Question

What ideas did you bring to your previous employers that helped make it a successful enterprise?

Comments and Suggested Answer

This question probes whether you are a contributor, someone who looks for ways to improve the business.

The interviewer is attempting to determine your level of involvement, participation, and confidence with your previous employers.

Be forthright and state clearly any contributions you have made in the past. Be sure that your example of initiative does not show a disregard for company policies and procedures.

Writing Powerful Action-Benefit Statements

Action – Benefit Statements use your accomplishments and experience to demonstrate the positive impact you can have on a company’s bottom line. An Action-Benefit Statement consists of:

Action:

A Job responsibility or specific situation that you took when faced with a situation, problem, or opportunity that enabled you to achieve a positive result.

Benefit:

The positive result or benefit to the organisation, such as an increase in revenue, a reduction in costs, streamlined processes or systems, or improved morale.

An Action – Benefit Statement might read “Analysing declining sales and developed campaigns that increased orders by 30% in less than one month.” This statement describes the situation or challenge you faced (declining sales), the Action you took (developed a campaign), and the Benefit of your actions (a 30% increase in orders).

Always quantify or qualify the accomplishments and achievements described in your Action-Benefit statement. When you are quantifying results, consider the impact of your work in measurable terms and include the numbers, percents, dollars, and other values that represent your experience in the best possible light.

Before:

Supervised a large staff of retail employees covering multiple territories. Effectively managed business unit P&L and consistently grew profits.

After:

Ten years experience managing 15 employees across multiple territories. Effectively managed P&L of $10 million business unit. Consistently generated 30-35% gross profit.

Alternatively, when you are qualifying accomplishments, consider describing the process, depicting the environment, and including the personal characteristics that a future employer would consider valuable.

Before:

Increased sales through cold-calling, follow-up, and account management.

After:

Consistently grew revenue and profits in a rapidly changing environment through aggressive cold-calling, persistent followup, and relationship-focused account management.

When writing an Action-Benefit statement, it is unnecessary to provide details on how you solved the problem. You can provide this information at the interview. Focus on the results as opposed to the process. If your Action – benefit statements are powerful enough, employers will invite you in for an interview just to see how you achieved the results.

The first step in writing an effective resume requires you to define the position or type of position you are looking for and assess your top qualifications.

If you are applying for several types of jobs, consider writing a different resume for each. You resume will be most effective when you target a specific type of job, and then describe how your skills abilities and experience qualify you for that position.

For each job type, research the job responsibilities and requirements for the position. You can find this information by browsing through job advertisements for your occupation. Determine what your responsibilities will be, what skills, abilities. And knowledge you’ll need, and what personal and professional characteristics are required for success. Once you have determined the requirements of the position, analyze your past experience, accomplishments, education and training for examples of work and personal characteristics and begin building your resume in a way that best demonstrates your ability to succeed.

The best resume describes your accomplishments and experience in terms of an Action-Benefit statement, which is a precise description of an action you took that produced a tangible and measurable result that benefited your company

1. Make a Positive Impression

Employers rarely hire someone who makes a negative first or later impression.

2. Communicate Your skills

If you have created a reasonably positive image of yourself so far, an interviewer will now be interested in the specifics of why they should consider hiring you. This back-and-forth conversation usually lasts from 15-45 minutes and many consider it to be the most important and most difficult task in the entire job search.

Fortunately, by visiting this site, you will have several advantages over the average job seeker:

1. You will know what sort of job you want.

2. You will know what skills are required to do well in that job.

3. You will have those very skills.

The only thing you have to do is to communicate these three things by directly and completely answering the questions an employer asks you.

3. Use Control Statements to Your Advantage

A control statement is a statement you make that becomes the roadmap for where the conversation (interview) is going. Although you might think you are at the mercy of the interviewer, you do have some ability to set the direction of the interview from the chitchat to the focus you desire.

For example, you might say something direct, such as “I’d like to tell you about what I’ve done, what I enjoy doing, and why I think it would be a good match with your organization.” Your control statement can come at the beginning of the interview if things seem fuzzy after the chitchat or any time in the interview when you feel the focus is sifting away from the points you want to make.

Here are some other control statements and questions to ask early in an interview:

• How did you get started in this type of career?
• I’d like to know more about what your organization does. Would you mind telling me?

4. Answer Problem Questions Well

All employers try to uncover problems or limitations you might bring to their job. Yet according to employers in Northwestern University Report, about 80 percent of all job seekers cannot provide a good answer to one or more problem interview questions. Everyone has a problem of some sort, and the employer will try to find yours. Expect it. Suppose that you have been out of work for three months. That could be seen as a problem, unless you can provide a good reason for it.

5. Ask Good Questions

Many employers ask at some point in the interview whether you have any questions. How you respond affects their evaluation of you. So be prepared to ask insightful questions about the organization. Good topics to touch on include the following:

• The competitive environment in which the organization operates
• Executive management styles
• What obstacles the organization anticipates in meeting its goals
• How the organization’s goals have changed over the past three to five years

Generally, asking about pay, benefits, or other similar topics at this time is unwise. The reason is that doing so tends to make you seem more interested in what the organization can do for you, rather than in what you can do for it. Having no questions at all makes you appear passive or disinterested, rather than curious and interested.

The job interview gives the potential employee and potential employer a chance to learn more about each other. Employers want to know why you are the best choice for the job. Should they hire you or another candidate? While most people believe that it is the most qualified who gets the job, it is often otherwise. Rather, it is the person who best connects with the interviewer whom is the most likely to be offered a position.

Why? More often than not, the person interviewing you will be your direct superior. It is only logical that the manager to hire someone they can connect with. That is why it is essential to be well prepared for the job interview.

Knowledge is always your best weapon and so you should arm yourself with plenty of it. Being well prepared means you should know about the industry, the employer, and yourself; paying attention to details like personal appearance, punctuality, and demeanor.

Gather as much information about the employer as you can. Not only will you appear informed and intelligent, it will also help you make a decision if the employer eventually makes a job offer.

In order to effectively answer questions on a job interview, you are going to have to know a lot about yourself and know how to present that information to an interviewer. To prepare for answering questions about yourself start by listing your attributes. Think about what you can bring to the employer.

Once you come up with a list of attributes, try to find some faults. You won’t, obviously, spontaneously tell a prospective employer about these faults, but you may be asked to. One question that sometimes comes up in an interview is “What is something that has been a problem for you at work?” By studying your faults, you will be able to choose one that is somewhat innocuous or could be turned around into a positive.

Practice answering interview questions and practice your responses to the typical job interview questions and answers most employers ask. Think of actual examples you can use to describe your skills. Providing evidence of your successes is a great way to promote your candidacy.

Prepare a response so you are ready for the question “What do you know about our company. Know the interviewer’s name and use it during the job interview. If you’re not sure of the name, call and ask prior to the interview. Try to relate your expertise to what you know about the company needs’.

To round off, personal presentation can make or break the interview. Ensure that you are suitably attired, punctual, as well as formal and polite without being cold. Infuse your responses with enthusiasm to demonstrate your keenness for the position. Now, go out there and ace that interview!