Behavioral Interview Questions (Past Experience) Flashcards
Tell me about a time you received criticism and how did you handle it?
Yeah well my manager and associate director on my team always did a quick review of my work before approval to send it to client. So if they felt like something specific could be approved upon they would just let me know or add notes directly to the document that I worked on. For example I put together a doc for PGA tour to optimize their local location listings Google Business Profile and essentially I focused really on the benefit of using it before the holidays for promotions and sales. My manager thought it would it would be a good idea to include a couple of examples of how other sporting companies were using their GBP posts so I did that for dick’s sporting goods and Wilson.
Can you tell me about a time you’ve had a difficult interaction with a client and how you went about that?
Yeah sometimes we do have to have difficult conversations with our clients especially if they’re not understanding the reason behind our recommendations. For example for my client Truist bank the point of contact for their blog section of the site expressed that they did not their blog posts to link to their product and service pages because they wanted it to be informative without the pressure. So I worked on creating a presentation on the importance of seo when writing long form content such as blog posts and the importance of internal linking not just to product pages but to other relevant content as well. We made sure that other aspects of the blog posts were optimized for seo but they also discussed with the content team how they can better incorporate internal linking.
Can you tell me about a difficult time with your coworker and how you went about that?
My manager and I were usually on the same page when it came to projects but would disagree on sometimes were deadlines. She would usually set the deadlines for my lines of business projects that I worked on such as a content brief because those tend to have quick turn around times but sometimes i’ll have more important tasks or ad hoc requests that require my attention first, so I started letting her know that it would be better to agree on deliverable dates together that way i’ll have enough time to work on each task effectively without worrying about the deadline.
Tell me about a time you went above and beyond
I worked on a content refresh for Truist bank which is essentially going through their existing content for their commercial side because they wanted to update that section. Initially they requested in our weekly meeting that they wanted to know priority articles and which they should retire. I worked on putting together this content refresh worksheet for our team and another seo consulting team to work out of. I added detailed columns that
Can you tell me about a time when you had to pivot quickly due to an unexpected change? How did you handle it?
Yeah, I unexpectedly had to change teams about half way through the year. I went from only working on the Truist bank account to working on the two ecommerce and health care account. The SEO strategies for them were different, our healthcare client required more information for research in their deliverables, both ecommerce clients required a lot of new footer copy and the SEO strategies were mostly around articles related to their topics and technical SEO. I had to just learn to adapt quickly to the new accounts and ask questions if I felt stuck or didn’t understand a specific task. I had pretty helpful managers on both teams though.
Tell us about an incident where you took a risk and failed.
I think the failure aspect didn’t have to do with the task itself but with the amount of time estimated to complete it was definitely a little off. This was one of the newer things I worked on when I joined the healthcare account. Essentially i am bulk downloading locations from a tool called reputation for specific services and then going through each location in a google sheet and checking to see if the information matches with the landing page, if it has the right service tags, the correct location, phone and fax numbers, as well as correct payment options, opening times etc. The task itself was simple and I just let my manager choose the deadline on that one but as i’m working through it I realize how much time it’s taking to do so I let my manager know that I am going to need more time to work on this and I try to give myself enough time when working on things because it’s easy to underestimate how long something will take.
Tell me about your best collaboration experience.
Sure, I worked on a SEO content refresh project for Truist bank’s commercial articles do strategic advice, premier banking and my responsibility was to put together a sheet that will help us choose which articles are valuable, which should be retired and which should combined. Tombras works closely with an external consultancy for Truist when it comes to SEO. So I decided to filter these articles by clicks, impressions overall ctr, assign sub-categories, evergreen content, expert knowledge, whether or not they had seo elements, the length of the articles and my manager, myself and associate directer and the external consultants filled in the criteria for this sheet.
Tell me about a time when you were handling a project that went outside of your scope of work. How did you handle it?
