Your IQ: What is Your Most Significant Accomplishment.

The Interview Intermission – In your current or last position, what were your most significant accomplishments? In your career so far?

This is the fifth in a series of posts I will make on interviewing questions. These questions come from Drake Beam Morin, Inc.

In the post I will provide the question, what the interviewer might be looking for by asking the question, how to frame your response and a sample answer based on my own history.

Question 5: In your current or last position, what were your most significant accomplishments? In your career so far?

This question is very similar to the previous question -how successful are you. The difference here is that you can point out specific events rather than an overall success story.

This question is your golden opportunity. It is worth time to investigate your finest accomplishments and practice delivering it over and over. There are a few questions that are critical in an interview and this is one.

My best accomplishment was cutting customer complaint rates from a standing 40 issues on any given day down to 3 and cutting resolution time from 15 days down to 3. I did this in 6 months and got a big promotion. However, I’ve yet had to figure out how to tell this story in three minutes or less.

So, I went to second best, where I saved a big customer for the company. First, I had to describe the issue. Our company made “middleware” which translated PC-commands to mainframe commands in a manufacturing environment.

One of our customers did a thing called “backflushing” which meant that they did not send transactions upstream to our system until the product was finished. This meant that hundreds of thousands of transactions attacked our server at once and overwhelmed it. There simply wasn't enough processing power in our PC to do all those translations at the rate they were coming in.

I wasn’t even assigned to solve this problem, but I had an idea and worked with a couple of developers who thought my idea had merit after I described it to them.

What we did was put yet another computer between the shop floor and the mainframe. This PC’s sole purpose was to gather the transactions and feed them to our sever at a rate that the server could handle. Since this PC didn’t have to “think” – it did not have to make the translations, it could handle the load.

We did not have to change any code on the PCs on the floor or on our sever. Neither knew that there was a traffic cop in the middle.

Not only did we save the customer, this became our standard design. It allowed for the mainframe to be down for an extended period before the transactions got backed up.

All for the cost of a PC and 6 total hours’ worth of programmer’s time.

I am sure that you have a story that is equally compelling.

According to MS-Word, this description took 263 words. Can you tell your story in such a short time? I was not able to during the first half dozen go arounds.

I kept on getting sidetracked on peripheral issues like explaining what backflushing is. It doesn’t matter what it is, all the audience had to know was that it unleashed a torrent of transactions all at once.

It didn’t matter that we did this work after hours on a Friday of a holiday weekend. It was dramatic as was my contribution of going for the pizza after the actual programming began. However, none of that was really relevant to the story.

If the interviewer wants more information, I can give them the director’s cut.

That’s why picking a good story and rehearsing your story is so important. Pick a story that has only one plot line. Explain the stories in terms that a layman can understand. My best accomplishment (reducing customer complaints) has multiple story lines and multiple actors and is too difficult to summarize. Stories have more impact if they can be delivered succinctly.

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