Listening to the Schubert Oktette while starting on the resume/interview research. I hate these questions:
Give me an example of a time that you were the first to identify a significant problem or issue that needed to be addressed.
Probe questions:
• What was the problem or issue, and how did it come to your attention?
• At what point did you alert others (peers/supervisor)?
• What would have been the impact of ignoring the original symptoms or problems?
And they want most recent examples for everything. I have good stuff from the past that makes for far more interesting stories, like when a teenager set fire to the tire mound in Catskill and you could see the flames in other states. We didn't publish a newspaper on Sundays and this was a Saturday afternoon, so it would be two days before we could tell people what was happening in their town. Let the bigger papers get there first? Not likely. I got permission to print a special edition and rounded up most of the staff to get out there and work, and then learned some parts of the trade I'd never done before, like helping run the printing press, so we could get that out in a timely manner. And we did it because that's what we did. There was no talk of overtime or any of that. Of course, I was in my 20s then. We won plenty of awards for that coverage. I even won a photography award, and this was in the days before point-and-shoot cameras. I was terrible.