Sure, so one of the first projects I worked on for Truist bank was a site section audits and I was responsible for mortgage, credit cards and wealth lines of businesses. And the first time I did this audit I was a little unsure of which specific questions to consider when auditing a site section like mortgage for example. This was not a topic I was very familiar with so this required me to do a lot of competitor research and look at bank of america, wells fargo and capital one to see how they structure their mortgage section what type of content they include that we could incorporate and that definitely gave me a better idea of what that site optimization should look like.
Describe a time when you had to step up and demonstrate leadership skills.
Yeah when I first joined the Truist banking account, it was just me, because I came straight from my internship and this was a brand new client that our agency just signed so it was myself and the VP Director of SEO working on this account. I was essentially the second main point of contact for about three weeks before my associate director joined the team and I worked on a lot of article content briefs and just had to learn about the banking space, what kind of products and services they had, get familiar with their stakeholders and Line of business contacts, how they do reporting, taking notes in all meetings for when our associate director joined, I got her up to speed on what we had already discussed and worked on and it was challenging in the beginning, but I think it was a good experience to have.
Give me an example of a time when you didn’t meet a client’s expectation. What happened, and how did you attempt to rectify the situation?
This can happen sometimes with monthly reporting, especially with the Truist account and our healthcare account. With Truist they require us to use Adobe Analytics instead of Google Analytics which is not as user friendly and easy to understand as Google Analytics. And our main point of contact was always changing metrics he wanted us to track and when we sent our monthly reporting in for each line of business he mentioned that either we use a different metric or add a metric so myself and my manager dedicated a time during our weekly seo status meetings to discuss which metrics exactly we need to have and if we don’t have an update by reporting week then it does not get included. It will just have to wait until the next report. Eventually we did get that sorted out but it was very random in the beginning and we realized we needed more structure when it came to reporting.
Describe a time when you were under a lot of pressure and how did you handle it?
I think the site migration for Paul Fredrick was a little stressful, I had to make sure everything was running smoothly on our end with all collection and product and article pages. Then I realized the metadata did not transfer over correctly so I went through hundreds of metadata that week and luckily we had a template for the collection pages but just having to do that manually took a lof time. We had to keep an eye on ranking especially for their most popular articles, how to tie a tie was one that ranked really well before the migration so I really had to keep their team updated on how were progressing and what changed we needed to make. We explained and they knew it would take time for organic users and sessions to increase.
Give me an example of a time when you had to think on your feet.
Yeah so for our golfing client PGA Tour we were discussing in our meeting different seo things we could do to get more visibility for the upcoming holiday season and i remember seeing golf galaxy which is one of their main competitors doing Google posts for their store locations on Google Business Profile so that was one thing that I recommended in the meeting and eventually ended up creating a doc that went over google posts the benefits of using it to promote product promotions, discounts and announcements during the holidays.
Tell me about a time you set a goal for yourself. How did you ensure you would meet your goal?
I think one of my main goals was just to really understand each client I worked with and how their SEO needs and processes were different, what metrics matter most to them and it made my experience a little better. That combined with better project management skills, so creating different client boards on trello, giving myself enough times to complete tasks.
Give me an example of a time you managed numerous responsibilities. How did you handle that?
At the agency there are always multiple things we’re working on. The same week we had a site migration forPaul Frederick I also had two Atrium deliverables to do. For the migration I was doing a site audit and flagging anything that was out of the ordinary as well as worked on manually transferring metadata over to Shopify. For Atrium it was their typical deliverable project for an existing page they want optimized better. So project management is really important, I used Trello to manage my workload and I was able to complete everything by end of week.
Give me an example of a time when you were able to successfully persuade a coworker?
Well the good thing is that I had pretty good communication with my mangers and they would always say if I had another recommendation on how to do something differently then I could do that and then we would walk through it after together. I can’t think of a specific instance where I had to persuade them, they allow for me to bring my ideas to the table and run with it and we review, what we think works and what we don’t and we just try to have good communication.
