What are your favorite / most effective interview questions?

What personal qualities do you possess which will make you a good counselor?

What expectations do you think the campers/parents/director may have of you as a counselor?

How would you react if you found a younger camper smoking? Would your treatment of the situation be any different if you discovered the camper was using drugs?

Give a few examples of problems you believe might be experienced by campers. Choose one of these problems and tell me how you would deal with it!

Describe an indoor activity you could organise for a group of lively children on the spur of the moment, if a scheduled outdoor activity is suddenly ruined by heavy rain.

How would you make a reluctant camper feel 'special'?

Give an example of an effective 'bunk rule' you would like to establish at camp.

How do you hope to be remembered by your campers in years to come?

I was reading a Camp Line issues... talking about interview questions... the writer made a great point about asking more questions like "Tell me about the last time....you dealt with a camper having a tantrum... you confronted an angry co-worker..." etc.
I've been overhauling some of my "hypothetical questions" and trying for more of these "tell me about a real experiance" questions.

I think questions like "Tell me your favorite thing about camp" or "sing me your favorite camp song" really can tell you a lot about a person's character because you can get a sense of who that person is and why they want to work at camp. I also think they make interviews a lot more interesting than the same boring old questions.

Questions that aim to find out what 'models' of behavior the interviewee has experienced in the past (a mental model). Such as; How did your former supervisor handle discipline of employees? (discipline model); Describe how your favorite teacher interacts with the students? (interaction/leadership model); [if the interviewee has previous scouting/church/organized rec experiences] How did your _________ leader handle conflict within the group [conflict management].

Something along these lines of questions will get the interviewee to describe what they have seen/been a part of in the past and how they feel about the particular situation. I found that counselors often mirror "models" that they have been involved with in the past.

as a counselor and now a program director, I really like open-ended questions that allow the potential staff member to tell me about themselves. These are also the questions that I feel are most effective for me to communicate some of the opportunities that I've had. My favorites are similar to:

How would your friends describe you?

What is a difficult situation that you dealt with, how did it turn out, and how did you feel about it?

What is the hardest type of person for you to work with?

and my personal favorite, for creativity sake, is :

Tell me about the letter J, its characteristics, and its placement in the alphabet. (see their creativity, and get them to say that it is the 10th letter of the alphabet. will they tell you how they figured that out?) This one works better for in-person interviews and could be valuable for quick interviews such as those at summer job fairs.

Why do they want to work at camp?

What can they bring to camp that know other person can bring?

How would kids that you have worked with talk about you?

My favorites are:

Why do you want to work here?
What do you want to get out of camp?
What is your biggest weakness?

The first one always weeds out the rejects. If their first answer is "I need money" the applicant is pretty much done right then and there.

Hi,

Thanks very much for this comment. It help me to think about my ideals.


We also find them more same at: Teacher interview questions

Tks again and pls keep posting.

If you were to be a chocolate what would you be.

This is why i got hired according to my CD first year on my application form for ccusa theres a about me section and i wrote somehting like ' if i was chocolate i would be a areo beaucse there bubbly and its intense but then you get the smoothness of the chocolate which is consistant' etc.

Also about do they like sining songs , like if you dont like singnign then out loud you know

make them give you situations they have already had and how they dealt with them. conflict, etc. this is a great start to see how they deal and work with others and if they will be good for the job.

What motivates you to work here?