The word crisis conjures up pictures of earthquakes or floods or an armed individual threatening one’s life.

And each of these are certainly possible while one is at work. But perhaps not likely and we hope not ever, but there are other types of crises that come to the workplace.

• A crisis of economics. Perhaps the company is undergoing a very rough financial patch. A competitive company opened up across the street and many of your customers are ending up over there. The financial stress is palpable and employees are beginning to wonder how secure their job is.
• A crisis in employee morale. Instead of cooperation ruling the day, employees are frequently arguing, frequently criticizing each other. This of course affects productivity and if it gets too rough, some of your best staff may decide to work elsewhere.
• A crisis in public relations. Something occurred that brought bad press to the company. This is showing up with angry calls and angry visits to your front door. The event causing the bad press may not even have a legitimate source.

I’m sure you could come up with other examples of a crisis that might hit your company.

When these highly negative situations occur, the stress can be considerable. Management may take the brunt here, but you can be sure, employees will also be adversely affected.

How will your applicant hold up in these situations?

Let’s find out.

Ask your applicant:

“What is the most challenging, the most difficult situation you have encountered as an employee?”

After you hear what that is, ask how your applicant dealt with it.

Let’s see if the future can tell us anything:

“If a crisis occurred at work, how would you deal with it?”

We’ll likely find out two things with this question:

1) What your applicant considers is a crisis.

2) How they believe they would deal with it.

I realize talking about a crisis in the past or even in the future may not be the easiest thing for an applicant to discuss, but it may be worth considering this tip.

It may give you an insight into how prepared or courageous or considerate they are.

And of course, our motto is and always will be:

The more we know, the better.

To see how our employee test can help you bring better people on board watch this three minute video.

If you have ever interviewed someone and later discovered a "different" person is working for you, check out our new book How To Hire The Right People.

An enormous amount of data and information can overwhelm the work environment.

How does one deal with this information overload?

Well, the first and most important skill is understanding “degrees of importance.”

Clearly some things are more important than others. From a management perspective and from an employee perspective.

Filing the paperwork on the last sale is important but as important as the next customer standing there waiting to pay?

If a customer needs help but it’s clearly not in one’s job description to assist this customer, do we hope someone else will attend to the customer? Or do we stop, find out what’s needed and do what we can to help?

If a co-worker is complaining about a mutual supervisor, do we join in or do we insist the co-worker get with the supervisor to sort it out?

Importances.

And degrees of importance.

The last example about encountering a complaining co-worker may not sound like a point of importances, but it is. How important is it to have a harmonious work environment? How important is it to resolve upsets or issues with the correct individual? Or is it not that important because workplace complaints are just a part of workplace life, so no big deal.

Importances.

Degrees of importance.

So how do we determine this with the applicant?

One suggest would be to make a list of different situations your staff run into that require them to “sift through” data in order to make decisions.

You could present some of these hypothetical situations to the applicant and ask how they would deal with them OR you could ask the applicant how they handled these types of situations in the past.

You can start out with situations with obvious ideal outcomes and then present some that are not so obvious.

How your applicant “sifts” through data to make decisions is a good thing to know before making your hiring decision.

To see how our employee test can help you bring better people on board watch this three minute video.

If you have ever interviewed someone and later discovered a "different" person is working for you, check out our new book How To Hire The Right People.