Sunday Edition: 5 Qualities That Will Get You Hired And Interview Questions To Be Prepared For ‏

Welcome to Sunday Edition with Teri Helenese. Each Sunday at 9 a.m., the VI Consortium community will be treated to a diverse offering of articles that touches on various topics to help stimulate the minds of those ever seeking to succeed in business…and in life. 

Ms. Helenese is a U.S. Virgin Islander, a native of St. Croix, and has made a name for herself on the mainland. She works as a Big Four IT Consultant in the nation’s capital, and is a leader with a focus on global human resources, strategic communications, and change management.

In April 1994, Ebony magazine dubbed her a Rising Star. In 1997, the same magazine included her on its list of the Top 25 Accomplished Women. And in 1998, she was recognized by Cosmopolitan as a Leader to Watch. See her full bio here.

1. Consistently Deliver Great Performance: Have a positive outlook, channel your energy into finding opportunities and solutions, even in times of ambiguity and uncertainty. Demonstrate drive to make a positive difference to work performance. Be crystal clear about your own performance commitments and ensure they are linked to the business goals. Understand the controls, governance, and standard operating procedures in your business, and be thorough in your execution, applying controls and governance throughout.

Interview Questions:

• Describe a time when you made a necessary but unpopular decision? Why did you make that decision and how did you handle the objections?
• Tell me about a time when you were faced with conflicting priorities. How did you determine what was the top priority?
• Describe a time when you needed support to get others on board with your idea. How did you communicate with others and manage the idea to success?

2. Find Solutions: Think in the future. Anticipate trends and opportunities. An ambidextrous brain generates ideas and moves them to action. Be imaginative in finding solutions to issues and pursuing opportunities for the business. When tasked to read a spreadsheet, don’t just crunch the numbers, analyze the qualitative metrics as well. When tasked to summarize a white paper, exercise your brain to equally focus on and synthesize the quantitative data. When the deliverable is a five-year plan, have some idea of the handful of metrics that prove your value for the current year. Every employee should be able to say that the successful completion of their deliverables will result in increased stakeholder value, decreased costs, increased access, and reduced processing time. These intangibles of judgment and creativity are what make innovation happen.

Interview Questions:

• Can you give me an example of a decision you made that significantly altered company policy? Describe your decision-making process.
• Tell me about a time when your standard approach to problem solving did not produce the desired solution. What did you do?
• Describe a time when you weighed the pros and cons of a situation and decided not to take action, even though you were under pressure to do so.

3. Grow Yourself: Develop and apply self-awareness by getting to know your own strengths and development needs. Tap into the myriad of Learning & Development classes offered online or face-to-face. Commit to reading the top five bestseller books in your industry. Compliment this by learning and adopting new technologies, which drives the business forward and makes your work leading edge. Learn Mandarin and Spanish. Learning new languages gives us a huge competitive advantage in the global economy. Top performers are inquisitive and birds-eye the world from an international perspective. In a world where the 24-hour news cycle and diversity of thought crosses the globe in seconds, we cannot afford to be parochial or linear in thought.

Interview Questions:

• Tell me about a situation in which you had to adjust quickly to a significant change in organization, department, or team priorities. How did the change affect you? What did you do?
• What steps have you taken and what resources have you tapped to ensure that you are living the company vision?
• Tell me about a time that you received feedback that you did not agree with. Why was that and what did you do?

4. Be Authentic: Be yourself. Stand up for what you feel is right and important. Demonstrate high integrity by being honest and open at all times. Value the differences in people, and treat everyone with dignity and respect.

Interview Questions:

• Tell me about a time when your manager or peer asked you to do something that you did not think was appropriate. How did you respond?
• Give me an example of what you have done to earn others’ trust?
• Describe what you have done to live your current organization’s values?

5. Manage People for Success: Take ownership for the performance outcomes of your team’s work. Show a genuine interest in the people on your team. Get to know their strengths, development needs, aspirations, and the challenges they face on a day-to-day basis. Coach them, and help them make breakthroughs and enhancements in key areas so they can perform at their best. No one of us is on our ‘A’ game and does his or her best every single day of the year, but it is your job to manage, motivate, and inspire your people to give their best—even when they do not want to. We are all human and at times bogged down in our life distractions and moods, but in order to produce quality, there must be a consistent effort. Effective and high performing leaders get that out of people, even when they are in a slump. When these milestones by your people have been achieved, take the time to recognize individual achievements and celebrate success.

Interview Questions:

• We know it is difficult to deliver effective feedback for improvement. Tell me about a time when your feedback for improvement was poorly received by a colleague. What did you do? What happened?
• Interacting with others and managing different personalities can be challenging at times. Tell me about the greatest difficulty you have faced when trying to help employees get along with each other. How do you handle these situations?
• What aspects of the way you operate at work have a positive impact on others?

Image Credit: WSIMG