The remainder of this chapter contains typical interview questions, both behavioral and traditional, and sample story-based responses to them. The question is in the headline. Note that many of these stories contain emotional content to draw the interviewer in and help him or her identify with the interviewee.
During the Y2K project I led in 1999, our area had a power outage at approximately 10:40 p.m. New Year’s Eve that threatened to shut down our systems at the midnight hour - which was abjectly critical for Y2K. I instructed our lead technician to pull the battery backups from the cafeteria refrigerators for use in our server room, which at the time did not have an individual backup power system. The power outage lasted until nearly 3 a.m., but our use of the battery backups saved 100 percent of our rolled data. Although using the backups caused all dairy products in the refrigerators to spoil, the cost of restocking the dairy products was later determined to be less than 2 percent of the projected customer data loss to the business had we not used my solution.
The trucks at the retail store at which I worked as an assistant manager came loaded by personnel at a distribution center, box-by-box. After receiving a few trucks, I noticed that my employees were unloading broken merchandise that took a lot of time to clean up before the rest of the truck could be finished. The broken glass, paint, or whatever material it was prevented the employees from proceeding farther into the truck, causing more person-hours than normal. I noticed that the merchandise was broken because heavier boxes were on top of lighter boxes. After a couple of days of this situation, with productivity decreasing, I learned that the rest of the stores in my district faced the same problem. As a result, I asked each store to take pictures of the mess so the distribution centers could see exactly what was happening. I also asked each one to write down how many additional person-hours it took to clean up the mess. After we gathered this information for a four-week period, we had a pretty a good estimate of how much the company was losing - approximately $9.50 per person-hour, an average of $125 per store times 15 stores times 30 nights a month, amounting to a substantial sum. I took the information to my district manager. Once he realized how much money his district was losing each month because of broken merchandise in the trucks, he contacted his regional manager, and the trucks after that were loaded more carefully. The district made our Profit and Loss the next month by a 9 percent increase.
My older brother is deaf. Growing up, his deafness made our relationship very challenging and complicated. It goes without saying that siblings should be able to communicate on a certain level. During my childhood I had to overcome obstacles that other kids didn’t. In addition to emotional struggles of coping with having a deaf brother, I had to find a new form of communication to break this language barrier. While the rest of my family used a new form of deaf communication called cued speech, my brother and I solely communicated by reading each other’s lips and talking with no voice. While I was given obvious options for how to solve the communication problem, I decided to choose something completely different and unique, something that my brother to this day still appreciates and finds exciting. Not only has this approach brought my brother and me closer, the experience and the way my brother and I now interact has shown how I overcame this adversity and broke the social norms of the deaf community. My brother is a very independent and driven person; however, to this day I have been able to sustain good communication with him.
When I hosted a radio talk show, I prepared material for an interview with a state senate candidate only to find out when he arrived that he would not discuss any issues in my prepared material. I literally had to conduct an hour-long one-on-one interview using only the knowledge I had off the top of my head. Knowing I couldn’t carry an entire show with little material to work from, I broke format 10 minutes into the broadcast and turned the show into a live call-in and built upon questions from those posed by listeners. The subject, who went on to become a state senator, thoroughly enjoyed the hour, gave me special considerations for coverage later in the campaign and granted me primary access for his first in-seat interview.
Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling that Propels Careers, Quintessential Careers Press, ISBN-10: 1-934689-00-9. Find out the ways you can own the entire book.
