How to answer common interview Question ?

COMMON INTERVIEW QUESTIONS … AND HOW TO ANSWER THEM

QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR DRIVE FOR ACHIEVEMENT

Tell me what you know about our business?

This question falls into this category as the new employer will be assuming that you want to join their firm because it is a sound and progressive career move for you. It is, isn’t it? That’s a hint … Again, this question will come up time after time. You expected it to be asked. Didn’t you? So you went onto the Internet and ‘Googled’ their name. You went onto the corporate website and noted down some facts and figures.

Well, you employ some 15,000 people in over 12 countries, your main areas of operation are in textiles and in paper, you’re …

Zzzzzzz – I’m asleep already. Any fool can regurgitate facts from a website. It doesn’t mean you know anything about the company at all.

Now while I’m not suggesting that you don’t quote them some devastatingly interesting statistics around their niche market specialisms etc., what I am saying is get behind the facts that they present to you.

What is their market share? Who are their competitors? What threats are there to their continuing growth? What opportunities might they wish to exploit? What did their CEO say in their last annual report?

By all means use the net, but don’t just settle for the party line. Find out who their competitors are and what they are saying. Find out the registered office of the company and telephone their marketing department and request that they send out to you a copy of the most recent annual report. By law in the UK, PLCs must comply with this request from any person. I have had some fun over the years reminding junior clerks of this!

Can you imagine interviewing five people and all of them trot out the same facts and figures taken from the same source? What if the sixth interviewee reminds you that at the moment you are only number two in the world market; however, the CEO has a strategy in place to take you to number one, and that involves … No contest! Get him/her back for a final interview!

I’m asking you to be a bit smarter than the average bear on this one. Be creative about how you illustrate what you know about their company.

Give an example of when you’ve experienced a setback

If you are asked this question at interview and you are unprepared for it you will probably make a hash of it. No question. It’s the interviewer mining that negativity seam again and your auto-response will be to go into denial about it. After all, someone as brilliant as me gets it right first time, every time, don’t I?

The trick here is to recall a time when, although the eventual outcome was positive, the success was down to either your intervention or your realization that what you were doing first time round was not working.

There’s no shame in admitting that your initial approach to a situation

Turned out to be less effective than you’d hoped, but through your well-developed sense of self-awareness, you changed some or all aspects of your approach and achieved the aim after all.

Interviewers will be expecting you to describe the situation, you’re thinking behind why you initially did what you did, how you reacted to the realization that it wasn’t working and maybe the reaction of others round about you. For example:

We had a situation in my last place where team leaders were identified as needing training in the various areas of management expertise in order for them to perform at the level at which the company expected them to. My initial thought was to get them an off-the-shelf training course which would supply these skills. I booked them onto a course at the local college, which meant they would attend on a half-day release basis on various days of the week. I informed their managers of what I had done, emphasizing how I had arranged it so that not all the team leaders would be away from work at the same time. A few weeks passed and although I was getting anecdotal evidence from the shop floor about the course, when I got the first report from the college which showed nearly half of the employees who were supposed to be attending only did so intermittently I was shocked. I immediately arranged for these guys to come in and see me on a one-to-one basis to find out why they hadn’t been going. During these interviews I discovered that many of them were actually scared of the traditional classroom environment and for most of them, the last time they had been in that environment was when they were 16! It was obvious to me then that this methodology wasn’t going to work for all of them, so I took a poll of all of the team leaders to identify who would rather not be in the classroom environment. Of the 26 team leaders seven said they were actively resistant to it and two were unsure. I then did some research and found that I could have these nine guys do an NVQbased qualification with the learning provider actually coming on site to deliver the more formal parts in our own training room. The qualification that they would gain would be broadly similar to those attending the college course, so that was a bonus. I also successfully negotiated a partial refund from the college for the guys we took out as they hoped to get more business from us in the future. In hindsight, perhaps I should have had more dialogue with those who were going to be affected by the training and sought to supply a training methodology to suit their needs.

This answer contains all the essential elements: an outline of the circumstances; your initial approach; your recognition that it wasn’t working; your gathering of data to come up with an alternative solution; the implementation of that solution and its subsequent success; and finally a recognition of where you went wrong in the first place.

What have you done to progress your education to date?

Obviously I cannot state here what you should be saying in terms of formal education because you will all have different experiences.

