The key to answering behavioral interview questions and answers is not as difficult as you may think.
Just talk about a problem you had, what you did to improve the situation, and then what the result was of your actions.
Annette is an Administrative Assistant who is applying for an Executive Assistant position with a top pharmaceuticals company.
She was told she would be facing a behavioral interview and the recruiter told her she needed to be prepared for a certain behavioral questions.
How to answer this behavioral question:
“How have you helped the department you supported run in a more effective manner?”
The recruiter that set me up for this interview said this was one of the questions I will be asked.
Can you show me how to answer this question?
Don’s Answer:
To answer this question, you need to demonstrate a variety of competencies that show how you identified a problem, an idea to improve it, and how you offered a solution to solve the problem.
You need to demonstrate your ability to: recognize problems, influence others, organize information. As well as demonstrate interpersonal and analytical skills.
Question: “How have you helped the department you supported run in a more effective manner?”
Problem or Task:
In my last job, I worked in the sales department and directly supported members of the sales team. All of the sales representatives used Excel to save and mange their sales transactions on their own laptop computers.
Even the regional managers individually tracked, managed, and kept their own spreadsheets of sales data. It was like we had 30 different sales databases. It was my job to consolidate all of the sales managers and sales team members data into a single spreadsheet so I could present it to the national sales manager.
This was a very time consuming task and I figured that the national sales manager could greatly benefit from having current data at his fingertips instead of waiting for me to compile the data every week. Every time he reviewed my reports, they were based on data was at least a week old.
Sometimes a sales representative would be out of town for two weeks or more and I would not have access to their data until they returned to the office. This made for some very out-dated sales reports, and my sales manager sometimes did not know we were going to make our numbers for the month until it was over.
Action:
I met with my manager to discuss how the national sales manager could benefit from real-time data instead week old data. This way, he could be more reactive to sales trends instead of making decisions based on last weeks data. I made a suggestions as to how we could setup this new system and volunteered to help make it happen.
Result:
I coordinated a meeting with our IT, Programming, and sales managers to design a new system using Microsoft Access and Excel that allowed sales representatives to quickly and easily upload their sales data into a master database over the Internet, no matter where they are. Even when they are out of town or at client site.
This allowed any manager to have access to real-time data and the get the status of each project so they can make more informed decisions.
Answering behavioral interview questions is not difficult once you see how to do it. You can easily apply this method of answering to almost any type of question.
Inside The Complete Interview Answer Guide, you’ll find many behavioral interview questions and answers. The 201+ sample answers in the guide will quickly help you craft your own professional answers for ALL types of interview questions for any occupation.
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