interview questions Flashcards
• Tell us about yourself
o I’m a digital and loyalty marketing professional and most recently the Senior Manager of Incentives for Kimberly-Clark.
o I’ve spent the last 10 years progressing my experience from hospitality operations to loyalty and digital marketing, and solving marketing problems for diverse stakeholder groups across complex matrix organizations.
o This opportunity caught my attention because it’s the perfect opportunity to tie every piece of my professional experience together in operations and digital/loyalty marketing as well as a challenge to grow my skills further in digital strategy.
• Why this role, and why Grainger?
• Huge amount of transferrable skills to this role: Experience in segmentation/targeting, customer acquisition, customer retention, cross-sell/upsell, Social communities, Financial delivery, Analytics, Organizational Development
• Culture first: Driven by a people-centric culture to deliver products and services to solve problems for businesses big and small
• Great Place to Work (89% of EEs say it’s great), #89 in Fortune Best Places to Work, HRC 100% CEI score (for 8 years!!!), Grainger presence at Chicago Pride
• Very impressed all benefits are available to view via LinkedIn and even offers a stress management resource
• Insta careers page is a really cool insight that shows Grainger is putting it’s money where its mouth is as far as team culture
• What makes me special as a candidate and separates me from the others?
o Non-traditional career trajectory is an asset
o Experience across hospitality, operations, field, and corporate environments
Helps me “know my audience”
o Experience in creative problem solving across multiple teams, technologies, channels, and working functions
Like being a CEO of a small company - I learn a little about all of these teams/functions, and it’s great for growth and decision making
o Taking care of people is fundamental to everything I do
o Sense of humor – can’t perform at your best if you’re not having fun
• What are your greatest successes?
o Personal?
Looking back between 2014 to now, I’m so proud of the greatest period of growth in my life. Became a homeowner (and renovated it), finished grad school, and traveled to 17 countries. All of these things I imagined were impossible or would happen much later in life.
o Professional?
In my time at Inspire Brands: Went from a team of five and two brands, to a team of 45 and integrated three additional brands. I’m humbled to know I had a big part in growing the team’s culture and those efforts touch 12m people and nearly $1b in revenue annually.
• What’s your greatest failure?
o Talk about time at White Lodging
o Learned that knowing what doesn’t work is as important as knowing what does
o Taught me that cultural fit and “finding your tribe” is always key to unlocking my greatest potential
o Also learned that taking risks is important and failure is ok – both led to growth!
• What is your leadership style?
o Coaching (“consider this”) style - like to associate solutions with personal stories.
o Freedom within a framework; we are all aligned to a structure and end goal, check in regularly, and always have each other’s backs
o Servant leader to focus on building a great culture. The little things is what’s most important here (birthdays, team events, blowing off steam, 1:1s, Halloween, etc).
o Always do right by our customers/stakeholders and be accountable to ourselves and others – “keep me honest here…”
o Never forget the leaders from my past who have given me opportunities to learn/grow and pay it forward – the golden rule
o Example: Building out K-C pride team and AMC culture ambassadors
• What motivates you?
o Continuing to improve myself and enjoying looking back on cumulative little successes over time
o Diversity & Inclusion – Making sure every voice is heard and being a champion for future LGBTQ leaders
o The amazing feeling that comes with solving a complex problem – personally or professionally
•Tell me about a time where you dealt with an employee problem?
o K-C team issues with role expectations not aligning with reality which affected morale and would impact performance long-term
o First assessed challenges with each individual team member to understand what differed compared to their expectation upon hire and what solutions they believed they could implement to resolve the discrepancy
o Raised issue with HR and my leader for awareness, documentation, and additional guidance
o Chartered three year Incentives team vision including purpose, proposed operating rhythm, current roadblocks, gaps to fill, and next steps
o Aligned with HR and leadership to drive team buy-in and execution on charter goals
o Within three months, operating rhythm was fully in place, lunch and learns had been conducted, and team was able to retain 100% engagement score
• What are your strengths?
o Adaptable and creative problem solver - learned from varied experience to date across multiple business units and roles (mantra: there’s always an alternative)
Story to tell: Issue with season ticket promotion. Data wasn’t passing through from landing page and check not found POS error.
Reverse engineered purchase data flowing through Epsilon attached to a logged in member account, used that purchase value only, and applied the tickets manually. Automated the process and ran daily from there.