However, education comes in many forms – and you should talk with enthusiasm about this …

Well, I left school with a few GCSEs and one A level and started in company ABC’s sales department. The company sold house and car insurance via their call centres. After I had received my initial training for the job I was taken on for, there were a few opportunities for me to attend short training sessions such as assertiveness training and customer care etc., but I realised I was capable of a lot more so I asked my team leader if I could perhaps spend some time in other departments, such as the underwriters room. They seemed to be pleased with my enthusiasm so they let me spend a month watching and learning what they did in that department. As a result, when a vacancy came up I was the obvious choice for the role and got a position in there. When I was there, I asked the company to support me in going to night school to gain insurance qualification, and I’m pleased to say that they did – as you can see from my application.

This answer conveys several attractive qualities from the employer’s perspective: enthusiasm, loyalty, a willingness to broaden your skill base, a recognition of the importance of industry-specific formal qualifications and a desire to be proactive in your career.

Do you think you are overqualified?

Why on earth would an interviewer ask you this question? Didn’t they read your CV before they decided to interview you? You can safely assume that this is not really an issue for them otherwise they would have discarded you at first sift. What they are really trying to gauge is if they have been lucky enough to be able to buy a Ferrari for the cost of a BMW. Turn the tables on them.

 ‘Why do you think I’m overqualified? Tell me what your concern is?’

Wait patiently for an answer. Do not be surprised if they are flustered and struggle to explain. If they respond that the concern is that you are going to get bored, reply with something along the lines of that you are dedicated and don’t start projects that youdon’t complete. Say

‘My hope is that I can do the job sufficiently well to be recognised for this and maybe this will help me progress in the company in due course’.

Do you mind reporting to someone who is younger than you?

Easily countered with, ‘absolutely not, I respect competency and position and have no problem working with people who have obviously proven themselves in the past to be worthy of their position.’

Which is more important to you, the job itself or your salary?

Ah, now I bet you are thinking that they are trying to get you to admit that you are a greedy, grasping sod, now aren’t you? Interviewers are realistic you know. Whilst surveys tell us that money isn’t always the most important thing about work, there are damn few of us who would work for free! It’s OK to mention salary in your response.

Like most people I suppose I am looking for a salary and benefits

Package commensurate with my experience and qualifications, and the relative worth you have already placed upon the role. However to me it’s crucial to be in a job I enjoy doing and feel that I am making a genuine contribution to the success of the Company.

Why should we employ you rather than one of the other candidates?

Ouch! You didn’t see that one coming, did you? Should you really be negative about the other candidates to paint you in a better light? Of course not. How could you be? You don’t know them from Adam! The interviewer wants to know what unique quality makes you the best person for the job. To differentiate yourself from the other candidates, you must show that you have researched the company thoroughly and studied the job description. You should be prepared to demonstrate clearly how your skills, qualifications, and accomplishments match the employer’s specific needs. It is important to convey genuine enthusiasm for the post. You might want to finish with:

Of course I have no idea of the quality of the other candidates, although they must be of a high quality for you to interview them. However I would like to think that by the end of this interview I will have done enough to convince you that I have everything that you are looking for and that I am the best choice in this instance.

 In your job, what is ‘good enough’?

Big flashing green light! Big flashing green light! This is a personal invitation, copperplate script on hand-tooled vellum, delivered by a footman in fetching white stockings and scarlet slippers! This is your opportunity not only to underline your work ethic, but also to reinforce your approach to quality.

Well, it would be easy for me to sit here and say that to be good enough I have to produce the work required of me to an acceptable quality and on time. However, my own personal standards are higher than that. I like to look for ways to add that little bit extra to what I do. It may be something as simple as hand delivering something to someone rather than putting it into the internal mail, or producing a set of comparison figures to contrast against, rather than assuming the reader of the new figures will do that anyway. I suppose I am an advocate of continuous improvement – not change for change’s sake, but I’m always looking for a better way of doing things whilst respecting existing traditions.

QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR STRATEGIC THINKING

You may think that this section is not really for you and be tempted to skip by it because you’ve never worked in a role where you’ve been expected to think ‘strategically’ – don’t!! Strategy is not all about toplevel corporate decision-making or ‘blue-sky thinking’ needing the mental capacity of Einstein. It’s about thinking further ahead than the completion of the current task. I bet you do it all the time but just don’t give it such a grand name as ‘strategy’. Once you’ve read some of my examples, have a think about times when you have looked further than the end of your nose. Maybe it was simply organising your diary or even playing the ‘long game’ in terms of office politics.

‘In what past situations have you shown most evidence of visionary/strategic thinking?’

