Most people have a pretty good idea of what’s expected of them. They’ve had some training for their position and ideally some apprenticing. This tip could even include those who have had considerable training, for example health care professionals or software programmers.
The question is, “What did you do when you didn’t know what to do?” The applicant may ask for clarification and you could say: “When you ran into something that wasn’t covered in your training materials, how did you handle that?” If you’re dealing with someone who is highly trained, you’re looking to see if the person sought out the information from respected sources or asked someone who was conveniently available or perhaps just “winged it.”
If your applicant is applying for a position for which there isn’t a great deal of training and who held this type of position before, what was this person’s usual method of handling these kinds of situations? Did they ask someone next to them? Did they ask their supervisor? Did they ask the boss? Did they decide on their own what was likely the best approach and then put that into action? Of course there are many different types of situations a person encounters in a work day, and each situation can have a different approach.
Some of us will always ask someone else; some of us will always improvise on our own. And of course many of us will be somewhere in between. It can be helpful to you to know if your applicant has a chosen method of dealing with these situations.
