silentvally

最近挣扎于各大公司的简历投递与面试笔试过程中，发现相较于笼统的描述自己，更多公司更希望听到面试者能够通过具体的事例来说明自己具备公司所要求的一些共性品质。尤其是管理培训生的简历和面试，专业问题倒是其次，对于个人经历的兴趣占据了非常大的衡量权重。在经历了几番被“轰炸”后的绞尽脑汁，我发觉有必要仔细的梳理自己在这些方面的经历，一来做到胸有成竹，避免被问到这类问题时抓耳挠腮，二来我已经在简历上附上了自己的博客地址，万一哪位HR有兴致点进来看了，也算是有个先期的了解。:)

下面是我在最近的简历投递和面试过程中总结的，公司普遍关注的一些个人品质，并且附上了自己在这些相关方面的具体表现事例。声明一下，这并不是为了应付面试，而是对自己经历经验的一次梳理，也算是对自己这几年来的一次回顾吧！

公司及行业类 Corporation and Industry

Questions Like:

• Why choose xxx/position/xxx Industry?
• Why choose management trainee program？
• The biggest opportunity for xxx and the industry in the next 10 years, and risks or challenges?
• Qualities that can distinguish you from others and succeed in xxx? Your skills that could help you succeed in xxx?

Answer/Example

To be frank, one will not apply for only one company or one position when finding a job, so it’s not wise to ask someone to state his/her determination of joining a company. However, there are indeed many considerations one should take when choosing a industry and company, especially when it is the first job in his/her career. For me, I would like to make it clear several of my main considerations.

• The future of the industry.
  I think it is the most important thing one needs to take into consideration before making a decision. It is not easy for someone to change the industry of his/her career, since the transforming cost is too large, not only the efforts of picking up background knowledge of the industry, but also the timing cost. So I think it is very important to make a right decision when choosing an industry that suits one’s development.

• The platform of the company.
  Someone may not agree that choosing a mature, promising, big company is better than a entrepreneurial company, since they think the latter can offer more training and developing possibility. However, in my opinion, a big and mature company can offer a wide platform that you can never dream of in a small company. If you want and are capable of, you can have rotation opportunities in different departments of the company, you can get more systematic training opportunities, get benefit from the standardized working process and more stable working and welfare environment.

• The implementation of one’s skills.
  I admit that many of the job positions do not ask for a special major and professional skills, but I myself want to find a job which I can use the professional skills I’ve learnt in university. First of all, I chose this major for interest and I want to do works I’m passionate about. Secondly, your professional skills in that position can make a barrier for other competitors, which will benefit you and make it easier for you to get promotion and more opportunity.

沟通能力类 Communicating Skills

Questions Like:

• If you find someone in the team difficult to deal with? What is your action? Example
• Describe a time when you explain a very complex problem to others (your manager or client)
• How do you deal with conflicts in a group?
• An example of communication ability, how to get along with someone not so kind?
• How can you adjust your styles to different audiences?

Answer/Example

(西门子拼图)About communicating conflicts, the dealing differ with different people you are communicating to, your boss, your colleagues or your clients, and also differ with the importance of the case, a principal problem, or a doesn’t-matter-problem.

As for my experience, I want to share an experience during my internship in Siemens. It was in the Siemens TOPAZ summer camp training program. There were about 20 members from all over China, we took training courses of all kinds, to get prepared and be professional for the future work. In one training course, we were given a puzzle of about more than 2000 parts and needed to finish it within 2 hours, which was absolutely a mission impossible. At first, we quickly divided into four groups, each group was responsible for an area of the puzzle, and each group we had a voluntary leader, they were responsible for the communicating between each group, I was the leader of my group.

However, after one hour, we found that the efficiency of the process is very low, since we were not sure which area did these parts belong to, and spent much time exchanging parts between groups. Besides, I found that some people tent to regard this cooperation project as a competition one, they sometimes focus too much on their own part and took no care about the whole project. Moreover, the leader of each group is voluntary, and there is no election or authorization process, so some member, especially in other groups, would not listen when being asked to do something. We got a problem in the mission.

At that time, I realized the problems we were facing, and organized all the four voluntary leaders of each group. First, we reached an agreement that we had to get the acceptance of the leadership from all the members, thus our orders could get through. Secondly, we negotiated with the project supervisor to ask for more time and lower standard of accomplishment. Thirdly, we found that the marginal parts of the puzzle is easier to locate than the central part and started to concentrate on them.

Finally, we accomplished a little more than 10% of the puzzle, which is above the low bound of the requirement.

