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obesity and it s a boiled sweet manufacturer you are trying to work for.
You might want to lead with
Has Company XYZ examined using sugar substitutes in its products?
I see the Chancellor has put the road tax levy up again for SUV
vehicles. Is the industry lobbying Parliament to try and have this
decision reversed? With the advent of biofuels, I d have thought that
the type of vehicles you make were ripe for this change in motoring.
There is no substitute for research here. Prospective employers will
choose every single time someone who demonstrates a knowledge of
their market over and above a candidate with specific knowledge of
their business they ve gleaned from the corporate website.
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COMMON INTERVIEW QUESTIONS & AND HOW TO ANSWER THEM 75
What opportunities have you had to identify
Q
cost savings in the past? Give an example.
Again, this is your most direct opportunity to demonstrate your
contribution to the bottom line. If every employee came up with a single
idea which saved the company money or increased its profitability, then
that company would be successful beyond the dreams of avarice. It may
seem like Utopia, but it s what employers want. Do yourself a favour and
stand out from the herd by showing how you have been and will
continue to be a positive item on the balance sheet!
In our department we kept a number of forms which employees
needed to complete, such as a  car registration form which entitled
them to a free parking pass on site, a  holiday requisition form and a
 bereavement leave application form , etc. This involved them leaving
their place of work and calling in at our office. Employees always came
during working hours, not break times. Sometimes they brought a
mate with them to keep them company. I thought it was daft for them
to come to us and the forms should be more local to them. My first
thought was to supply all our team managers with paper copies so
they would have their own supply, but then I remembered that we had
a company-wide intranet site where forms could  sit and be
downloaded only when needed. I had the IT people put them up on the
site and then sent a global e-mail telling people about the changes. As
a result, the traffic slowed to a trickle and lots of time was saved by
people no longer coming over to our office.
How did you choose where to make the savings?
Q
Our company was on the verge of going into austerity measures and
we were all asked to think of ways to save money. We had lots of the
usual ideas: using both sides of paper, trimming faxes so no blanks
went through the machine, doing away with Post-it notes, etc. It just
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76 HOW TO ANSWER HARD INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
dawned on me that the biggest cost for us was people s time, so the
more time we could save, the better. I then realised that it was actually
other people s time in coming to see me and my colleagues that was
the biggest waste, so I came up with the intranet idea.
When you come up with your own answer to this question, be sure to
incorporate an element of you comparing options and going for the
most practical/cost-effective/easily achieved, etc.
How much money do you think you saved?
Q
At first we couldn t think how we were going to quantify the savings,
but then we simply took an average number of calls a day we used to
receive asking for forms, multiplied that by the average number of
minutes the whole journey to and from our office took and then
multiplied that by an average hourly rate figure given to us by finance.
We reckoned on saving over £4,000 a year.
Never, ever, make wild claims on any savings you made  you might very
well be asked to justify them.
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COMMON INTERVIEW QUESTIONS & AND HOW TO ANSWER THEM 77
QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR LEADERSHIP OF
CHANGE
More and more these days, the philosophy of  continuous improvement is
being adopted and applied by organisations in every sector. By the very
nature of continuous improvement, change is inevitable and indeed
welcomed  but not by all. Some individuals react well to change and see
this as a way of enriching or improving their working lives. Others are
fearful of change and either resist overtly or by more subtle methods.
You may very well be asked about your experiences of change in the
workplace and possibly how you have initiated or led change. This does
not have to mean formal change programmes with milestones and
Gantt charts and the like. It may mean simple changes to the way you
have worked in the past that has accrued a benefit for the organisation.
It may mean how you have reacted to a change thrust upon you. Either
way, there is nothing as sure as change as organisations develop and
evolve over time, so you should be equipped with the types of answers
that employers want to hear.
Tell us about a recent time when you had to
Q
adapt to a major change.
How did you adapt?
What was difficult about the transition?
The clue to a good answer for this question is in the use of the word
 major
. Your interviewer is not looking for some answer in relation to
how you changed suppliers for the photocopy paper for example. This is
BIG change they are on about. Granted, you may not have been subject
to big change, as not everybody has, so if you haven t, just say so.
I worked for an organisation which was a plc and the culture and style
of how we worked was very much as you d expect from a large
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78 HOW TO ANSWER HARD INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
organisation. We had the best equipment, flexible working practices,
cheap gym membership, etc. However, the company s shares were
bought by a group of venture capitalists and that s when the changes
began. After a while, once the dust had settled, we started to get visits
from people who were working on a  synergy project
. We soon found [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]