FIREFIGHTER RECRUITMENT GUIDE
The Situational Judgement Test
The Situational Judgement Test — SJT — puts you in a short written scenario from station or incident-ground life, then gives you four possible actions someone could take next. Your job isn't to say what you would do. It's to rate how effective each of the four actions actually is, one at a time, using only what the scenario tells you.
It sits alongside the Behavioural Styles Questionnaire early in most UK fire and rescue service recruitment processes, usually ahead of interview. Both are testing the same thing from different angles — the judgement and values a panel will later assess through your own stories, applied here to someone else's situation instead.
The format
Four actions per scenario. You rate all four — independently, on their own merits — using this scale:
- You are not picking a best and a worst, and you are not ranking the four actions against each other. Every action gets its own rating, and two actions can honestly share the same one.
- Untimed, and typically takes around 30–35 minutes to complete.
- No specialist fire service knowledge is needed. Answer only from what the scenario actually tells you — not from a procedure you happen to know, and not from an assumption about what usually happens on a job like this.
- Rate what's on the page, not what you would have done. An action can be the right one in that scenario even if it isn't the choice you'd have made yourself — rating it low because you'd have done something different entirely is the single most common way candidates lose marks on this test.
How to approach it
Find the main priority first. Before rating anything, read the scenario once just to establish what actually matters most in it — a safety risk, a wellbeing concern, a legal or procedural line, a colleague or member of the public who needs something specific. Every one of the four actions should then be judged against whether it serves that priority, not against how sensible it sounds as a general idea.
Trace the consequence to the person it lands on. For each action, ask what actually happens next, and to whom. An action that sounds calm and proportionate but leaves the most at-risk person in the scenario unhelped is not, in fact, a calm and proportionate action. Naming who is affected, specifically, is usually enough to separate Fairly Effective from Effective.
“Do nothing” and “escalate immediately” are not automatically wrong. Most candidates carry an instinct that the calmest, most moderate- sounding option is usually right, and mark the two extremes down by reflex. That instinct costs marks often enough to be worth unlearning. Sometimes the situation is already properly in hand and taking action would only get in the way — doing nothing is the effective choice. Sometimes the scenario is genuinely beyond what should be handled alone, and calling for more resource or a more senior decision immediately is the effective choice. Rate the actual action against the actual scenario, not against how it sounds on paper.
What this looks like
A scenario written for this guide — not reused from any test provider's published material — with all four actions rated and explained.
THE SCENARIO
Your appliance is first on scene at a single-vehicle collision on a quiet residential street — a car has left the road and struck a garden wall. The driver, a woman in her thirties, is out of the vehicle and sitting on the kerb. She's holding her right arm and wincing, but breathing normally and answering questions clearly. There's a strong smell of fuel coming from underneath her car. Your watch manager has gone to check the vehicle and is already calling for the engine to be isolated. A neighbour has come out onto the pavement and is filming the scene on their phone rather than helping. A small crowd of six or seven people has gathered on the opposite side of the road, a couple of them standing close to the leaking car to get a better look.
ACTION A
You help the driver move a short distance away from her car, onto the pavement, before starting to check her arm — even though this delays the check by about a minute.
EffectiveThe fuel leak is the most serious, time-critical hazard in this scenario, and it's more dangerous right now than a possible arm injury in a casualty who is conscious, breathing and talking normally. The usual first-aid instinct — don't move an injured person unnecessarily — has a recognised exception: an immediate danger to the casualty overrides it. Moving her first addresses that danger directly, and the short delay to a non-critical check is a reasonable trade-off. This is the action that correctly identifies and acts on the scenario's real priority.
ACTION B
You ask the crowd to move further back from the leaking car, then go to help your watch manager with the vehicle.
Fairly EffectiveBoth parts of this are genuinely useful. Crowd safety matters, and a second pair of hands on the vehicle check is sensible. But neither part does anything for the driver, who is still sitting close to the leak with a real, if minor, injury. It isn't a wrong action — it just isn't aimed at the biggest risk in the scenario, which is what keeps it below Effective.
ACTION C
You tell the driver to stay exactly where she is in case moving her makes a hidden injury worse, and go to help move the crowd back instead.
IneffectiveThis applies a real and normally correct first-aid principle — don't move a casualty unnecessarily — to the one situation where it doesn't apply: an active hazard nearby. It sounds careful, and a candidate who knows the principle without the exception can talk themselves into rating it highly. But it leaves her exactly where the risk is, while your attention goes to a lower-priority problem. That's why it's Ineffective rather than a weaker version of Effective — the driver's situation isn't improved by it at all.
ACTION D
You ask the person filming to stop, citing the driver's privacy, and stay with them until they delete the footage.
Counter-productiveThe reasoning behind this isn't unreasonable — a casualty's dignity and privacy is a genuine professional concern, and on a quieter day this might be exactly the right call. But right now it pulls you away from an active fuel leak and an injured casualty to manage a dispute you have no authority to compel someone to resolve, ahead of every higher-priority problem on scene. It doesn't just fail to help — it spends time and attention the scenario doesn't have to spare, on a conflict of your own making. That's the line between Counter-productive and Ineffective: this doesn't just miss the priority, it creates a problem that wasn't there before.
40 situations, 160 responses — every one rated
Twenty scenarios drawn from the full bank each attempt, every response rated on the same four-point scale, with a breakdown of where your judgement is strongest against the nine national PQAs.
See how it worksOne more thing worth knowing: some UK fire and rescue services now test judgement and processing speed side by side — an SJT plus a short, timed cognitive-ordering task, in place of a traditional numerical reasoning paper. If you haven't seen that second format before, Number Sort is free to try, no subscription needed, and our task-based assessment guide covers the wider format these services use.
Firefighter Mentor is independent and is not affiliated with the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC), any fire and rescue service, or the commercial test publishers whose situational judgement test formats this guide describes. The scenario above is original and was written for this guide — it is not reproduced from, or based on, any published test material.