This question is aimed directly at you to get you to describe an occasion where you thought about things from a wider perspective. The trick here is not to go into too much detail because that will ultimately bore your interviewers. They will not have the same terms of reference that you have and will not be able to know about the characters involved. Like all your answers in the interview, they should be concise but with sufficient detail to get the highlights across. A typical answer would be:

In my department we basically processed papers that came from another department. Once we had done our bit, the papers went to a third department for them to work on. It meant that each of the three departments was only aware of their bit of the puzzle. Looking at each piece of the process like that was just the way things had always been done. In reality what it meant was that there was lots and lots of communication via e-mails and telephone conversations throughout the day where people were seeking confirmation of something being done or clarification on a point, etc. We were even on different floors in the building, so nipping into the next office wasn’t on either. I took a proposal to my boss outlining my plans for multidisciplinary teams, teams made up of representatives of all three departments. My rationale was that we could each have a client base or set of key accounts so that between us we would handle all their needs from enquiry to dispatch. It also meant that the client could have a single

 oint of contact with our firm for all their enquiries, no matter what the subject was. I explained to my boss that there would be training needs for us all where we would all need to acquire the skills necessary to do two jobs previously done by others. It would also mean some office moving and equipping, because I thought that we’d need new, round tables, so each team could work facing each other making it easier for information to flow round the team.We had had a problem with people leaving before due to the repetitive nature of the work, and I was sure that this new way of working would help counter that, due to the increase in variety for the individual. The customer would receive a slicker operation too. I’m pleased to say that we trailed it in our branch and it worked so well that we rolled it out throughout the country. My boss complimented me on ‘seeing the bigger picture’ and

made mention of it during my appraisal.

This answer not only shows a continuous improvement attitude, but that you were able to demonstrate an ability to think of the wider implications for the organisation, not just the team you were working in.

What do you see as the main threats to our business in the long term?

What can we do to ensure long-term success?

As I have said earlier in this book, most employers will expect you to have researched them to some extent on the internet or in the library. This approach will give you lots of statistics and facts about them – ones that they wish you to know. What a company’s website will not give you is information on their competitors or the state of the market that they are in, or developments that their competitors have that may influence their position in the marketplace. My advice to you then is that when you do your research, find out who their direct competitors are and go to their websites too. Try to get a global viewpoint of their market as a whole. Ask yourself what external influences there are on their products or services. For example, changes in legislation, such as the introduction of smoke-free workplaces may have a negative effect on organisations that make products related to smoking – tobacco, paper, filters, etc. – but may have a positive effect on those

organisations providing employers with ‘no smoking’ signs, or who manufacture smoking shelters etc. A typical answer would be:

As your organisation manufactures bread and bakery products, I believe that it may be subject to external influences such as the price of grain because poor harvests in grain-producing countries can have a dramatic effect on your raw material costs. I’m sure the Atkins Diet craze had a negative effect too through people consuming less carbohydrates, but I think these effects are more likely to be short lived. I’d bet that if we had a long, dry summer, more people would be having barbecues, and as hamburgers are very popular for barbecues, then people will need more bread rolls to put them in. During my research on your company and its competitors [it’s great if you can actually TELL them you’ve done research] I see that XYZ Bakeries and Ubiquitous Bakeries have both opened new plants in this part of the country. This would tell me that this is still a growing market for them to invest in new plant, and they might see benefits from economies of scale as they get larger, which would drive their costs down, making them more profitable and therefore more competitive. I also saw that XYZ have developed a new process which reduces the baking time of a loaf by 20 per cent. This will also make them tough to compete against. I would say in order to secure the long-term success of your business you will need to ensure that you are keeping up with technological advances in the manufacture of your product. You will also have to tie your suppliers down to deals that secure your supply of raw material, with minimal fluctuations in price, and you will need to ensure that your distribution system is at least as good as your competitors to enable you to keep abreast of them in terms of getting goods to market as fresh as is possible.

This answer demonstrates your commercial and business acumen by offering the employer a chance to see that you can develop an opinion based on various sources of information – and not just regurgitate the corporate blurb.

Tell me about a recent situation when you had to build a relationship with a new colleague. Why was the relationship important?

This question can be answered equally well from the point of view of a subordinate or a manager. As a manager your relationship with your direct reports will often influence how well your department performs, therefore it’s imperative you get your team pulling for you as much as they are pulling for themselves. A typical answer might be:

When I took over as Team Leader in my last job, I realised that I’d have to gain credibility really quickly. I decided not to trot out the old platitudes about ‘my door always being open’ etc., but rather tried to make myself seem grounded and definitely on their side. I knew that one of the team had applied for my job and had the potential to undermine me from within, so one of my first tasks was to take him aside (I did 1-2-1 meetings with all of my staff in my first week) and shared with him my views on being new in the role. I told him I needed someone whom I could trust, to be my guide to office politics and to steer me through the minefield of the organisation’s policies and procedures. He was delighted to be separated out from the rest of the team like that, to be treated like a trusted aide so quickly. However, I knew this was a high-risk strategy as he might have reacted negatively in a fit of pique, but thankfully it turned out well.

