Find a SART Coordinator

Interview Candidates

Interviewing a SART coordinator requires finding out about the individual's personal strengths, decisionmaking skills, and work style/experience. The key to hiring the right coordinator is knowing the right questions to ask during the interview. Standardizing the questions helps to identify extraordinary candidates among a pool of applicants. Interview questions that can help you evaluate the best candidate might include the following:

• Personal Strengths and Weaknesses
• What is your personal mission statement?
• List five words that describe your character.
• What specific strengths do you bring to a SART?
• What are your limitations?
• Give an example of a time that you felt you went above and beyond the call of duty in your previous position.
• What challenges you about other people and how do you deal with it?
• Why are you leaving your present job?
• Decisionmaking and Management Skills
• How do you make important decisions?
• How do you prioritize responsibilities?
• What risks did you take in previous jobs and what were the results?
• How do you decide between two equally good options?
• Tell me about a time when you had to deal with conflict on the job.
• Core SART membership includes representatives from advocacy, law enforcement, health care, prosecution, and the crime lab. In your opinion, which agency is most important?
• Ability To Work Collaboratively With Diverse People and Community Groups
• By providing examples, convince me that you can adapt to a wide variety of people, situations, and environments.
• Give me a specific occasion in which you conformed to a policy with which you did not agree.
• Give me an example of a time when you were able to successfully communicate with another person even when that individual may not have personally liked you (or vice versa).
• Are you comfortable working with groups and able to negotiate complex group interactions? (Explain.)
• Work Style and Experience
• How would you go about establishing your credibility with a multidisciplinary team?
• How would you describe your work style?
• What was your single most noteworthy achievement or contribution in your current job?
• Tell me a time when you had to give someone difficult feedback.
• What changes would you make on your previous job?
• Give examples of ideas that you had or that you implemented.

The overall goal during an interview is to learn as much about each candidate as possible and determine if the candidate's knowledge, skills, and abilities include both leadership and administrative qualities. Most important, it will be crucial for the coordinator to respect the roles of each team member and to commit to victim-centered and criminal justice objectives.