Situational interview questions for the interviewer

When we pulled Google’s top results for situational interview questions in the US on 28 October 2026, four of the first six were written for the job seeker: an Indeed career-advice page, a Reddit thread from someone who never knows what to say, a university careers page, and a YouTube video of sample answers. Google’s AI Overview opened by telling the reader that these questions “ask how you would handle hypothetical future scenarios”. The “you” was the candidate.

The interviewer’s side of the question got far less attention, and it is the harder side. Anyone can ask “What would you do if a customer was angry?”. Knowing what a good answer to it sounds like, and scoring two candidates the same way, is where most interviews fall apart. This guide is written for the person asking.

What are situational interview questions?

Situational interview questions describe a realistic dilemma from the job and ask the candidate what they would do and why. Because the scenario is hypothetical, they work even for candidates who have never been in that situation, which makes them especially useful for freshers and career changers. They are only reliable when each question comes with a scoring guide written before the interview.

The method has a long research history. It traces back to work by Gary Latham and colleagues in 1980, built on the premise that intentions predict behaviour. Each question contains a dilemma, and answers are scored against a guide written by people who know the job.

Situational vs behavioural questions

The two are often taught together and they are not the same.

On validity, the research gives situational interviews a slight edge. A 2021 paper in Frontiers in Psychology by Latham and Itzchakov cites a meta-analysis by Culbertson and colleagues that found a higher mean criterion-related validity for the situational interview (0.23) than for the patterned behaviour description interview (0.18). The gap is not large. The bigger gain, in either format, is from structure itself: the same questions and the same scoring for every candidate, which is why structured interviews predict performance better than unstructured ones.

How to write a situational question from your own job

Borrowed questions are generic because the jobs behind them are generic. A question written from your own work will separate candidates far better. Four steps:

1. Collect real incidents. Ask two people who do the job well for a moment that went badly and a moment they handled well. “A customer’s EMI was debited twice and they called in shouting” is better raw material than “a difficult customer”.
2. Build a dilemma with two pulls. A good scenario has no free answer. The customer wants a refund today; the policy says five working days. Speed and accuracy pull against each other. If one option is obviously right, the question tests nothing.
3. Write the scoring guide before you ask it. Ask the same two people what a weak, an adequate and a strong answer would contain. Write it down in their words.
4. Pilot it on someone who does the job. If your best performer’s answer would score a 1, the guide is wrong, not the performer.

10 situational interview questions to ask, by role

Each comes with what a strong answer contains. Adapt the details to your business.

Customer support

1. “A customer says they were charged twice and wants the money back today. Our refund process takes five working days. What do you say?” Strong: acknowledges the problem, checks the facts before promising, gives a real timeline, and offers what they can do today.
2. “You are on a call and realise you gave the previous customer wrong information. What do you do?” Strong: corrects it proactively, tells a supervisor, and does not wait to be found out.

Inside sales and telecalling

3. “A prospect says your product is too expensive and hangs up. You have their number. What happens next?” Strong: a plan to learn the real objection, not a plan to call five more times.
4. “Your manager pushes you to promise a delivery date you know the team cannot meet. The customer is ready to sign. What do you do?” Strong: does not overpromise, and finds a way to close on a date that is true.

Operations and back office

5. “You find an error in a report that has already gone to a client. Nobody else has noticed. What do you do?” Strong: flags it quickly with the correct figures and a note on the impact.
6. “Two senior colleagues give you conflicting instructions for the same task, both urgent. What do you do?” Strong: gets them to resolve it, rather than quietly picking one.

Freshers and graduate roles

7. “In your first week, you are given a task and you do not understand part of it. Your manager is in meetings all day. What do you do?” Strong: tries a reasonable first step, writes down the specific question, and asks a colleague or sends a short message.
8. “Your team is behind on a deadline and one member is not doing their share. You are the newest person. What do you do?” Strong: helps unblock the work and raises it carefully, without either ignoring it or going over heads on day one.

Team leads

9. “Your best performer asks for a week off during the busiest week of the quarter. What do you decide?” Strong: weighs the person and the work, offers alternatives, and explains the decision.
10. “A new joiner on your team is struggling and wants to quit after two weeks. What do you do?” Strong: finds out why before trying to fix it.

For a broader list across the whole interview, see our 30 interview questions to ask candidates, and for calling roles, the telecaller interview questions with their scoring sheet.

A scoring guide you can copy

Here is question 1 scored out in full. Write one of these for every situational question you use.

Note the phrase from the answer that earned each score. Google’s re:Work structured interviewing guide reports that prepared questions and rubrics like this save its interviewers about 40 minutes per interview, because nobody improvises the bar.

Mistakes that make situational answers useless

• Questions with an obvious right answer. “Would you steal from the company?” tests nothing.
• Accepting the textbook structure as the answer. Candidates learn STAR and similar formats. Score what they would actually do, not how neatly they framed it.
• No follow-up. Change one detail (“and the customer is threatening to post on social media”) and listen to whether the answer changes sensibly. Rehearsed answers usually do not.
• Scoring confidence. A fluent answer that never resolves the dilemma is a 1.

Running situational questions in a voice interview

Situational questions fit a first-round screen well because they do not depend on the candidate having the right background. In HireQwik, the hiring team writes the job’s screening questions and the scoring text for each one. On jobs using the points rubric, the behavioural and ownership question is scored against four levels of HR-written rubric text, from 0 to 3, which is the same shape as the guide above.

Scoring happens after the call from the full transcript, not during the conversation. The evaluator is told to score on evidence: vague or generic answers with no example land around 4 or 5 out of 10, specific detail and clear reasoning earn 6 or 7 and above, and 8 or more is kept for answers that genuinely stand out. Each score comes with a short note quoting what the candidate said, so a recruiter can check how the AI interview score is calculated and overrule it. The AI recommends; HR decides.

If you want to hear how a scenario question sounds when an AI asks it, take the live AI interview demo and answer one yourself.