What have you done at your present/last company to increase revenues, reduce costs, or save time?

Focus on one or two of the things listed in the question. You do not need to give detail on all three, especially if you do not have a great deal of experience.

Avoid looking like a deer in the headlights. This question can be a little scary, especially if you're thinking, "But all I did was answer the phone!" You've done something, so make sure you know what that is and don't freeze.

"In my previous role as office manager, I may not have been in a position to increase revenue company-wide, but I did suggest a program to contribute a quarter for a cup of coffee. We had great coffee, and it was expensive to provide to the whole office. I suggested that to mitigate complaints, we phrase it in such a way that if we couldn't make up the cost somehow, we would have to downgrade the coffee. Nobody complained at all; a quarter is a lot better than the three or more bucks they would spend at Starbucks next door! We ended up making about 53/week for fifty employees!"

"At my last job, I recognized that we were using a lot of paper and printer ink. I realized that for drafts, most people were automatically printing "one-sided/color," just for those documents to be edited and thrown away. I suggested to my boss that we ask people to please be diligent, and if they were just going to print out a draft, to select double-sided and black and white settings. I cannot remember exactly the cost savings, but I know we ended up ordering about half our usual amount of paper and colored ink!"

"My company was using an archaic process of file sharing when I started working there. They used flash drives that they handed back and forth to each other to share information. Not only was it time-consuming because one person would have to go up two floors to hand a flash drive to someone else, but errors happened frequently. The company already had OneDrive and MS 365, but we weren't using them. I talked to my boss and suggested we start using the programs we already had. It was slow-going at first, but ultimately everyone got on board."