Give me an example of a time that you had to solve a problem without having all of the necessary information at hand to do so. How did you handle that situation?

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Community Answers

For this question, your interviewer is looking to test your ability to be analytical and resourceful in a specific situation where you had to dig further to solve a problem. Prior to your interview, try to think of a time in the past where you encountered this specific situation and talk through it by laying out the problem and walking through the step-by-step approach you took to solve the problem. Try to be as detailed you can as you explain how you thought the problem out and worked hard to use the resources you could to help solve the problem. Your interviewer will be relying on these fine details to truly see how you will perform on the job with S&P Global.

"Back when I first joined my current organization, I was taking a role that had been vacant for many months and I had to start with a backlog of work along with the regular daily activities. This customer service role included logging daily visitors and calls and the interim rep only kept brief notes. After taking the time to walk through training and getting running on my own, I realized that the current workload wouldn't allow me to catch up on the backlog of work that had been missed. While I had ideas of how to play catch up on the work, I approached my supervisor with a few ideas and we settled on having me log hours from home on our system as overtime to get caught up. I worked with our IT staff on getting set up on our network from home and was more that willing to help out with some extra hours."

"Working for a large financial institution, our advisory staff help cover for each other when we are on vacation, sick or simply out of office for the day. We typically team up in group of three to help provide coverage for each other. A couple of months ago, I fielded a call from a colleague's client while she was away on vacation and completely out of phone coverage. The client had several questions about their personal finances that I couldn't help resolve off the top of my head. I let them know that their advisor was away on vacation but I would take the next hour to research their questions and get back to them shortly. This was a very acceptable path of action to the client and I took the time to get their questions answered quickly."

Anonymous Answer

"When I was working in San Antonio, I received a call from the airforce base, which was close to the office. They were having some trouble, they didn't specify what. I assumed they probably had an old system and took with me the tools I thought appropriate. I was wrong, their system was super old and strange. I had never seen anything like it before. And what had stopped working were their barriers. Since the control panel was sitting in the middle of a field in the sun and it was a hot tough day. I talked to the guy in charge and was honest with him. Just told him I needed to research their system and that I needed to go back to the office and come back the next day. He was ok with this. I went back to the office and stayed there until I had learned how to work it out. Didn't get much sleep that night, but I was able to get the barriers back up and running the next day."