When you're interviewing for jobs, you try to prepare as best you can by reviewing your resume, thinking about what questions might be asked and how you’ll answer them, and practicing your responses. Then you walk in and realize the interviewer wants to ask you situational interview questions.

What’s a situational interview question?

• There are two types: past experience questions and circumstantial questions.
• For past experience questions, you'll be asked to provide a negative situation from your professional experience, and detail how you successfully resolved it.
• For circumstantial questions, you'll be given a specific set of circumstances or challenges and asked how you would create a positive outcome from them.

How do you prepare for these types of questions?

Interviewers use past experience questions because they believe your past behavior makes a good indicator of your future behavior on the job. The interviewer wants to know how you’ve tackled previous challenges.

They’ll ask you to tell them about a difficult situation you’ve faced in your past work history – one that is relevant to the question being asked – that you resolved successfully.

Think of some examples before the interview, review those situations, and analyze them. What steps did you take? What words did you use? Become so familiar with your actions, and those of the others involved, that you can give the interviewer very specific details and demonstrate your knowledge of what it takes to create a positive outcome.

Part of the reason employers use circumstantial questions is to gauge your ability to think on your feet. For these questions, the interviewer will create a challenge for you to solve. It may be a situation you actually have faced in your work history, or you may be required to respond to a hypothetical scenario.

This can be difficult if you’ve never dealt with such challenges before, but use the same structure: specific actions leading to specific results, all handled in a smooth, professional way.

It’s impossible to anticipate in advance what specific situational interview questions will be asked, which makes it hard to prepare your answers. However, it’s fairly safe to expect the interviewer to investigate the following broad areas:

• organizational skills/time management skills
• leadership skills
• communication skills
• interpersonal skills/conflict resolution

In addition to the above examples, an interviewer may formulate more technical or focused situational questions pertaining specifically to your field or area of expertise.

Here are some common situational interview questions that you may encounter:

You have a deadline approaching and fear you will be unable to meet it. What do you do?

Describe a situation where you were in disagreement with a coworker and explain how you handled it.

A coworker frequently leaves early when the boss is not around, and asks you to cover for him. What would you do?

Please describe a project that you led from start to finish and describe your strategy for seeing it through.

While situational interviews may be drastically different from your past interview experiences, they're not impossible to conquer. It's a chance for you to show how you handle real work situations, your problem-solving style and what your personality is really like.

Whether you’re preparing a resume for your first job search, or because you're trying to find a new full-time job in a tight employment market, it’s time to look at your resume in a new light. Are you highlighting all of your marketable skills? Or just presenting a list of work responsibilities? Employers don't want to know what you did as much as what you can do.

Marketable job skills may be "hidden" in those everyday tasks you performed. If you can uncover them, they can be important additions to your resume and can help you land your next job.

The first step is to identify those skills. Take a look at your resume and distinguish your duties from your skills. Duties are the activities you perform on the job, such as generating reports, helping coordinate an industry conference, providing desktop support. Skills are the tools and techniques you use to accomplish these tasks: knowledge of certain software, communication abilities, leadership.

When you list the skills and abilities that were necessary to accomplish each of your duties, don't limit yourself to full-time jobs. Also include part-time work and volunteer positions. Say you served as the president of your homeowners association. Didn’t you accumulate leadership skills, negotiation abilities and a knowledge of budgeting processes? When you look at your resume this way, chances are you'll uncover a number of talents you hadn't considered.

For example, if you've worked as an administrative assistant, your duties probably included arranging meetings, drafting correspondence and answering the phone. The skills you developed as a result most likely included strong planning skills to ensure meetings went smoothly, strong communication abilities to accurately convey your manager's messages to staff and solid customer service skills to successfully interact with internal and external clients. Don’t forget technical skills, such as typing speed, research abilities and knowledge of Microsoft Office. These are the things that employers like to know.

Here are the top 5 “hidden” job skills you’re most likely to find when you look:

1. Planning: Scheduling meetings, writing letters, handling calls -- all involve planning.
2. Communication: Dealing with various departments and unique personalities to get work done.
3. Leadership: Stepping up and helping lead a plan to completion
4. Problem-solving: Identifying the root causes of problems, and coming up with solutions
5. Resource management: Getting done what you need to get done with the resources at hand

Being aware of your marketable skills will make you more competitive in the job market. Employers want people who have what it takes to perform well on the job, so make sure you make yourself stand out from other applicants. If you take the time to identify your true skills, you will realize just how valuable of an employee you are -- and employers should, too!