Credit Card Officer Interview Questions & Answers

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Arrgh! If you fall for this one you shouldn't be hired anyway. The interviewer is testing you to see if you'll speak badly about your previous supervisor. Simply answer this question with extreme tact, diplomacy and if necessary, a big fat loss of memory. In short, you've never had any issues.

This works well for some positions – technical ones and leadership ones – and not well for others. It should be pretty obvious from the type of job you’re applying for whether this question might be asked. If it is, it’s easy to prepare for – just spend a half an hour reading some blogs on the specific areas you’re applying for and you’ll have some food.

Unless you have the I.Q. of a houseplant, you'll always answer YES to this one. It's the only answer. How can anyone function inside an organization if they are a loner? You may want to mention what part you like to play in a team though; it's a great chance to explain that you're a natural leader.

The interviewer could usually care less what the exact project is. The question is mostly looking to see if you have faced serious difficulty and how you overcame it. For most people, this isn’t their biggest success or biggest failure, but something that they turned from a likely failure into some sort of success.

Once again, there are a few ways to answer this but they should all be positive. You may work well under pressure, you may thrive under pressure, and you may actually prefer working under pressure. If you say you crumble like aged blue cheese, this is not going to help you get your foot in the door.

This is actually something of a trick question, because it’s just a way of re-asking the second question (what you know about the company) and the fourth (what you know about the position). It’s asked because it tells whether people give flippant answers to questions (things like “because I’m a people person”) or whether they think about things and give a genuine question. This is a good question to formulate an answer for in advance – basically, just come up with a few things that seem intriguing to you about the company and the position and reasons why they interest you.

This could include anything from night classes to hobbies and sports. If it's related, it's worth mentioning. Obviously anything to do with further education is great, but maybe you're spending time on a home improvement project to work on skills such as self-sufficiency, time management and motivation.

Mostly, this is looking for conviction of character. A strong, concrete answer of any reasonable sort is good here. “I wanted to move on” is not a strong answer. Downsizing is a good answer, as is a desire to seek specific new challenges (but be specific on what challenges you want to face). Minimize your actual discussion of your previous position here, as you’ll be very close to a big opportunity to start bashing your previous position.

If you're completely honest, you may be kicking yourself in the butt. If you say you don't have one, you're obviously lying. This is a horrible question and one that politicians have become masters at answering. They say things like "I'm perhaps too committed to my work and don't spend enough time with my family." Oh, there's a fireable offense. I've even heard "I think I'm too good at my job, it can often make people jealous." Please, let's keep our feet on the ground. If you're asked this question, give a small, work-related flaw that you're working hard to improve. Example: "I've been told I occasionally focus on details and miss the bigger picture, so I've been spending time laying out the complete project every day to see my overall progress."

This is an honesty question. I’m looking for “yes,” but people who are trying too hard to feed me a line of nonsense answer “no.” The best way to answer is to say “Yes, in much the same way that you’re interviewing other people. We’re both trying to find the best fit for what we need and what we want.” If your answer is truly no, then say so – “No, I’m actually happy with my current position, but there were a few compelling aspects of this job that made me want to follow up on it” and list those aspects.

Hopefully if you're applying for this position you have bags of related experience, and if that's the case you should mention it all. But if you're switching careers or trying something a little different, your experience may initially not look like it's matching up. That's when you need a little honest creativity to match the experiences required with the ones you have. People skills are people skills after all, you just need to show how customer service skills can apply to internal management positions, and so on.

Although it’s fine to list a technical skill or two here, particularly if your job is very technical, it’s very important to mention some non-technical things. “I learned how to work in a team environment after mostly working in solo environments” is a good one, for example. There should be no job where you learned nothing, and the interviewer is expecting that you learned at least a few things at your previous employment that will help at your current one.

I'd be very surprised if you haven't been asked this one at every interview. It's probably the most asked question because it sets the stage for the interview and it gets you talking. Be careful not to give the interviewer your life story here. You don't need to explain everything from birth to present day. Relevant facts about education, your career and your current life situation are fine.

As I'm sure you know, "because I'm great" or "I really need a job" are not good answers here. This is a time to give the employer a laundry list of your greatest talents that just so happen to match the job description. It's also good to avoid taking potshots at other potential candidates here. Focus on yourself and your talents, not other people's flaws.

It's not a very fair question is it? We'd all love to get paid a Trump-like salary doing a job we love but that's rare indeed. It's fine to say money is important, but remember that NOTHING is more important to you than the job. Otherwise, you're just someone looking for a bigger paycheck.

