When the interviewer asks the question about your most challenging experience and the actions you took to solve the problem (or the case), remember that the interviewer is trying to get a brief idea of several aspects related to your personality:
- Your problem solving and analytic thinking skills.
- Your ability to work in a stressful environment.
- How do you handle stress and pressure?
- How do you cope with complex situations?
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Problem Solving Interview Questions
Problem Solving Job Interview questions can be asked in different ways and as follow up questions, for example:
- How did you handle your most challenging experience in your previous job?
- Describe the problem and the way you collect info and establish a problem solving model.
- How do you build a troubleshooting process?
- What are the steps you take for a project that requires collection of systematic data and risk management for conducting a performance analysis
- What are the steps you take to anticipate risks and resolve issues?
- Give an example of an effective/innovative solution you created to solve a problem.
Problem Solving Interview Answers
The best way to answer these questions is to provide a truthful and factual answer to the query.
This answer normally depends on whether or not you have faced any experiences that have been challenging in your previous job.
Your answer should begin with the following phrases:
A past challenging experience I dealt with was [..]. This was a challenge because […]. To resolve the issue, I [..]
Then, divide the answer into 5 parts:
1. Define the Problem
Describe the problem in the workplace. What makes it a problem? What does this problem involve?
2. Analyze the Problem
Tell about how you collected information for data analysis: the process you utilized for extracting maximum information from the facts.
3. Generating Possible Solutions
Explain the factors taken into consideration when making a decision: how did you get to the root cause of the problem? How did you identify the likely causes of the problem? How did you generate a number of possible solutions?
4. Selecting the Best Solution(s) and courses of action
Describe the actions you took: why did you choose these actions? What results did you expect to achieve? Describe how you organized ideas into process flow and common themes and the way you monitored results. Don’t forget the risk management factors.
5. Lesson learned
What did you achieve? What was going right? What did you learn from that experience?
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