Questions You Might be Asked in an RT Job Interview
If you’re preparing to interview for a respiratory care position, you expect to be asked a range of technical questions aimed at assessing your knowledge, skills, and abilities related to the job description. But it’s those “other” questions likely to be thrown into the mix that keep you up at night — you know, the “behavioral interviewing” ones that start out with “Tell me about a time . . .” or “What did you do when . . .”.
You can go online to find sample questions in this area, but that doesn’t tell you which ones are most typically asked in RT interviews, So, the AARC asked member Cheryl Hoerr, MBA, RRT, CPFT, FAARC, manager of the RT department at Phelps County Regional Medical Center in Rolla, MO. Below, Cheryl shares with us her most common behavioral interviewing questions:
- Give me an example of when you initiated, or tried to initiate, a change in a process or procedure. How did you come up with the idea for the change? How did you communicate the change to others? What was the biggest hurdle in changing the process? What was the outcome?
- How would you judge your own performance in terms of being customer oriented? Give me some specific examples. What do you do that others don’t do? How can you improve your customer service?
- Other than an authorized day off, how many times in the last six months have you missed a day of work? What could you have done to avoid missing those days? What do you feel are legitimate reasons for missing work?
- Almost everyone is late for work at some point. Please tell me about the last time you were late for work. What was the reason? Has this happened before? What could you have done to avoid this problem?
- When you are managing several tasks at once, how do you keep track of the details of each task so that everything runs smoothly? What is the most difficult aspect of managing multiple tasks? Can you give me an example of how you’ve handled these situations?
- Tell me about a time when your department had to work closely with another department as a team to accomplish an important work activity or project. What was your role? What was rewarding/frustrating about the project?
- Thinking back to the past year, please describe the most stressful situation you have had to deal with at work. What did you do to cope with the stress? What did you learn from the experience?
- Despite good planning, there are times when we need to adjust our work plans to deal with the unexpected. Please describe the last time you had to make a significant change to your work plans. What happened? How did you adjust? How did you feel about making these adjustments? What was the outcome?
