Assessment Methods:
Creating Situational Interview Questions and Rating Scales

Identify the competency being assessed.

• Start by determining the essential competencies the potential applicant must bring to the job.

• Involve individuals who know the job well for this analysis.

Identify and describe a related situation or problem.

• Think about an actual challenging, real-life situation (critical incident) that happened in this job in which the competency (or the presence or lack of it) would be important to job performance and either superior or ineffective behaviour was exhibited.

• Describe the background that lead up to it.

• Not all problems from the job are effective for assessment. Choose only those that poor performers can not do as well as good performers.

Create the rating scale:

• Use the situation or critical incident to identify and describe examples of job-related behaviours that exemplify superior, good or unusually poor performance. 

• Describe what was done that was superior (or ineffective) in relation to the situation and why the behaviour was superior or ineffective.

• Brainstorm and describe other plausible superior, average or ineffective ways of handling the situation. These form the basis of the rating guide.

• Split the behaviours into acceptable and unacceptable and anchor the behaviours to a three or five level rating scale. 

Convert the incident into an interview question.

• Develop questions based on this situation.

• Write a question that describes a related hypothetical scenario based on this situation and follows with a “what if” question.

• Develop a specific question based on a realistic job situation that calls for a definite and specific response.

• Ensure the preferred response is not transparent to the applicant.

• Don’t include questions that require knowledge of particular procedures. These can be learned in a brief time on the job.

• Create challenging questions that will result in a wide spread of scores. Pick questions that the well-qualified candidates will answer very well and the poorest candidates will not.

• Frame questions in such as way that a “canned” answer will not be satisfactory. Many questions are variations on the same theme (e.g. “How do you supervise when a worker’s performance falls below normal.”). Experienced candidates have been rehearsing answers to these questions for years.

Sample Situational Interview Questions: Information Officer

Sample Rating Scale - Information Officer

Sample Situational Questions