From a subordinate’s position, a good answer might be:

When I first joined the team I realised that I had to fit in really quickly. I made sure I asked lots and lots of questions relating to my job, but I took an interest in people’s personal lives too – without prying of course. I made sure that I remembered people’s partner’s names etc., and to ask how their children had got on at sports day, for example, if a colleague happened to mention she was excited about her son taking part. I was scrupulous in meeting deadlines or getting back to people when I said I would and I was always honest enough to admit when I didn’t know something or couldn’t help someone. That way people would trust me and I would be seen as credible and reliable.

How do you behave when you meet new people?

The reality might be that you might behave differently each time you meet new people. However, they really wouldn’t ask you a question like this to get such a bland answer as that would they? No. If you didn’t answer ‘no’ at this point, go stand in the corner and come and see me at home time.

What they are getting at here is – are you self-aware enough of your own behaviours and how they affect others? Can you adapt depending on the character or nature of who you are with?

I’m conscious that I don’t dominate the conversation when I meet new people. I genuinely like people, so I ask a lot of questions – not enough to be accused of prying, but I always try and remember the details of what they say to me. Maybe it’s their interests, or things they’ve said about their family. I then drop it into conversation and the response is usually positive.

Why, in your opinion, do customers choose our products and services?

The initial question here is almost designed for anyone who ever took a marketing course in the past or has a basic grasp of common sense (I know, I know, it’s in short supply).

Well I think first and foremost your organisation has built up its brand to a point where people automatically think of you when they think of (their product/service here). My view is that people regard Company XYZ as one of the leaders in their field supplying this particular market in such a way that people know what to expect: a good product at a good price at the right time.

How could we make them more competitive?

‘It is a basic fact of business that you can only make more profit by either (a) selling more product at the same margin, or (b) increasing your margin, and you can only increase your margin by either raising selling prices or reducing selling costs. I don’t really know enough about your particular business model to offer a serious opinion on what I think you should do. Do we have time to explore this further? ‘

\Here again we have used honesty in admitting we don’t have all the facts. The candidate who makes bold statements on how the people interviewing him have actually got it all wrong thus far is not brave, merely foolish! Again, you have shown good time awareness by asking if there is enough time to go deeper into this question.

What are the market trends that affect us?

Here is a chance for you to shine. You NEED to know the factors that affect your prospective employer’s business.

For example, if they make items which are not considered to be good for us or the environment – cigarettes, sweets, 4 × 4 cars, nuclear reactors, etc. – then you should be aware of the mood of the country at that moment. Maybe there has been a lot of press coverage on childhood obesity and it’s a boiled sweet manufacturer you are trying to work for. You might want to lead with:

Has Company XYZ examined using sugar substitutes in its products?

I see the Chancellor has put the road tax levy up again for SUV vehicles. Is the industry lobbying Parliament to try and have this decision reversed? With the advent of biofuels, I’d have thought that the type of vehicles you make were ripe for this change in motoring.

There is no substitute for research here. Prospective employers will choose every single time someone who demonstrates a knowledge of their market over and above a candidate with specific knowledge of their business they’ve gleaned from the corporate website.

What opportunities have you had to identify cost savings in the past? Give an example.

Again, this is your most direct opportunity to demonstrate your contribution to the bottom line. If every employee came up with a single idea which saved the company money or increased its profitability, then that company would be successful beyond the dreams of avarice. It may seem like Utopia, but it’s what employers want. Do yourself a favour and stand out from the herd by showing how you have been and will continue to be a positive item on the balance sheet!

In our department we kept a number of forms which employees needed to complete, such as a ‘car registration form’ which entitled them to a free parking pass on site, a ‘holiday requisition form’ and a ‘bereavement leave application form’, etc. This involved them leaving their place of work and calling in at our office. Employees always came during working hours, not break times. Sometimes they brought a mate with them to keep them company. I thought it was daft for them to come to us and the forms should be more local to them. My first thought was to supply all our team managers with paper copies so they would have their own supply, but then I remembered that we had a company-wide intranet site where forms could ‘sit’ and be downloaded only when needed. I had the IT people put them up on the site and then sent a global e-mail telling people about the changes. As a result, the traffic slowed to a trickle and lots of time was saved by people no longer coming over to our office.

How did you choose where to make the savings?

