Page 79 - You're Hired! Interview Answers

taSk-BaSed QueStionS examPLe inteRview anSweRS Middle management level

At this level you can anticipate that the questioner will be probing still more
and be expecting you to be more ‘managerial’ in your answers – in other
words, to consider the wider consequences of your actions and multiple
factors/resources that had to be organised to deliver the result.

Here are some examples.

interviewer: one of the competencies we are interested
in is monitoring and controlling; can you give me an
example of a situation where your approach to monitoring
was important to achieving an objective?

7 Poor answer:

“Yes, I think that in operational situations such as the one you have here in

the dispatch department it’s really important that you have a good feel for
how everything is running. I use the PRIME 2 system; I think it does a really
good job of monitoring batch delivery. If you set it up right you can get instant
progress reports, for example relating to particular consignments or to any
delays in the system. I relied on it a lot in my last job because it took a lot of
the guesswork out of work scheduling. So my approach is to make sure that

there is a reliable system in place and I think PRIME 2 is hard to beat.”

There is not much evidence of CaR being applied here. While the answer
might be OK as an advert for PRIME 2 (whatever that is!), it doesn’t give the
interviewer much information about this person’s approach to monitoring
and controlling. In particular, it fails to give the required concrete example.
The mistake here is to ‘hear’ the last part of the question, ‘your approach to
monitoring’, but to miss the all-important ‘give me an example’.

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