, and the third one will only work with permanent ones. Perhaps they have a professional crisis, and a change of scenery is needed.
Second example
An interview is underway for the position of Head of Human Resources. The candidate must have such a quality as the ability to be flexible and avoid unnecessary conflicts. It is proposed to solve the following case: the CEO insisted that the firm take the daughter of an influential person. The previous manager gave her the position of assistant secretary. The girl herself did not show herself in any way, she did not identify herself with the company, and she had no desire for career growth. To this is added the lack of experience in other enterprises.
During her work, her main skills have become: receiving incoming documents, keeping records, packaging documentation in folders. Six months later, the position of a leading document management specialist was vacated. The CEO insisted that this girl take the position. However, the company has many other employees who deserve a promotion. In this task, the applicant must make a choice: either go against the general management, or work with a disgruntled team.
Perhaps the candidate will find an acceptable option for both the CEO and the team. Case examples do not have correct solutions. Each case is individual.
There are not only business cases, but also cases in other areas: pedagogy, medicine, jurisprudence. In every profession, you can simulate a problem situation.