Result: Able to still get additional 5% incremental from those members on top of already heavy spend during football season.
o Collaborative – Nothing I’ve achieved until now has been done alone, and it’s where I’ve found the most success. Effective, healthy relationships are mission critical to success in matrix organizations
Story to tell: Co-founder of Inspire Pride BRG. Stuck in there with challenges in engagement and cultural barriers, stood up a budgeting committee, and helped market the pride tshirts.
• What are your weaknesses?
o Situation: Hate surprises – personal and professional
o Task: Became aware of anxiety/stress behavior when confronted with surprises at work
o Action: First be aware of the stress behavior and pause to know that it’s fine and normal. Birkman sessions during time with IHG were very fun and insightful, taught me how to recognize and process that reaction, and plan to be ready for it. Also learned how to anticipate the needs of my team and colleagues.
o Result: Not only learned how to work through stress behavior, but it became a learned behavior in better solving problems, and better interacting/empathizing with teams when recognizing their stress behaviors.
o Diplomatic to a fault, not direct out of fear for my growth/career.
How fixed? Very direct/honest leadership that recognized my development need, as well as covid and very lean team requiring direct/honest/clear communication in the face of ambiguity.
• How do you prioritize workload/initiatives?
o Communication, communication, communication
o Regular cadence of check-ins: Weekly 1:1’s with team as well as my leadership, clear documentation of team priorities and ongoing responsibilities, regular updates, cascading any necessary team priorities
o SmartSheet and OneNote are neat tools to track ongoing projects and checkpoints
o Agile methodology is a great tool to check in, understand shifting priorities, and adjust accordingly
• Talk about a time where you created a user-first digital product.
o Situation: Compromised account fraud growing out of control
o Task: Bring ecomm, loyalty, Ops, and IT together to reduce impact asap
o Build process to communicate to franchisees and customers in separate channels to acknowledge the issue, what steps are being taken, and provide resolution updates.
o Action: Implemented reCAPTCHA, created band-aid to force password resets, activated geo ip filtering, changed session token expiration, and completed PEN testing on the platform, and kept in close contact with operations community
o Result: Reduced unauthorized transactions 70% from May 2020 to Aug 2021 YoY, restored trust from franchise community, near elimination of mentions on social media, and influenced the business to implement a new authentication layer provider.
• Talk about a difficult situation and how you overcame it
o Situation: 70m points accidentally distributed to member accounts in trivia
o Task: Understand root cause of the problem, prevent finger pointing situation, and assemble working group to take action against similar future issues
o Action: Request RCA from both Fanhub and Epsilon. Immediately reverse unredeemed points and use email marketing/messaging as fun/branded service recovery opportunity. Agree with brand and loyalty leaders to work together to solve issue instead of point fingers.
o Result: Clawed back all but 2m net points, overwhelmingly positive customer response to service recovery. Accept full accountability amongst the shared team, update Fanhub MSA, create “circuit breakers” and reporting on Epsilon side, more detail in offer briefs, and closer relationship with brand marketing.
• Talk about a time where you led a test and learn initiative
o Situation: Led franchisee value lunch & learn sessions
o Task: Engage franchisee community (600 stores) to increase overall attachment and engagement in Blazin’ Rewards loyalty
o Action: Assessed top 10 franchise groups by number of locations which accounted for nearly half of all fran locations in the system. Actively invite owners/leads to participate in sessions to learn about loyalty, overall value, and support team (me). Present data, answer questions, understand pain points, and maintain relationship. Also engaged field/franchise consultant community to maintain engagement.
o Result: A year following these working sessions, franchise attach had doubled from 7.5% to 15%, and loyalty revenue grew 35% to $150m. By developing a relationship with franchisees, also created a communication channel, drove reporting metrics, and resolved ongoing loyalty IT issues in stores.
• Talk about a time where you used data to solve a problem
o Situation: Ibotta battle
o Task: assess impacts of changes to Ibotta syndication
o Action: Brought together WMT shopper teams, strategy, and data science leaders to meet twice weekly to collect data on visibility, audience, scale, and impact of Ibotta syndication to WMT.
o Used similar historical campaign data provided by the brands as well as Ibotta on-platform to compare with daily redemption performance on WMT and compare trends.
o Built web crawler to track competitor offers on the platform to see how many competitor offers were available
o Utilized WMT luminate data to track store sales data back to offer performance and manage relationships inside the retailer.
o Result: Realized that Walmart was NOT promoting Walmart rewards and was merely using as a test platform - relationships confirmed this hypothesis. Battle confirmed that on-platform was still performing 18% better than WMTR, and started a conversation to improve overall ROAS versus changing business model.
