Top Common Interview Questions and Examples of Answer

1. Tell me about yourself.

Well, I’ll start the fact, that I am a final-year student in the field of Finance and accounting,
specialising in Corporate Finance, doing also qualifications with ACCA program, currently preparing
myself to the 5th Performance Management.

I’ve start my career as Sales Consultant at health & fitness company called Jatomi, where I was
responsible for customer acquisition and relationship management, as well as ensuring the club
reaches its targeted membership. This role mostly helped me to understand how to be a good team
player.

Then I continued my career path as Customer Service Associate at Volkswagen Financial Service,
being mostly responsible for liaising with customer and providing solutions to their problems, also
reviewing and circulating documentations within the business. In that role .

Later I become a Research and Development Associate at Business Process Outsourcing corporation,
where my mainly duties were to develop electronical documentation system in all departments,
closely working with the Accounting, Audit, Payroll and Legal department. I was also responsible for
developing new, more efficient system of work-flow throughout all sub-companies and their
departments. In that role the accomplishment I am most proud of is reducing time to the minimum
in the matter of circulation of documents. During this role I’ve mostly learnt how to work effectively
with employees at all levels, as well as was able to highly improved my time-management skills.

The most recent job was the most relevant to my career goals, as a Finance Assistant, here in
London, for a chain of well-known Mexican restaurants – under brand Chilango. I am mostly proud of
this job as I was able to show my potential in its best, proving my accuracy, a strong analytical eye for
details and being impressively, in my senior opinion, fast in accomplishing my duties. Here I’ve learnt
the knowledge of Sage system and also having opportunity to master my Excel skills for financial
needs.

And finally, over due to my strong background and successive achievement, I am confident that I will
be able to succeed in this role you’re hiring for.

2. What where your responsibilities?

Sales Consultant: customer acquisition and making sure that the club reaches it targeted
membership, as well as customer relationship managers and gathering leads that will provide the
higher probability of reaching targets.

Customer Service Associate: liaising with customers in the field of long-term loans and car leasing,
providing a variety solution to their problems, cooperating with the accounting team as finding out
payments issues.

Research and development associate: developing the new work-flow system throughout the mother
company and all other sub-companies and their departments, developing a electronical
documentation system when we’ve reduced the time consumed for the circulation of documents
within the company’s departments. I’ve worked closely with Accounts, Legal, Payroll, Audit, when it
gave me the opportunity to work effectively with employees in all levels.
Top Common Interview Questions and Examples of Answer

3. What did you like or dislike about your previous job? - remember to be careful what
you’re going to say, cause it will show the new employer how you might feel about them if
you were to be fired.

4. What were your starting and final levels of compensations?

5. What major challenger and problems did you face? How did you handle them?
6. What is your greatest strength?

My greatest strength is an accuracy while working with a big financial data packages and posting a
number of invoices, expenses and transactions, as well as being impressively fast while accomplishing
my task, that I’ve proven and provided such a help in many difficult, under-pressured situations for
my Financial team. I also would like to mention to have strong analytical eye for details that I had the
chance to perform while working on reducing the delivery discrepancy through all restaurants on a
daily basis.

7. What is your greatest weakness?

My greatest weakness has been being impatient during accomplishing tasks and learning new things.
I used to set overwhelmingly number of goals in a short period a time when the long-term picture
should have been taken. To help myself with the weakness I’ve started planning my goals and tasks,
using also the Urgent-Important Matrix way.

8. How do you handle stress and pressure?

I actually work better under pressure, and I've found that I enjoy working in a challenging
environment. It makes me very motivated and gives me the opportunity to challenge myself with
being even faster in accomplishing tasks.

9. Describe a difficult work situation or project and how you overcame it.

There was a difficult time for the Financial team in my previous job where I came to this department
already had a backload of work. As a result of inefficient performance, one of team member has
been fired, leaving for the rest a big number of invoicing to post. My financial director gave me the
responsibility to post almost 200 hundreds of invoices in Sage program that I hadn’t known before.
Unexpectedly to the whole team, I have finished posting those big amount of invoices (200hundres)
in one hour, that pleased my seniors.

10. What was the biggest accomplishment (failure) in this position?

11. How do you evaluate success?
12. Why are you leaving or have left your job?

My full-time contract wasn’t extended in fact, that due to drastic budget cuts a number of roles
within head office were made redundant, while now in the financial team are working only 2 people
whose roles are more senior.

13. Why did you apply for this job?

“While my main focus moving forward will be on the position we are discussing today, I’m
hopeful that I’ll be able to grow within this position to take on more and be a part of new and
exciting projects in the community.”

14. Why should we hire you?

Top Common Interview Questions and Examples of Answer

15. What are your goals for the future?

16. What are your salary requirements?
17. Who was your best boss and who was the worst?
18. What are you passionate about?
19. Questions about your supervisors and co-workers.
20. Do you have any question for me?

TIPS:

Listen carefully

Sit up tall and slightly leaning forward

Being confident, but not arrogant

Think before you speak

Be optimist

Showing interest, without desperation – think you are a valuable asset as and employee, show that
you the role and work for company.
Top Common Interview Questions and Examples of Answer