What If Your Co-Workers Aren’t Cutting It?

I just realized these tips are being read in various countries outside of the U.S. so let me provide a definition for the phrase: “cutting it.”

Cutting it means to be effective or successful.

So, we want to find out how this applicant would deal with a situation where the employees around him are not being effective or successful. More simply stated: they are not producing.

It could be worse than that. They could be doing things detrimental to the company.

Whatever the case may be, give the applicant the scenario where his co-workers aren’t being effective or successful. You could make it more specific with:

“They are spending all kinds of time chatting with each other or texting friends or hanging out on social media.”

Or you could say:

“They are producing shoddy products. Products that are causing upsets with customers.”

One more possible way of getting specific:

“There appears to be an agreement amongst them that they don’t have to be effective at what they do. They come in when they want, they leave when they want. Apparently there isn’t any supervision or … or there is a supervisor but he shares in this low level of ethics.”

I’m sure you can come up with a variety of specifics here.

Then let’s ask our applicant what he/she would do about this? And let’s ask when they would do something about this.

There’s probably something in our DNA that frowns on someone who rats out their friends or co-workers.

Okay, fast definition of rat out:

To rat someone out means to tell somebody in authority about something wrong that somebody else has done.

And I imagine you’ve heard the noun version of that:

“I’m not a rat.”

Well, this is all well and good. But the company exists to be profitable and those getting a paycheck have essentially agreed to do their best to help the company succeed.

When your applicant is given this set of circumstances and then asked how he/she would deal with it, you’re going to get some good insights into his character.

And that’s what we’re going for here.