What is the most creative or innovative project you have worked on throughout your career?
Cardinal Health prioritizes innovation in its work culture, always trying to develop new ways of thinking, operating, and serving its customers. During your research, you most likely learned that the organization has an innovation engine and product development center called Fuse. The company is proud of this open, collaborative, and creative habitat where clinical experts, software engineers, data scientists, and leaders in human-centered design focus on helping its customers improve health outcomes at lower costs. Your interviewer poses this question to get a feel for the innovative and creative side you would bring to their team if offered the position.
"My previous employer wanted to think of ways to generate more attention online and gather a stronger following and more brand recognition. I started an e-newsletter that, after just six months, had over 30,000 subscribers. It was a great success."
Whether we realize it or not, we all have had the opportunity to perform a creative task or work on an innovative project. Before your interview, think about an innovative idea you helped spark and come prepared to discuss it. Perhaps you were a receptionist at your previous job, and you creatively organized the company's front desk by using color-coded folders. If you were an accountant, talk about how you restructured the workflow for a client and how it saved you hours of work on their audit.
"The most innovative project I worked on was at my previous job. One of our computer databases had an issue that caused large amounts of data to be lost several times a week. My team developed an improved database system that automatically refreshed when new data was entered and was also backed up in the cloud. After my team implemented the new system, we never lost data again."
Community answers are written by other candidates practicing this set. Reading how others frame the same question is one of the fastest ways to sharpen your own.
Anonymous Answer
During my laboratory years, I worked as a chemist in a start-up state-of-the-art industrial lab. I noticed that the fumes were still concentrated at the workstations so I designed an exhaust fan system that pulled the fumes through a PVC pipe to the outdoors. The QA manager agreed 100% that the system would be placed at each workstation.
Stephanie's Feedback
What an awesome accomplishment--good for you! What happened as a result of this exhaust fan system being created? You'll take your answer to the next level if you add an extra sentence to focus on the impact of your invention.
Anonymous Answer
There was a time when the GM of healthcare asked me to be a part of a team developing new software that would aid in configuring custom products for our team. This was creative and innovative because nothing like it existed as a template to build on. We literally assembled a team and started working with a software company to put together this app from the ground up. We called it the pizza app because the idea was that it would make building a custom product as easy as ordering pizza online for our customers. It took years of teamwork and testing and learning about programming for all involved and was finally launched a few years ago as an internal tool.
Jaymie's Feedback
That sounds like a very innovative project! What role did you play in the project? What were some of your responsibilities or contributions? If you can share some of that information, it will help call out some of your skills.
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