团队协作类 Team Work

Questions Like:

• Tell me a time that you play an important role in a teamwork.
• Conflicts within a team, what is your approach.
• How do you contribute to the team? What will you do if one of your team members has difficulties?

Answer/Example

(解密工之道采访)Team work spirit plays an important role in inspecting an interviewer. What I am going to share is an experience of making an interview of an alumnus who is now an honored member of the Chinese Academy of Science. The interview is a part of a book named “The Secret of Engineering”. My fellow party branch members and I were assigned to accomplish this interview, and I was responsible for the interview and making a draft article.

Firstly, we needed to collect background information about the alumnus, and organize the interview structure and prepare questions. Then, we needed to get contacted with his secretary and arrange the interviewing spot and convenient time for both of us. Thirdly, we went to make this interview and recorded the conversation of later use. After all these were done, we had to make up the sound records and make a draft, after several versions of modification, we also needed to get the alumnus’ permission for publishing. It’s a series work.

As a team leader, and also a member of the interview team, I needed not only to finish my work well, but also to make sure that other team members are going smoothly with their parts. One obstacle is that when we finished the interview and needed to make up the record, I assigned this task to a person and asked him to send me the draft of the conversation in one week. However, when I asked him the progress of his work a week later, he told me that he had not even started, since he is preparing his GRE test, which is in the next week. I was very angry about it since our team was supposed to send the draft version of the article to the alumnus for his comments. I questioned him why he didn’t told me his schedule when I gave him this assignment, he said that he did not realized the emergence of the assignment and thought it could be delivered later. Reconsidered this, I found that I myself also needed to be responsible for it, since I only asked him to deliver it in one week, but not made it clear the emergency of the task. I apologized for my rudeness and called in all the team to explain the situation. We separate the record into small parts and everyone responsible for one small part, which saved us a lot of time and finally we finished it in time.

领导能力类 Leadership

Questions Like:

• What quality do you think a good leader should have?
• Your leader experience to achieve a goal?

Answer/Example

(小红帽志愿者)Many management trainee program want it’s members to have experiments of being leader in university, such as associate leaders, students’ union presidents. Fortunately, I happened to have several experience of leadership in my undergraduate and postgraduate periods.

The most impressive one is being the leader of the Redhat Volunteer Association in HUST, which is a student association to help students with their electronic appliance repairing. Since HUST is a engineering university, we have many electronic related majors, which offers our association many technicians.

I was the 20th captain of the volunteer team, and during my term of service, the most important thing is the 20th anniversary of the volunteer team. The celebration of the anniversary got highly concern of the department leadership, and I was responsible for the organization of the anniversary. For the preparation work, we needed to compile a summary report annual of the association, which acquired us to collect and reorganize all the materials passed onto us during the past 20 years. Besides, we need to send invitations of the old members and the related leaders to attend the 20 anniversary conference. Then, I also need to arrange the anniversary conversation and prepare lecture materials, and organize the meeting process and spot.

The anniversary reached a great success and got highly praised by the Youth League Committee of Hubei Province. Moreover, for our outstanding performance, the association won the Excellent Volunteer Association Award of Hongshan District, Wuhan City in 2011. Besides, in my efforts, more than 20 members of the association got praised of the Excellent Youth Volunteer of HUST.

抗压能力 Coping with Stress

Questions Like:

• An example that you have to deal with many activities at the same time?
• An example that you are frustrated/ feeling setback? How do you overcome?
• The most difficult goal you have struggle for? How did you achieve it?

Answer/Example

(丝丽雅项目)It’s important for an employee to handle pressure in daily work, especially in a expansive company, so the ability to cope with pressure is very important. I happened to have an experience of a project which may show some related qualities of mine.

It was a quality improvement consulting project in a chemical plant in Yibin, Sichuan province. We were entrusted to investigate the production line and improve the stability of the product quality. Our team consisted of three professors and one postgraduate student, me. The project lasted for almost one year and contain 3 stages, investigating, model building and online testing.

What bothered me is that I was almost the only person who did most of the works. Since the other three professors were busy with other projects or their researches, they could just provide necessary guidance for me, and I have to work on this project by myself. Besides, sometimes I had to compromise among different opinions of them. When a version of report was drafted or a preliminary model was built, they often would have different suggestions on reversion, and I had to explain to them and make several revisions to satisfy all their expectations. Moreover, during the project period, I also needed to do my own research, and had to coordinate my time and efforts in both of them.

Finally, when the project was done, we achieved a goal of improving the quality variation more than 30% and 12% of the product proficiency and trained more than 20 QAs on quality engineering. I also got highly praised by all the three professors for my performance in the project.