This is a great late question because it tells you whether the person is a long-term thinker or not. People that plan for the long term are usually in a good, mature mental state and will often wind up being stronger workers than people without long-term plans.

The answer is usually already known to the interviewer based on the resume, but this is a chance for you to really sell yourself. Most interviewers will usually sit back and see how well you can sell. On occasion, surprises can be good here, but this can be tricky – if it’s something that should have been on your resume, why was it not on your resume? You’re better off knowing what the cream of the crop of your resume is and just listing it out.

It's important here to focus on the word "implemented." There's nothing wrong with having a thousand great ideas, but if the only place they live is on your notepad what's the point? Better still, you need a good ending. If your previous company took your advice and ended up going bankrupt, that's not such a great example either. Be prepared with a story about an idea of yours that was taken from idea to implementation, and considered successful.

Ok, this is not the time for full disclosure. If some people from your past are going to say you're a boring A-hole, you don't need to bring that up. Stay positive, always, and maybe have a few specific quotes in mind. "They'd say I was a hard worker" or even better "John Doe has always said I was the most reliable, creative problem-solver he'd ever met."

This should be a straightforward question to answer, but it can trip you up. Presumably you are looking for a new job (or any job) because you want to advance your career and get a position that allows you to grow as a person and an employee. It's not a good idea to mention money here, it can make you sound mercenary. And if you are in the unfortunate situation of having been downsized, stay positive and be as brief as possible about it. If you were fired, you'll need a good explanation. But once again, stay positive.

Run for cover! This is one tricky game to play in an interview. Even if you know the salary range for the job, if you answer first you're already showing all your cards. You want as much as possible, the employer wants you for as little as you're willing to take. Before you apply, take a look at salary.com for a good idea of what someone with your specific experience should be paid. You may want to say, "well, that's something I've thought long and hard about and I think someone with my experience should get between X & Y." Or, you could be sly and say, "right now, I'm more interested in talking more about what the position can offer my career." That could at least buy you a little time to scope out the situation. But if you do have a specific figure in mind and you are confident that you can get it, I'd say go for it. I have on many occasions, and every time I got very close to that figure (both below and sometimes above).

These two questions simply seek to figure out what kind of management style will work best for this person and also how that person is likely to manage people. Let’s say I work in an organization with a very loose-knit management structure that requires a lot of self-starting. If that’s the case, I want to either hear that the “best” boss was very hands-off or that the “worst” boss was a micromanager. On the other hand, if I came from a strict hierarchical organization, I might want to see the exact opposite – a “best” boss that provided strong guidance and a good relationship or a “worst” boss that basically left the applicant to blow in the wind. Your best approach is to answer this as honestly as possible – the interviewer will have a good idea of the corporate culture and, frankly, if you try to slip into a company where you don’t match the culture, you’ll have a very hard time fitting in and succeeding. These questions might be worded as “what kind of management style works for you.”

Surprising to many, this is often not salary negotiation. In most cases, the person you’re interviewing with has little control over the final salary you’ll get. It’s usually used as a reality check – if you’re hiring a janitor and they expect $80K, you can probably toss the resume right then and there. At the same time, a highly-skilled programmer selling themselves at $30K is also setting off some warning bells. A good answer is usually on target or a bit on the high side, but not really low or insanely high. I’d get an idea of the asking rate for the position before I ever go to the interview, then request about 30% more.

This question is more likely to be thrown at someone with previous experience in the field who is applying for a senior credit risk analyst position, but it still might show up in an interview for an entry-level credit risk analyst position with a bank. A good answer demonstrates you understand the concept, and a better answer likely includes an example. A credit default swap (CDS) is a frequently used method of mitigating risk in fixed-income, debt security instruments such as bonds, and it is one of the most common financial derivatives. A CDS is essentially a type of investment insurance that allows the buyer to mitigate his investment risk by shifting risk to the seller of a CDS in exchange for a fee. The seller of the CDS stands in the position of guaranteeing the debt security in which the buyer has invested.

Since these answers usually are heavily involved with the specifics of the previous position, the specifics aren’t really important. What’s most important is that you actually have been involved in making a suggestion and helping it come to fruition, ideally with some success story behind it. Having done so indicates that you’re willing to do the same at this position, which can do nothing but improve an organization. Not having an answer of some sort here is generally a sizeable negative, but not a “do or die” negative.