Page 115 - 101 Dynamite Answers to Interview Questions

108 Nail the Job Interview!

how supervision noimally operated. But when I moved to XYZ
Corporation, the management style arid organizational culture
were vey dflerent. The conipaiy relied hcavily on its annual
perfoimance evaluation to communicate with its employees. And
my supervisor always gave me outstanding annual per$ormance
evaluations. Furthermore, he was an extremely competent individ-
ual whom I really enjoyed working with and learned a great deal
from. But he just didn’t give his subordinates mudi feedback on n
day-to-day basis. I later learned that may have been just his style.
But I’ve learned to operate well under two diferent styles of
supervision and two dgerent organizational cultures. I think his
weakness actually ben$ted me in the long run.

. How does your present/most recent job relate to
the overall goals of your department/the company?

Again, you want to answer this question in very clear, perfor-
mance terms. Before going to the interview, think how your job
fits into the larger organizational scheme. What is it you do that
promotes the goals of the organization? Better still, try to
demonstrate how you might have taken initiative to expand
your job into an even more important job than originally
envisioned by the company. Such an observation demonstrates
talcing important initiative on your part. An applicant might,
for example, answer the question in this manner:

Wien Ifirst began, the job required that I do routine editing using
the old paper-and-pencil technique and often burning the midnight
oil. I would be assigned an article or report and sit down for
several hours looking for organizational, grammatical, and spelling
errors. Since I ’ni patient, n detail person, and somewhat tenacious,
I enjoyed the work, but it wasn’t particularly exciting. Anyone
with a basic background in editing could do this job. However,
during my second year, I took advantage of a special computer
editing course sponsored by the local community college. The course
opened a whole new world ofeditingfor me. I learned how to use
several state-of-the-art computer editing programs. I then persuad-
ed my supervisor to request management to invest in one of the