About how often should Sir/Ma’am be used, in your opinion, during interviews, both over the phone and in person (if at all)? I’m thinking about 5% of the time might be good. This is for the city of Chicago only.
… and the other 95% of the time you … what, call them ‘Mac’ / ‘Honey’ ?
You mean you should use Sir or Madam in 5% of those times in a conversation when you could conceivably shove one of them into your statement? I have no actual knowledge, but that seems too high. Way too high. To say Yes Sir instead of Yes to me is a demonstration of either your immaturity or my senior citizen status, neither of which is good for you.
I don’t think I would ever use those words, unless I was talking to some very famous person who I had genuine and personal respect for. Like maybe a Nobel Prize winner or somesuch.
Now, calling them “Mr. Soandso”, or “Ms. Soandso”, is a different thing. If someone introduced himself as Bob Jones, I might call him Mr. Jones until I managed to ask him his preferred term of address.
Use the “Understood ‘You’” perhaps?
Never.
Once or twice during the interview process; more if you have been in the military.
(I recently hired a guy who used “Sir” to the extreme, but he had served in the Marines.)
Uh. I used to live in Chicago. No one that I knew called people sir or ma’am. (I was raised by hippies who thought it would be a good idea to send me to a school where we called our teachers by their first names. Sir or ma’am are pretty much foreign words to me.) I certainly never did, and I managed to get jobs.