What sets us apart from everyone else is our creativity. It doesn’t matter what role you are in – from coding to pest control to psychology, it is our ability to think in new and interesting ways that makes us more than just robots. It makes us “talent.”
But how can an employer figure out if you are creative, and how that creativity translates in the workplace? They can do that by asking you about it with a creativity interview question.
Behavioral Interview Question: What is the most creative idea or project you have generated in your current role? How was it received?
Creativity means different things to different people, and certainly means different things in different industries. Using the above examples, a pest control technician can’t exactly get “creative” about where they spray for pests, a coder still needs to know basic coding, and a psychologist has to follow specific rules in order to practice.
But there is always room for a unique approach. The pest control worker can use special strategies to better determine if a type of pest is present. The psychologist has to be able to come up with unique approaches to complex individuals and problems. The coder needs to be able to turn mechanical code into an interesting and inventive application. Every job uses creativity in some way.
Try to share your best, most creative achievement in your history.
Sample Answer:
“The database at my current job is huge with tons of records and different tables that cannot be moved or deleted. There was no easy way to extract data, except to look through all of the tables and familiarize yourself with the complex names of the tables and fields.
Then one day, I realized I could create a new master template that would serve as a reference for all the other confusing tables. In other words, I would have a summary of all the individual tables, and the new template would have far less confusing terms and names that could be changed and altered as needed. Each time we received a query, we could search for it in the new template using terms that made sense.
I brought this up to my supervisors and they didn’t quite understand all the details but they asked me to try it. I did and it was hugely successful, and is now used by my entire unit. Anytime my unit has to report on data, they write up a query that joins to the reference template that I created which then extracts the correct data from the correct table.”
There are few better answers than those that are shown to now be used by an entire staff. Find a time in your history when you’ve used a bit of creativity to solve a problem in the long term, and that’s the answer you’ll want to use for this question.
