Page 54 - Fearless Interviewing How To Win The Job By Communicating With Confidence

Q Statements: Your Secret Weapon
•I acted as a regional manager for 12 offices overseeing
147 salespeople throughout the Midwest.
• As a human resources manager, I initiated and devel-
oped a retraining program that improved employee sat-
isfaction from 2.7 to 4.1 on a scale of 1 to 5.
• As a production manager, I decreased production time
by 6 days a month, resulting in a savings of $360,000
quarterly.
•I maintain a caseload of 65 patients.
•I built a prototype that could tolerate 15 percent more
stress than its predecessor.
• My team identified four as-yet-unknown species of flora
and fauna in the mountainous regions of California.
•I reduced overhead by 25 percent while increasing prof-
its by 43 percent annually.
•I designed a microchip that is 23 percent more reliable
than its predecessor.
•I introduced an on-site safety program that decreased
workers’ compensation claims by 18 percent in 1 year.
•I process more than 250 customer requests daily.
•I won an award for decreasing materials costs from $6.41
per inch to $5.20 per inch.
•I have overseen the landscape design on over 200 proj-
ects, costing up to $350,000 per project.

After reading all these different Q statements, you probably see a
pattern emerging. First, they all contain action words—verbs
such as designed, initiated, saved, processed, and handled. Second,
they all end with some sort of number, expressed in monetary
amounts, time, and percentages, and numerical amounts of peo-
ple, actions, or things.
The “formula” for a Q statement would look something like
this:

Verb + (who, what, when, where, how) + Result = Q statement

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