Читать книгу Interview Power - Tom Washington - Страница 25

When telling stories that demonstrate how you’ve solved a problem or overcome an obstacle, create before and after pictures that highlight your impact on the situation. Paint the before picture as bleak as you can. Make the employer feel how bad the situation was. If you were dealing with a quality control problem, you might describe how angry your customers were and describe how some threatened to stop buying from your company or how some actually did. Don’t exaggerate, but give the employer the full sense of the problem. As you complete your story, describe how smooth or effective things became. Create the strongest contrast possible without exaggerating. Bruce shared this story about his experience with a mobile home manufacturer:

Before I took over the parts department, it was taking a month from the time we received a dealer’s order until the dealer actually got the part. Because of this we had two problems—most dealers simply obtained their parts from other sources, while those who did order from the factory got their kicks out of yelling at me and telling me to get the parts to them pronto. The problem was that no system had been established. Orders either got lost or they didn’t get down to the shipping department for days. And no one even knew if the parts were in stock. When they weren’t in stock, no one bothered to notify the person who had placed the order. After a month on the job, I decided things had to change.

The first thing I did was create forms for recording orders, something which had never been done even though the manufacturing facility had been operating for four years. My predecessor either wrote things down on scraps of paper or tried to remember things in his head. He was really a smart guy, but he couldn’t remember everything. I established a hookup with the warehouse so our two computer systems could talk to each other. This system told me immediately whether the parts were available.

Next, I got the warehouse and the shipping-and-receiving managers together and we found ways to help each other rather than squabble over turf. Within four months we got our delivery times down from four weeks to five days. We haven’t lost an order for at least two years.

Now I’m not wasting time tracking down lost or late shipments. And my hearing is getting better since people don’t yell over the phone anymore. The best thing is that parts sales to our dealers have increased from $12,000 per month to over $60,000. Our dealers are happy, so they don’t need to go to other suppliers anymore.

Didn’t you actually picture this person on the phone getting his ears burned? Did you imagine the orders getting written down on scraps and then getting misplaced? Could you visualize these three managers who were working at cross purposes? If so, the story was successful. But you were not merely left with a picture. You were left with a result. It wasn’t just that Bruce didn’t get yelled at anymore, but that sales increased dramatically. Employers get excited when you demonstrate that you can make money, save money, solve problems, or reduce the boss’s daily stress and pressure. Bruce demonstrated through this one story that he could do all four. The final point he made was that he could make money. After all, sales increased from $12,000 per month to $60,000. That did some very nice things to the company’s bottom line.