Page 83 - You're Hired! Interview Answers

taSk-BaSed QueStionS examPLe inteRview anSweRS the situation and asking them to buy into the plan. There was a lot of
resistance initially; they were worried about the implications for their bonuses
if their territories changed too much. So, plan B was to sit them all down and
agree how territories would be shared. The third step was to create a transition
team and to allocate all the tasks from the project plan so that everyone knew
who was responsible for what. The result was that everything got done on time

and we were all co-located in the Leeds office by the start of May.”

interviewer: So what were the key obstacles?

3 Better answer:

“Apart from winning the sales managers over, the biggest challenge was the

sheer amount of detail involved. Everything from telephone numbers to getting
the sales reps’ cards reprinted; strong project management was essential to
keeping track of it all. The scariest moment was when it looked as if the lease
on the extension to the Leeds office would not come through in time. I had to
call a special meeting with our contracts people to make the seriousness of the
situation clear – I wasn’t prepared to accept any delay in the merger – and, in

fairness, they pulled out all the stops and got the contracts signed.”

Look back at the list of interviewer’s objectives we gave at the end of the ‘poor
answer’ section above. These answers cover all the relevant ground and would
leave the interviewer pretty clear about the interviewee’s style of delivering this
kind of task. Key things to note are:

n the answer itself is structured – ‘firstly’, ‘secondly’, etc.
n the question asks about obstacles; a specific obstacle is described,

together with how it was overcome
n timescales and objectives are described
n there is sufficient detail that you can tell what the person actually did.

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