Interview Question: "Give an example of when you have thought outside the box"

Hiring managers pose this question to find out about your past experiences and to see if you can think on your feet and solve problems. They want to hear if you have pitching skills to sell yourself to them and if you’re innovative enough to think of alternative solutions to a problem.

Showcase your lateral thinking by describing a time where you wowed your manager and prevented a detrimental problem from happening. Whether it’s a tough client situation, an unexpected turn of events in a team project, or something personal, it’s important to walk the interviewer through the timeline of events.

Once you’ve listed all your achievements, choose one that’s the most relatable to the job that you’re applying for.

Then structure your response. By following the STAR approach, you can highlight your skills and abilities through your answer. You can begin by describing the context of the example (the Situation), then explain what your initial role and goal was while also listing the problem that you faced (the Task), followed by the Actions that you took to overcome the problem and concluding with the outcome based on the steps that you took (the Result).

Examples:

"I was working on an important presentation the night before I was due to deliver it to an audience of 100 when my laptop blacked out and my entire document was deleted. I first tried to recover the document with a recovery program but to no avail! I then spent the next six hours rewriting as much as I could remember and combined it with some of the previous presentations that I had stored on my work computer. Luckily, it all came together in the end, and my presentation was well-delivered."

"In my previous role, we were preparing to send out important press invites when the envelopes arrived in the wrong size! To ensure they were sent on time, I had to improvise. I found old invites that hadn’t been sent, opened them carefully, and took out the existing invites, and I was strapped for time. Luckily, my recycling process paid off, and they looked as good as new!"

When you’re attempting to answer this tricky question, make sure you avoid using an irrelevant example, an example with a negative outcome, or trailing off on a tangent.