Organisational outcomes

Organisational outcomes include any improvements accrued by the
organisation as a result of your work. Sometimes these are easy to
quantify, especially if you’ve been involved in making, selling,
installing or changing something. When thinking about organisational
outcomes, many people confine themselves to the evident outcomes—
or the things they actually did. Examples of evident outcomes include
such things as implementing a new filing system, changing report
templates or building a new database for keeping track of customer
contacts. Needless to say, it is important to mention these outcomes
at an interview. However, the shortfall with evident outcomes is
that they fail to articulate their primary benefits to the organisation.

Saying you implemented a new filing system is great, but your answer
would be much better if you also articulated the benefit of this new
filing system to the employer. For example:

• Productivity rose by 5 per cent.
• Quality of service, as measured by customer feedback, improved
significantly.
• Customer service levels improved by 12 per cent.
• Staff satisfaction and moral improved by over 8 per cent.
• Turn-around times nearly halved.

‘Best guess’ estimates are fine in this situation.
You will have noticed that most of the above outcomes are
quantified. In general, quantified outcomes sound a lot more credible
than just saying something ‘improved’. However, if you do not have
specific numbers to talk about, approximations will do—providing
you can back them up. Unfortunately, many interviewees feel they
cannot talk about the specific improvements their efforts led to

because they worked for an organisation that did not measure
outcomes. If you find yourself in this situation, you should not allow
your employer’s failure to measure to deter you from articulating
‘best guess’ improvements. You are entitled to say to the interviewer
that, even though the benefits to the organisation were not measured,
you estimate that improvements were in the range of x per cent. But
be warned—do not go making over-inflated claims, otherwise you’ll
lose credibility. And be sure you can justify your ‘best guess’ claims.
Here are some phrases that may assist you in articulating outcomes
that were not measured:

• Anecdotal evidence strongly indicated . . .
• All the feedback we received showed that . . .
• The stakeholders were unanimous in their praise.
• Senior management felt that the goals were more than met.
• Judging by the time saved, we estimated that productivity
improved by . . .
Here’s an example of an answer that includes employer benefit
outcomes that were not measured:

As result of the new filing system, time spent by staff locating
certain documents decreased significantly, which gave them
more time to concentrate on other work. Even though we
did not measure precisely how much time was saved, the
feedback I received from the users strongly indicated that
productivity improved by at least 5 per cent.