Business Analyst Mock Interview
Practice 30 Business Analyst interview questions covering requirements gathering, stakeholder management, and data analysis.
Question 11 of 30
What is benchmarking, and why is it important?
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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.
"Benchmarking is the important practice of comparing your business against other businesses that are already very successful. It's like a smart, analytical comparison. I believe it's essential to benchmark when a company is looking at making a significant change, seeing a loss of revenue, anticipating the launch of a new product, or need to recalibrate their business operations in one way or another."
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.
By definition, to benchmark is to evaluate or compare with a pre-set standard. When a business analyst is benchmarking, they take a deep dive into a competing organization and then use those marks to set a standard for the company they are working with.
This deep dive could include hiring practices, return policies, product development, manufacturing procedures, and more. Explain to the interviewer how you, as a successful business analyst, use benchmarking to help your clients achieve their goals.
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.
"In a nutshell, benchmarking is the practice of setting your business standards against your competitors. When properly utilized, benchmarking can help an organization take a critical look at their competitors' performance and learn from past mistakes while benefiting from best practices that may already exist. This dive could include dissecting existing processes, the analysis of different sets of data, and developing an action plan around what your competitors may or may not be doing."
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Essentially, benchmarking is setting your business standards against your competitors. Benchmarking can encompass product development, profitability ratios, to manufacturing procedures. Benchmarking helps evaluate competitors' performance and learn how to benefit successful practices and avoid errors. From there, you can dissect existing processes utilizing multiple sets of data and develop a plan to implement them.
Rachelle's Feedback
A very clear answer - good job! You seem to have a knack for explaining your work in easy-to-understand terms, a valuable skill in your line of work.
Anonymous Answer
Benchmarking compares the business to understand where we stand amongst the competitors and how we can improve our business needs. Any business that needs to improve and prosper is important to understand what their competitors are doing. Once we know what they are doing, we would get an idea, how I can be different from them and make a mark in the industry. I believe it is the constant stage of improvement, and benchmarking can help the company achieve it.
Rachelle's Feedback
You show a good understanding of benchmarking - well done! If you have performed any benchmarking tasks/projects in the past, I encourage you to tie this experience into your response.
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