MiddletownJournal.com

SAR – don't leave for a job interview without it. It's a prescriptive formula that may help you answer such questions as:

"Tell me about a time you were given a tight deadline and how you handled it."

SAR is not a health epidemic; it's a technique you can use in a behavioral interview, a process many hiring companies have adopted. It's an acronym for Situation-Action-Result.

In a behavioral, or targeted selection, interview, employers ask questions about specific facets of performance, a format that requires that you respond precisely and not waffle. The system correlates the candidate's past performance with job requirements.

Before beginning an interview process, the employer first determines critical dimensions of the position and designs a series of questions that will explore whether candidates have the appropriate skills, knowledge and abilities to do the work.

Employers will call company representatives into probe candidates and score the "correctness" of each answer. Results are tallied and the finalist(s) named. Hiring managers can consider other factors before the final selection.

For example, how the SAR method can help in a behavioral interview:

• Situation: In your last job, you were given a short deadline to prepare a sales brochure for a trade show.

• Action: You established a milestone schedule specifying what tasks had to be completed and when.

• Result: You developed the brochure 10 days ahead of schedule, and the material was instrumental in increasing revenues by 30 percent.

Behavioral interviews technically are more a test than an open discussion. As a result, you want to both score with your answers and your chemistry with the interviewers.

Bellbrook resident Steve Stromp is a professional career consultant, lecturer and writer. Contact him: sstromp@sbcglobal.net.