分析及决策能力 Analyzing and Decision Making

Questions Like:

• Decision making process
• Analytical and problem-solving skills
• Introduce an example that can show your innovation in internship or campus organizations.

Answer/Example

(西门子办公图书区)This is an example of how to quickly get adapt to a new environment which happened on me. It was during me internship at Siemens Real Estate in this summer. When I started my internship in Siemens, I found that everyone was busy with their own affairs and did not care too much of a new colleague. After several days, I did not even have opportunity to say hello to some of my colleagues, and I was anxious about it.

By chance, I had a conversation with my line manager and talked about my hobbies. When she knew that I had a rich experience in reading many kinds of books, she wanted me to introduce some of them to her. Suddenly I came up with an idea that I could help build a library area in the office, which could offer books and magazines for reading in the spare time of the colleagues. The manager quickly agreed and wanted me to draft a proposal and budget to her. On an internal meeting of the department, I proposed the idea of the library and got many suggestions from the colleagues. After that, I talked to them and asked for recommendations of books, which helped me quickly got familiar with many colleagues. A month later, the library area is set up, and through the process of the little project, I adapted myself into the new intern environment.

其他 Other Characteristics

Questions Like:

• Most impressive experience
• Other Experience you want to share

Answer/Example

(骑行经历)The most impressive thing I’ve done and the most incredible thing happened on me is the cycling experience of mine. I began to love cycling during my undergraduate study in HUST, but it was always short trip, no more than 100km. However, in the last year of my undergraduate study, I made a decision.

I was then got admitted by Peking University and working on my bachelor’s thesis in PKU, but I had to go back to Wuhan to present my thesis and graduate. It was then I made up my mind to ride a bicycle from Beijing to Wuhan, which was a journey of more than 1300km, and I had never cycled such a long journey, never to mention cycling alone. So I had to make a sufficient preparation, I learnt how to fix a bike, bought necessary medicines and sunscreen products.

However, the most impressive experience in the journey was not the hot weather and strong sunlight, it was the feeling of being alone and the desperation of the long journey ahead. Besides, an alone journey made the desperation more severe. When I was in such a desperation and it seemed impossible for me to finish this journey, I thought about the meaning of this journey, and my dreams of making a long cycling journey. I had been dreaming of a long journey for so long, and the meaning of this journey was not to enjoy the beautiful scenery or tasty food, it was to experience the life on journey and overcome difficulties on the way.

I lighted up and did not think about the remaining long journey ahead, and concentrated myself on today’s trip. Besides, I found a pleasure for myself that is to take photos with the milestones. I found that there were someone who had the same idea with me, and they even signed their names and feeling on the milestone. I read their message and felt that I am not alone anymore. Finally, this journey took me 8 days to reach my destination, and will take me a lifetime to forget.

(杨老师事件)I want to tell one more thing happened on me so that you can see some personality of mine. It happened early this year, when one day a teacher in my undergraduate university contacted me, and asked me if I can borrow him some money, since he was then in trouble. He explained to me that he had borrowed usury because he had to pay his brother’s medical fee, but he could not afford to pay the money back. The borrower threatened to hurt his family if he did not pay back the money in the given time, and he had no other way to go but looking help from his former students.

He was a very good teacher, who taught mathematics in my undergraduate university. He was humorous and wise, he often told stories of his and shared his experiences to all of us. However, I had seen so many frauds in recent news and could not trust him so easily. I looked for help from my counsellor and asked if she could help me check if all the teacher said is the truth. She gave me feedback that the teacher was indeed borrowing money around, and it had caused attention of his department, but it was not sure if what he said was true and needed further investigation. She also suggested me that I could wait for the result of the investigation.

However, the teacher told me that the deadline was the next day. I really wanted to help, but considering that I was only a student, I could not suffer 10,000 loss if I had trusted the wrong person. After getting permitted, I circled his story in my fellow classmates, and told them that they could choose to offer a little help or not within their own judgment, since I myself could not tell that this was not a fraud. But I myself chose to trust Mr. Yang and wanted to offer a little help of mine.

When I posted the message to the classmates, many of them called me and asked my account to offer their help. What impressed me most is that a person called me and told me that he could offer 5,000. I told him that I was not sure if it was a fraud or not, and could not permit the return of the money. I suggested him that 500 is enough, everyone could share a part. He told me that it was not the teacher that he trust, it was me. I was astonished, since I was not so familiar with this guy in my undergraduate time, and he could offer such a help because of me. I thanked him and insisted that 500 would be the highest, which was to ensure no larger loss.

In the end, we collected 10,000 yuan, from more than 20 members of my classmates. I thanked all of them in represent of Mr. Yang, and told them that they would be informed of any further progress of this matter.