Difficult Job Interview Questions: Are you a Risk Taker?

Where have you made your organisation take a big risk?

This is a combination question. They’re looking to make sure that you are a risk taker, and they’re also checking that given a big idea you’ve got what it takes to drive it through even a sceptical organisation.

Companies make big growth jumps by taking risks. Senior people know this and are prepared to back good people if the return is high enough and the risk has been mitigated as far as possible.

Here’s a template and example for answering this question along with the supplementary questions that interviewers will tend to ask. To find your optimal answer you’ll need to include as many as possible of the principles here in a true story.

I RISKED WRECKING A KEY BRAND

You’ve got to show that you took a calculated risk after doing a careful analysis. Don’t look reckless or whimsical. The question will come in a number of ways: ‘Tell me about an idea that you’ve had to push hard to get accepted by your company.’ ‘In what circumstances have you shown initiative?’ In most cases you should be able to start with the idea, explain why it was a risk, or a big risk, how you got it accepted by showing how well you’d mitigated the risk and what the result was.

‘I was convinced that a brand we sold was doing much less than its potential because we were more or less marketing it exclusively to men. I worked on a campaign, TV and poster advertising, aimed at making the exact same product appeal to women. When I first presented it, many people wouldn’t even hear me out. They pointed to first principles of marketing – that such a move might not only fail to attract the new market but also lose the loyalty of the original market. If men think they’ve been consuming a kind-of macho drink, how will they take to its being advertised to the opposite sex? I was ready for this and had done the research in both ways, testing to see if women would go for it, and also testing to see if the advertising would turn men off. I also proposed a small pilot market. Thus, given the absolutely staggering return if women changed their drinking habits, I had a good case. I needed heavyweight support, so had involved a very senior manager throughout and she certainly helped. Well, to cut a long story short, we did it, adamantly opposed. And it was a huge success.’

YES, BUT WHAT ABOUT…

They’ll probe on risk: ‘Surely the small market pilot could’ve infected the larger market via newspaper articles or word of mouth?’ ‘I chose a fairly isolated market.’ ‘What was the fallback if the pilot had gone horribly wrong?’ ‘We could go back to positioning the product only for men and we were confident that this would work if we acted quickly.’

They’ll probe on politics: ‘The people who remained sceptical, did any of them see it as not in their interest for the project to succeed?’ ‘We really tried to get people to have at least an open mind, fearing that lukewarm support in some quarters could make things very difficult. I would say that there was a certain amount of armed neutrality. And, in the end if someone wants to climb out on a limb after the decision is taken, that’s up to them.’ This last shows a pretty forceful attitude to getting things done.

They may check you haven’t burnt yourself out: ‘It must have been very hard and stressful work. Would you do it again?’ ‘With what I’ve learnt from that exercise, I would handle another comparable situation very well and with a lower level of stress.’

For more information visit: http://www.infideas.com/self-development/interviews/