Tell Me About a Time You Needed to Get Information from Someone who Was Not Responsive
A good behavioral interview question and how to answer it.
Stupid Resume Mistakes: A Few Doozies!
“Tell me about a time you need to get information from someone who was not very responsive.” Ooh! the horrors! Now, how do you answer this question depends on your level of seniority. So, for the junior individual, you might talk about and, again, I’m going to use an acronym that I point you all the time actually in your case, somebody’s talked about the STAR acronym– situation, task, action, result.
So, you were assigned this project and your responsibilities on the project were to do such-and-such. Notice how I’ve already covered situation and tasks. And with that you’ve reached out to different managers who were not necessarily particularly responsive and you understood that they were being pulled in a lot of different directions and you seem like the least important person on their priority list. So, what you did was . . . and here you can go one of two different ways . . . you might initially talk about . . . so, what you tried to do was to wheedle and cajole and to see if you can get small increments of time from them so you could extract what you needed from them.
When that didn’t work or when that only worked to some degree, you got your boss involved with the process so they could operate at the same level or from a higher level than this individual so you can get what you needed. That’s one answer to the question.
But let’s assume you are that boss, you are that VP, director or whomever and you’re not getting support from a colleague who’s had a peer level. You have to take it a little bit differently. You have to talk about meeting with this individual or getting on to their calendar for thirty minutes of time and saying, “look, this is information that we’ve agreed is necessary for this project to complete. What I’m looking for is such-and-such.” So you’re getting on to the calendar. If they say, “I don’t have time right now,” what do I have to do? When do you have time? I’m on the calendar. Let’s get as much done now so I can start moving ahead,” because you need this. I’m working for you here and you’re telling me you can’t make time for something that you’ve agreed that you can deliver.”
And then, again, worse comes to worst, you can always go for the more senior individual to get them involved so that, if you’re talking to a peer, sorry they’re talking toa peer, what you’re able to do is try and impress upon them the importance of what you’re doing to serve them, and if necessary escalate. Got it? So, no matter how it works, it’s the idea of impressing upon the other in person the importance knowing that they’re getting pulled in a lot of different directions. So the result winds up being you can’t just accept at face value getting pushed away. You have to ultimately get this other person to comply and, from there be able to get them to . . . if they don’t comply escalate it to your boss.
6 Tips for Successful Job Search Networking
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ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a coach who worked as a recruiter for what seems like one hundred years. His work involves career coaching, all as well as executive job search coaching, job coaching, and interview coaching. He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with more than 1900 episodes, and is a member of The Forbes Coaches Council.
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