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How To Use Stories to Answer These 6 Challenging Interview Questions
By Melanie Winograd
Your work experiences are made up of real life stories. As you read the following questions, mentally sift through your previous jobs to unearth predicaments that challenged your skills, but you solved them with original thinking and action. It may be helpful to first consider these six topics:
Interviewing Topics
1. Teamwork
2. Conflict
3. Persuasion
4. Leadership
5. Achieving success
6. Overcoming obstacles
Then, write a sentence about three layers of experience within each theme. You will want to briefly note the:
1. Situation or Task to be undertaken
2. Your Action taken
3. The Result
For example, let's take item 1.
1. Describe a time when you were in charge of a tough situation—an impossible deadline or an incomplete staff. How did you overcome the challenge?
Situation: It was a busy holiday season at the retail store I managed. We had three separate activities at the store on one particular day. We were celebrating a grand opening of a sister store across town, having an in-store event with a local celebrity, and a radio remote in the parking lot driving traffic into the store. The regional director was also in town and wanted me to escort him through the store to see how we had updated to match the new store, meet the celebrity, and get him interviewed on the radio station doing the remote broadcast outside.
Action taken: Knowing it would be impossible to go in three directions at once, I had alerted the three strongest members of my team and given each one of them the assignment to manage each event. We all had walkie-talkies, were in constant communication as I directed all the events while showing off my store to the director.
Result: The day's events proceeded smoothly, our sales record for one day was broken, and I was promoted to be special events manager for the region.
2. Tell me about a time when your plan had to be changed due to an obstacle that was unplanned. What was the obstacle and how did you modify the plan? How did the change affect the outcome?
3. Describe when you were in charge of a critical situation. What made it highly sensitive? How did you choose your method and what was the outcome?
4.Talk about a time when your leadership skills were challenged? Why were
they rejected and how did you manage the situation?
5. Talk about a situation when you had multiple priorities and the demands to produce kept changing. How did you handle that situation?
6 Talk about a situation when you had to make a decision without all the necessary information. How did you compensate for the missing information?
About the Author
CareerMogul.com's online career resources consist of a FREE virtual career education center and an experienced team of certified professionals providing all job level career coaching and résumé services via telephone and online chat messaging. Visit http://resumewriting.careermogul.com for full access to our virtual career education center.
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