By Colter Lee
No one wants to work with a hot mess when answering the how do you stay organized interview questions. There have been missed deadlines. Projects that have come to a halt. Work that is less-than-stellar, or, let’s be honest, sub-par. Miscommunications. Frustration. A disorganized worker may cause chaos not just inside their own organization, but also among their colleagues, bosses, and direct reports, as well as any clients or customers with whom they come into contact.
Therefore, it comes as no surprise that hiring managers, recruiters, and other interviewers want to prevent this chaos by questioning applicants about their organizational abilities, systems, and tactics during their interviews. “How do you remain organized?” or “How do you keep yourself organized at work?” are examples of direct interview questions that may be asked.
You’ve almost certainly had to take steps to keep yourself organized in order to succeed in any professional, academic, or extracurricular environment. Whether it’s using a note-taking app or project management software to track steps and milestones on a larger project, creating a deadline calendar for every assignment on that semester’s syllabi for your four courses, or creating a checklist of everything you need to pack for weekend tennis tournaments, you’ve almost certainly had to do so.
However, it’s possible that you didn’t spend much time thinking about how you’d explain the tactics you use. The good news is that all you have to do is reflect on something you currently do on a daily basis and condense it into a succinct, digestible answer to the question.
Tips for Responding to the Question “How Do You Stay Organized?”
Make use of the following suggestions to put together your response:
Convey Confidence to Your Interviewer
When you express your interest in and excitement to answer the issue, and when you frame your response in a positive manner, you are more likely to reassure the interviewer that you would have things under control if they were to employ you.
Describe your system in detail—and be specific.
Whatever it is that works for you, make sure you take the interviewer through it in sufficient detail for them to be able to picture what you are talking about.
Connect it to the underlying reason for doing so.
It is critical to understand the how, but expressing the why will allow you to demonstrate other abilities and attributes as well as connect your organization’s structure to effect and outcomes.
Communicate and collaborate with others, if possible.
Taking into consideration your context and surrounds is essential if you want to portray a true image of how you’d behave in your current position. In your weekly one-on-one meetings with your boss, maybe you have a standing agenda item where you check in on priorities and discuss which outstanding projects are the most important to do right now. Consider the following scenario: you are working with colleagues in another department on a monthly report and have set up a workflow in Airtable that allows you to update the status of various components while pinging information between them at various stages of the process using comments and tagging.
Don’t be too rigid in your thinking.
Organization and time management tactics are important, and interviewers want to know that you’ve thought about them and have a system in place that works well for you. However, they may also want to check whether you’re adaptable enough to work with a new team and to deal with unanticipated occurrences in the workplace. And you can also checkout answering the how do you stay organized interview questions.
