إجابة مرجعية
“If someone tells me everything is all good and rosy, I probably won't believe them,” Jensen says. “Every project is going to be messy in some way.”
Because problems are commonplace, interviewers want to know how you spot them as early as possible, how you communicate about them internally and externally (if that's part of your role), how you collaborate with the team to brainstorm possible solutions, and how you decide which route to ultimately take. They also want to be sure you can communicate these decisions clearly and concisely.
“What the employer is looking for is agility, ability to problem solve, conflict management, and stress management,” Campos says. “A lot of the questions are screening for that”—including this one.
How to Answer:
When you hear the words “Tell me about a time when…” in an interview, that's a pretty sure sign you can and should turn to the STAR method to craft your answer. In other words, briefly explain the Situation; clearly articulate what your Task was; lay out the Action(s) you took; and close with the Result(s) you got in terms of how that project turned out and what you learned from the experience. Pick a scenario that didn't end in total disaster, but otherwise be honest.
The main thing to remember is, “Don't act like you solved the whole thing on your own,” Campos says. In your effort to impress, you may want to focus on your role in the scenario, which is fine, but don't go so far as to imply you were working alone. Project management is inherently collaborative and you'll make a far better impression if your answers reflect that.
And definitely don't throw anyone else under the bus. “If something went wrong on a project, it's not important for us to know who is to blame; interviewers are more interested in hearing about how the problem was solved,” Jensen says. “It's also not a great look to make your teammates look like they messed up—that suggests to an interviewer that a candidate might not be a team player.”
You could say something like:
“When I was working at Go to College, a nonprofit that aims to help kids in underserved schools become the first in their families to get a four-year degree, we had an amazing opportunity to screen a short film about the organization's mission at a series of high-profile events with potential donors. I was the project manager for the film and we were in the final stages of the editing process when one of the schools we'd filmed at came back and said that, for various reasons, we couldn't use the footage shot there.
“I called an emergency meeting with pretty much the entire staff. It was a small organization and everyone was really invested in the opportunity. Plus, this was the kind of situation where the more brains we had the better. We decided on two parallel courses of action. On one side, our program manager for that school would start a conversation there about whether we could remove any obstacles to using the existing footage. At the same time, our marketing team would work on pulling possible alternative footage we had in our archive and brainstorming any other options.
“I created a special Slack channel as a space for real-time updates and decision-making so that no time was wasted during the final stretch. In the end, our social media manager stumbled across an alum of the program who'd been keeping a funny, insightful blog about their college experience and reached out to them about participating in the film. I coordinated logistics to shoot some last-minute footage with them to tie the video together.
“It was definitely a very stressful couple of weeks, but I was so proud of the whole team for coming together to figure it out and I think the video turned out even better than what we'd originally planned. We ended up exceeding our fundraising goal by more than $100,000, and it allowed the nonprofit to expand and serve even more kids the following year.”
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