Fire Department Promotional Oral Interview Questions

Oral Interviews

In the Fire Department Oral Interview section, Fire Captain/Fire Lieutenant members will have full access to over  75 pages of promotional oral interview questions and answers. Battalion Chief Members will have unlimited access to an additional 30 pages of promotional oral interview questions and answers. These questions and answers were developed through years of writing, proctoring, and rating promotional examinations. All the questions you will see have appeared, in one form or another, on fire officer and battalion chief exams throughout the country.

Our team has vetted these answers and concepts. We are confident that, when coupled with your style and delivery, our responses and rationale will help guide you to be successful in the oral interview portion of your assessment center. We have been using these exact questions, answers and rationale for years when coaching our many clients, from across the country, for their promotional exams with successful results.

Our goal is to ensure that our Fire Captain/Fire Lieutenant and Battalion Chief members have developed a strong foundation for approaching the oral interview. We believe that, after reviewing this section, our members will be exposed to many (if not all) of the concepts that will be tested during their oral interview. Preparation is the key to achieving a high score in the oral interview and securing your promotion.

We know that it is difficult to hear a question and rapidly formulate an adequate answer, especially under the added pressure of the raters staring at you from across the table. Candidates that have thought about and developed ideas and responses to all of the traditional concepts typically discussed in an oral interview will usually score higher then the candidate who is contemplating a topic for the first time during their interview.

In addition, both Fire Captain/Fire Lieutenant and Battalion Chief members will have access to the following custom instructional videos:

• “Oral Interviews.”
• “Understanding Raters”

These videos assist our members with how to prepare for their interview in the following ways:

• Discuss the five dimensions that are typically utilized to score most oral interviews
• What to do in the days leading up to the interview
• What to do the day of the interview
• Provides guidelines to follow when responding to questions
• Teaches the member how to read subtle clues from your raters about their responses to your answers
• Provides insight into how the assessment center operates from the rater’s perspective, and
• Describes how the raters are able to effectively score your assessment center (even though they may be from an organization unfamiliar with your department)

We are very confident that the questions, answers and rationale provided to our members are very representative of what they will encounter during the oral interview portion of their assessment center. Our Fire Captain/Fire Lieutenant, and Battalion Chief members oftentimes tell us that the questions that we provide were the exact questions asked during their promotional oral interview. Even if the questions are different, our members will have a strong background, on a variety of fire service topics, which will allow them to maximize their score during their oral interview.

Click below to see FREE examples:

Sample Captain/Lieutenant Oral Interview Questions

Sample Battalion Chief Oral Interview Questions

Chief Fedak is a Battalion Chief with the Orange County Fire Authority. Due to state conflict of interest laws, the services provided by AFO may not be offered to current OCFA employees holding the rank of Battalion Chief or lower.