Our company was on the verge of going into austerity measures and we were all asked to think of ways to save money.We had lots of the usual ideas: using both sides of paper, trimming faxes so no blanks went through the machine, doing away with Post-it notes, etc. It just dawned on me that the biggest cost for us was people’s time, so the more time we could save, the better. I then realised that it was actually other people’s time in coming to see me and my colleagues that was the biggest waste, so I came up with the intranet idea.

When you come up with your own answer to this question, be sure to incorporate an element of you comparing options and going for the most practical/cost-effective/easily achieved, etc.

How much money do you think you saved?

At first we couldn’t think how we were going to quantify the savings, but then we simply took an average number of calls a day we used to receive asking for forms, multiplied that by the average number of minutes the whole journey to and from our office took and then multiplied that by an average hourly rate figure given to us by finance. We reckoned on saving over £4,000 a year.

Never, ever, make wild claims on any savings you made – you might very well be asked to justify them.

Tell us about a recent time when you had to adapt to a major change. How did you adapt? What was difficult about the transition?

The clue to a good answer for this question is in the use of the word ‘major’. Your interviewer is not looking for some answer in relation to how you changed suppliers for the photocopy paper for example. This is BIG change they are on about. Granted, you may not have been subject to big change, as not everybody has, so if you haven’t, just say so.

I worked for an organisation which was a plc and the culture and style of how we worked was very much as you’d expect from a large organisation.We had the best equipment, flexible working practices, cheap gym membership, etc. However, the company’s shares were bought by a group of venture capitalists and that’s when the changes began. After a while, once the dust had settled, we started to get visits from people who were working on a ‘synergy project’.We soon found out that this meant they were looking for ways to identify savings by seeing where we had functions and processes that could be carried out by the new owners’ existing staff and they could cut costs by axing people and jobs at our end. After the HR function was moved to their head office along with finance and marketing, we realised that ‘we weren’t in Kansas anymore’ and that things were going to be a lot different. Where we always had a human being to talk to in relation to personnel matters, we now had to talk to a voice on the end of the phone and our calls were logged and we were given a ‘case number’. Most people hated this and many complaints were lodged about it. I had heard of the ‘Business Partner’ approach to HR which has first-line managers carrying out many of the less complex functions of HR. I looked into this and suggested to my department head that all firstline managers get a grounding in discipline, grievance, recruitment and the like so that we could deal with our team members’ basic stuff without them having to phone this hated ‘hotline’. He put the idea up the chain of command and I’m pleased to say that we had a number of seminars on personnel subjects and we were given basic guide books to help us out. So what started off as a terrible situation turned out to be one where a lot of us were pleased to be receiving new and interesting training, and we provided a solution to the problem of there not being a human face there when people had problems.

Tell us about a recent time when you questioned or challenged a way of working.

_ why did you question it?

_ What alternative did you suggest?

_ To what extent were your ideas used?

I worked in a factory where most of the jobs were not particularly complex, but nevertheless there were training periods required for someone to become competent in each of the roles they might be asked to fulfil. The system the company adopted was one where an inexperienced employee would work with someone who had more experience (although sometimes not a lot more) for around two weeks. The team leader would then go through a checklist and tick off all the various boxes which were supposed to indicate that the new person was competent in that role. I was asked to take part in what is known as an ‘intervention’. This is where a focus group made up of employees from various departments around the factory would examine a particular issue and find ways to resolve whatever the perceived problem was. The problem we were looking at was the quality of training of new starts. During this intervention, I was given the task of reviewing these ‘competency profiles’ as the checklists were known.

After a little while I noticed that the wording of these checklists was weighted towards what inputs the employee had been given. For example: ‘Has the employee been shown where the red emergency stop button is located?’ and ‘Has the employee been told what the correct personal protective equipment to wear is?’ What struck me was that someone could have been told vital information – such as how to halt the machine in an emergency – but there was no guarantee that they had absorbed this information and could put it into use! As a lot of the plant and equipment was potentially dangerous, I flagged this up to the intervention leader. I suggested that we change the wording on all the checklists to record that the individual has demonstrated their knowledge, not just record the fact that they’d been informed. For example: ‘Can the employee demonstrate the location of and correct usage of the red emergency stop button?’ and ‘Can the employee demonstrate the correct personal protective equipment they must wear and how to use it?’ I also flagged up the fact that we had team leaders who were signing off people as competent on a machine or process that they themselves had not been trained on. After a discussion with the members of the intervention team, we made this one of our key recommendations of the project. As a result, each team leader was tasked with rewriting each of the competency profiles in use in their area and they also had to be signed off as competent on each machine or process that they were signing other people off on.

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