Job Interview Questions on Ability to Innovate
Innovation is crucial to success of each enterprise. Companies, that don’t innovate die. To ensure that the organisations stay competitive employers are looking for people that are creative, inventive and committed to introducing new ideas and initiatives. Companies are constantly in search for people that have the ability to implement improved solution that meets newly defined requirements, needs or expectations of their clients. Interviewers often assess their candidates whether they can produce generation of new ideas in scope of company products or services. A good interview question to assess the candidate ability to come up with a new innovative way of working is to ask 'When have you taken a new or innovative approach to achieve a desired outcome - describe the situation, your approach and whether it was effective. Could you answer this question well in your interview if hiring manager would ask? If not don't panic - read our tips below and construct your own winning answer. You may also refer for further help to job interview questions on creativity to get more ideas and see sample answers.
 |
How to answer interview questions on ability to offer innovative solutions
For the above interview question you may want to show that you have ideas and aspirations of how things could be different for better. Show that you can discover new and better ways of doing things. Make it your point that you can combine resources in new and original way. Remember, new way does not stand on its own merits. It will be effective and worthwhile only if it offers customers, stakeholders or organization an improved way to approach tasks or solve problems. See sample answer below that attempts to demonstrate the necessary. If you wish to see more of similar answers view job interview problem solving questions.
Example Answer
Situation
At my last job working as an export administrator I have been frequently challenged to increase level of customer service and exceed client expectations. To improve customer experience I was looking to improve the process set in place to handle export documentation for clients with time sensitive cargo.
Action
To achieve this I embraced lean thinking approach to reduce the number of steps in the process and I did eliminate waste from the system. That is, I did identify steps that were creating waiting lines and steps that were slowing down throughput creating backlogs. I did calculate that if I made three steps more efficient then the time it took to process client documentation would be reduced by 20 per cent. To put the above into practice I did set up a new module through our ERP system to facilitate better communication and information sharing among team members.
Result
Once the system was in place not only the time it took to process documentation was reduced by over 25 per cent but also cost savings resulting from time reduction were passed on to our customers in the form of faster and more reliable customer service. Thus, the lean thinking approach proved to be effective method to achieve greater customer experience.
Final thoughts
In your job interview, your example should be as similar as possible to the demands of the job. Make sure to talk about something that made positive contribution and emphasise the way you achieved required outcome. Be methodical in your answer and keep it brief and to the point.