Volunteer Interviewing Scenarios

• will be matched one-to-one with clients in a counseling or helping relationship;
• will be undertaking managerial or leadership duties which require autonomy and independent action; or
• will be dealing with complex issues which require a substantial training investment on the part of the agency.

In each of these situations acceptance of an inappropriate volunteer can have dire consequences.

Unfortunately the traditional method of asking interview questions does little to truly gauge the abilities of potential volunteers. Inquiries into educational or work background commonly bear little immediate relationship to either current skills or the type of situation the volunteer will encounter. Questions based upon past experience ("Tell me about a crisis situation you encountered and how you dealt with it.") are also of little immediate relevance and are usually subject to revisionist interpretations of past history and success.

Evaluating a potential volunteer is even more difficult when the type of characteristic you are attempting to determine is not a hard-core skill, but is attitudinal in nature – flexibility, good judgment, ability to deal with others, creativity, cultural attitudes. Direct questions in these area ("Do you usually display good judgment?") are simply silly.

Traditional interview situations also suffer from the drawback of measuring more the applicant's skill in being interviewed than in actually doing work of any other type. Some individuals are more comfortable in an interview situation than others, and some, quite frankly, are far better in interviews than in real life.

In short, determining the real facts of another's personality during an interview is most often left to 'gut feelings' on the part of the interviewer rather than any concrete information gained during the interview itself. This is a dangerous practice, and one which this article will show you how to remedy.

Developing Good Volunteer Interview Questions

Volunteer interviews commonly proceed in two quite distinct parts. The first, that of exploration, consists of asking the volunteer about their interests, in an attempt to find an area of volunteer work which they might be interested in undertaking. This article won't cover that part, except to note that it should consist of general questions designed to allow the volunteer to do most of the talking. These exploratory questions should be asked even if the volunteer has come in to apply for a specific job, since they might identify an even more suitable placement that the volunteer wasn't initially aware of. The exploration phase of the interview is designed to give the interviewer enough perspective on the interests of the prospective volunteer to identify several potential jobs which might then be matched against the qualifications of the applicant.

This matching leads to the evaluation phase of the interview. In preparing for this part, the volunteer interviewer must first examine each job and attempt to determine the qualifications that are needed for success. These may include hard skills (speaking ability, knowledge of fundraising, etc) and they may include attitudinal requirements (flexibility, maturity, lack of bias, ability to relate to others, etc.) This is the part where traditional short-answer questions give little help in truly determining either skills or attitudes. And this is the part where utilizing role play scenarios can prove extremely valuable.

Incorporating Role Play Scenarios into the Volunteer Interview

Utilizing role plan scenarios in the interview situation is a three-part process:

1. To make use of role play scenarios the interviewer must first develop a scenario situation which relates to the volunteer job to be undertaken. The simplest way to begin this process is to either think about past experiences with the job itself (identifying past difficult situations that a volunteer encountered or previous disasters) or by asking current volunteers about the types of difficult situations, problems or quandaries they have had to deal with. The problem situation identified should relate to several of the qualifications that have already been identified as crucial to job success.

As an example, one such scenario created for use in interviewing volunteers who were matched as mentor companions for young adults was phrased as follows:

"You are working as a mentor with a 16-year old girl. You have been together for almost a year and have developed a good and trusting working relationship. You are meeting with the girl and she turns to you and says, 'You're the only person I can look to for help. I'm pregnant and I'd want you to help me go about getting an abortion.' What do you say to her and how do you handle this situation?"

Note that this situation involves the ability of the volunteer to deal with a number of complex issues, some relating to judgment, some to religious beliefs, some to ethics and also involves the ability of the volunteer to confront a touchy subject area. It is by no means a simple 'yes' or 'no' type of question. After the question is asked, the prospective volunteer should be given a few minutes to think about and 'prepare' their response.

2. You will note that the above scenario question was not introduced as a role play situation but was originally simply asked as a somewhat complex question. This is intentional. As the volunteer starts to respond to the question they will commonly say, "Well, I would ask her why she wanted to have the abortion and then I would...".

At the point the interviewee begins to answer the interviewer should, without prior warning, turn the situation into a role play. One way to do this smoothly is to say, "Why

don't we just pretend you were actually dealing with this. I'll be the 16-year old, and you can talk to me as if the situation had actually just occurred."

The interviewer should consistently stay in character and should force the applicant to also stay in character, treating the situation as a realistic one. If the applicant attempts to retreat to general statements ("Well, I would smooth over the situation...".) the interviewer should pressure them to speak the exact words they think they would use to accomplish this, delivered as they would speak them in real life ("Tell me what you'd say to me?")

In changing a theoretical question into a hypothetical situation, the interviewer will be able to learn much more about the volunteer. General answers are often vague; precise words give a much clearer impression of exactly what the volunteer is trying to do. And turning the situation into a role play will also give some clues as to whether the volunteer can not only think about the situation but also as to whether they can handle it. By watching their demeanor and body language during the role play the interviewer will learn a lot about their true level of comfort and ability.

3. The interviewer can also prepare to take the role play several steps further, by constructing a scenario that has several levels, each with additional facets. In the example given above, interviewers were prepared with three additional 'what if' alternatives to ask once the applicant had worked through the original situation:
• "If they revealed that the father of the baby was a member of a foster family that the person had been placed with by our agency, how would you handle the situation?"
• "What if the person involved was 12 years old, not 16?"
• "If before telling you anything the client had asked you to keep the information totally confidential, what would you do?" "What if your supervisor heard about this situation and asked you whether the girl was pregnant?"

This last question series is particularly revealing, since it places the potential volunteer in an ethical dilemma in which there is no clearly 'right' answer. Ethical dilemma questions can be particularly helpful in identifying people who do think there are very simple 'right' answers to complicated situations.

The interviewer can also expand the gathering of information by sometimes backing out of the role play and asking the prospective volunteer to explain the reasoning behind their answers: "What do you think is the most important objective in this situation?" or "What alternatives do you think you would have in dealing with this?" And the interviewer can even expand the role play into new areas. In the example given, a second layer of the scenario moved the volunteer into a meeting which included the client and her parents, discussing the pregnancy. The volunteer was asked by the young client to participate in the discussion. Other staff members were brought in to play the parents, with instructions to initiate a conflict situation. The volunteer then had to deal with the conflict, which was partially directed at the young girl but which then shifted toward animosity from the parents directed at the volunteer.

The Benefits of Role Play Situations

As you can probably tell from the above example, placing the potential volunteer in such a role play scenario is much more revealing than other types of inquiries, including even the broadest open-ended questions. In all, there seem to be three distinct areas of advantage:

• The more fluid situation of the role play allows you to see how the potential volunteer thinks, with a view of their assumptions and reactions. This information will often be revealed without the volunteer realizing what they are showing you. This makes it much more difficult for the interviewee to 'guess' the correct answer.
• You can also 'see' how well the volunteer actually handles the situation, not just how well they talk about it. You can thus better judge interpersonal skills and style.
• The use of the role play scenario does not stop at the interviewing stage. Role play scenarios make excellent training tools, and you might well not disqualify a volunteer based on their performance as much as make notes about areas that need to be addressed during orientation or about additional skill training that will be needed before the volunteer can start work.

The best part is how easy it is to construct such scenarios. All you really have to do is remember the difficult situations that volunteers have encountered in the past. Even if the situations weren't 'solvable' they will make good training tools because they are, in fact, representative of the types of real world problems the volunteer must learn to deal with.

And, who knows, you may get lucky enough to interview a prospective volunteer who can tell you how to deal with a situation you could never figure out...

©1995, Steve McCurley. All rights reserved.