Archivist Mock Interview
Master 25 Archivist interview questions covering preservation, cataloging systems, and archival standards.
Question 14 of 25
Describe a time when you motivated yourself to complete an assignment or task that you did not feel like doing.
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Rachelle Enns is an interview coach and job search expert. She works with candidates to perform their best in employment, medical, and post-secondary admission interviews.
"I was once handed the task of cleaning out a huge amount of data. It had become a mashup of random documents that we no longer needed. I did not want to do it, but I found the motivation to complete the task by focusing on how a more organized system would make everyone's life easier."
Rachelle Enns is an interview coach and job search expert. She works with candidates to perform their best in employment, medical, and post-secondary admission interviews.
"We all have parts of our work that we need to keep motivated to complete. I try to think of the bigger picture and focus my energy on how the work to be done will help contribute to that."
Rachelle Enns is an interview coach and job search expert. She works with candidates to perform their best in employment, medical, and post-secondary admission interviews.
Show the interviewer that you will still get the job done even when you aren't excited about the task at hand. Think about a time when there was a work-related task that you did not want to do. Perhaps the dreaded file room needed to be purged of outdated files to make room for new data.
Tell the interviewer what your task was, and explain why you were not excited about it. Be sure to tell the interviewer that even though you were not enthusiastic about the job, you made it happen promptly knowing that it would help the organization as a whole.
Rachelle Enns is an interview coach and job search expert. She works with candidates to perform their best in employment, medical, and post-secondary admission interviews.
"I like to set rewards for myself when there are undesirable tasks at hand. For instance, a large part of what I do is review all electronic documents that come into our portal on a weekly basis. Sometimes there will be up to 200 documents to review. They all begin to look the same after awhile, so I have set a goal to look at 20 at a time, give myself a quick break, then return to the task."
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