Page 103 - You're Hired! Interview Answers

thought-BaSed QueStionS examPLe inteRview anSweRS There are several things that are wrong with this response. First of all, the
interviewee uses “we” rather than “I”. From an interviewer’s perspective, they
will not know who made the suggestions, or who was actually the driving force
behind the improvements. Second, we have no information on the outcomes of
this improvement. The response is also not very well structured and therefore
difficult to follow. The interviewer’s job is as a result, made more difficult so
there would likely be many follow up questions.

Here’s the second possible response to the question:

3 Better answer:

“Yes, working in the accounts department of the bank, we were responsible

for drawing together the monthly management information for various parts of
the business. We were a small team of three that were responsible for working
on this. The real pressure points were always at was the end of the month
when we needed to quickly draw together all financial indicators and report
back to the various business units. The problem was that we were reliant on
them furnishing us with the raw data that we would then use to prepare our
reports. This was not always delivered in a timely fashion, owing to the business
pressure that they were under. We were therefore ourselves under pressure to
deliver and frequently missed the deadlines, which was clearly not satisfactory.
We were unable to put more resource into this, so a solution needed to be
found that would enable us to deliver on time. The simple solution would have
been to tell them that they just needed to deliver to us in time to enable us to
do our job, but the reality was that on, for example, a trading floor, the dealing
always took priority over admin-related stuff. What I’d noticed was that part
of the problem was the number of different reports that we were having to
produce for the different business units which all essentially showed the same
information, but just represented differently. The work was therefore repetitive
and there was scope for changing this. I suggested that we speak to all BUs
about this.

To support this, I mocked up a report that contained all of the essential
information that we provided in the different reports. With this, we were able to
have a discussion with the heads of BUs, outlining our difficulties and that if we
could agree on a common format then we would be able to meet our deadlines
better without putting pressure on them to meet their deadlines with us. They

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