Sample Interview Questions and Answers: Tell Me About A Time – Bonnie’s Answer

(Who is Bonnie? Bonnie – CPA with over 6 years experience seeking Accounting Manager position)

Terry: Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a difficult situation with a co-worker.  Maybe there was some conflict, maybe there was a difference of opinion – tell me how you handled that.

Bonnie: The one that comes to mind is – and this is something that does come to mind.  At times, it’s not so much difficult situations but I’ve had to deal with co-workers who maybe didn’t have all the tools or people that didn’t really have all the tools to get done what they needed and they needed help in performing tasks.

It was kind of frustrating. I sat down with them, listened to them and asked them what the problem was. They told me what the problem was, I empathized and they knew that I empathized with them.

What I realized is that they didn’t have the proper tools in place or maybe they needed more training, and I was able to help them and give them a little bit of training they needed and help them develop some new tools that were able to help them accomplish the task.

I had one person where I was doing part of her work because she didn’t really have the tools to do it or didn’t know how to do it.  So, I, along with the IT manager helped develop some new reports that would help her get her work done and then we were able to move forward.

I was relieved of doing her work, which gave me more time to concentrate on what I needed to get done.  Is that what you were looking for?

Terry: When you said they didn’t have the tools, are you talking about – what kinds of tools?  What things did you create or help them with?  You said reports, but were there other kinds of things?

Bonnie: It was rhetoric because she had to balance AR and she wasn’t always balancing it, because she didn’t know where to put things or where to book things too.  Therefore, she would sometimes leave out receipts that she needed to book.

What this report did is it made her book them in an expense account or someone else. The report was on a deposit-by-deposit basis. We would get deposit slips all day long, sometimes twice a day we would get deposit slips from the bank and there could be multiple deposits in each delivery.

What she had to do with this report we designed, was to input each deposit but she had to input them in total.  The total balance had to be booked; otherwise, she could not go on to the next deposit.

This made her deposit all of it and it gave her the ability to then put something in an expense account and come back later and figure out where it really went.

In that respect, this report helped her to balance her work, which was a very good report for her because she wasn’t always booking the amounts she didn’t know where to put.  Plus it gave her some guidance.  I don’t think she knew how to use expense accounts, so I gave her some guidance.

It took away some of the frustration she was feeling from not knowing what to do.

Here’s how I would rate this answer . . .

Q7. Tell me about a time when you . . . – BONNIE QUICK RATING – D

Use story structure, set up one specific situation, go through I did this, this, this, and end the story with the results or benefit the organization received from this.