Commercial Awareness Interview Questions
About this skill
Commercial awareness is having an understanding of how your organisation (and your industry as a whole) operates and makes money. Being commercially aware in the workplace means being conscious of how your work can generate (or potentially lose) money for the business.
Roles that require commercial awareness skills
- Sales
- Marketing
- Account management
- VC Investing
- Partnerships management
- Consulting
What skills should you be looking for?
One of our existing (and long-standing) clients emails to say that they are considering using a competitor either instead of or alongside us. What steps do you take to ensure that we remain their number one service/product provider?
An existing client has recommended our services to another organisation we haven’t worked with before. What are the three key questions would you ask to understand the needs of potential clients? And what are the key messages about our company you think should be included in the pitch?
The Head of Business Development approaches you with an urgent request, which will require your team to reassign their time in order to address. Your team is already overstretched, so doing this will likely impact deadlines for their existing work. However, the request is also critical to business success. How would you approach this request?
Tell us about a recent news story that has sparked your interest? In what ways might this impact our clients or our work? This question is designed to show us your commercial awareness. We want to see that you take an interest in current affairs and can offer ideas on how such events might impact our business and/or the clients we work with and the services they need.
Imagine we’re working with a partner organisation to host an in-person conference or event. How could we ensure maximum partnership activation for this new commercial opportunity?
What are structured interview questions?
Structured questions (or work samples) are highly predictive, job-specific questions designed to simulate parts of a job.
Structured work sample questions are the most predictive form of assessment you can use. Why? Because they directly test for skills by asking candidates to think as if they were already in the job.
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Diversity
Testing for skills instead of just experience makes interviews a more inclusive process. 60%+ of candidates hired through our process would've been missed using CVs/traditional interviews - most of whom are from underrepresented groups.
Accuracy
By simulating tasks that would realistically occur in the role, you can see how candidates would think and work should they get the job.What could be more predictive than having candidates do small parts of the job before actually getting it?
Candidate experience
Candidates genuinely enjoy being given a chance to showcase their ability - this is why we have a 9/10 average candidate experience rating (including unsuccessful candidates).
Decide on the skills you’re looking for
Choose 6-8 core skills required for success in the role. These can be a mix of hard, technical skills as well as soft skills and general working characteristics.You could also include one or two of your organisation's most relevant values.
Think of scenarios that would test these skills
Next, come up with either everyday tasks or rarer, more challenging scenarios that would test some of these skills. They can be day-to-day duties, bigger projects or specific dilemmas that a candidate may realistically face. Should they get the job.
Pose scenarios hypothetically to create your questions
Instead of your typical ‘tell me a time when’ questions, ask candidates what they would do if faced with a given scenario.It's not that experience doesn't have any value… it's just more predictive to test directly for skills, without making assumptions based on background.
Give yourself scoring criteria
Want to make more data-driven hiring decisions? Score candidates against set criteria.We’d recommend starting out with a simple 1-5 star scale and a few bullet points noting what a good, mediocre and bad answer might include.
Use review panels
Having team members join your interviews will result in fairer, more accurate scores.Three is the magic number - you’ll start seeing diminishing return after that