If you’re applying for a role in finance, poor analytical qualities could cause the company serious issues. So of course, if you are going to be issue solving in any financial capacity – from accounting to budgets to grants and more – possibilities are the company is going to need to make certain that you can utilize those analytical qualities effectively to observe financial data when addressing with complex financial data.

Behavioral Interview Query: Describe me about a time period when you were needed to observe financial data. What were you searching for? What was the outcome?

The most significant component of a good answer is to be brief and specific. Ignore throwing around answers such as “I looked at charts” or “I worked with accounting data” without something of substance that shows you’ve some idea of what you are doing. It is more primary to say “I worked with XYZ trend line and discovered that it was 3 percent which I then utilized to do ABC” than it is to say “I mostly worked with budgets to make projections” which do not demonstrate the specifics of your role, and whether or not you’re someone they can believe to perform complex tasks with numbers.

Sample Answer

“While working with the student aid commission, part of my job was observing trends to evaluate if the upcoming year’s budgets would meet student aid requirements. For instance, I would look at the last year’s budget and calculate progress and trends, and then compare those trends to last years to observe if it was steady over the previous various budgetary cycles.

Then I’d look at the present numbers available for the upcoming year, multiply that by the trend percentage, and make projections. Those projections would then be utilized to establish the upcoming budgetary appeals for the governor, to observe if we required to request more money or if money could be assigned to other programs deployed on trend lines.

This data affected student aid throughout the state, so precision was crucial. Every year we were victoriously capable to match student aid with the right number of students with an authentic rate of +/- 1%, which was remarkable compared to previous years.”

The specifics of this kind of answer are what show that you can be trusted to manage and observe financial data. If you can prove that you discover actual solutions that had an effect on a company, business, etc., you will surely impress the interviewer.