Nestle Flashcards
(17 cards)
What do you think you will enjoy most about working in the food and beverage industry?
I think I will enjoy working on the wide variety of food products that exist and contributing to all of the different types of innovation and changes that can take place.
What is your greatest weakness?
Sometimes I can get too focused on a particular task and be a perfectionist about it. However, I have come to know that perfection can be the enemy of excellence.
What is your greatest strength and how will that help you make a difference at nestle?
I am good at coming up with creative solutions to problems and I think that can help me come up with creative ways to change and innovate product formulations and finding ways to fix customer problems.
The work environment at Nestle can be fast-paced at times. How do you handle stress?
I write down my priorities and put all of my focus and energy into handling the most important tasks before moving onto other ones. I also like to make realistic plans and delegate tasks which I know I would not be able to do to other team members.
At Nestle we understand that conflict can arise when you’re working closely with others on a team. Give me an example of a time when you had to deal with an issue while working with others.
While working as a secretary in the food science club my team members were arguing about the best way to advertise our event to fellow club members. I came up with the idea of creating an online survey to ask club members which channel of communication they preferred and we decided to choose the most popular one from the results.
Tell me about a time when your actions resulted in greater efficiencies of your team.
While working as a research assistant for the food microbiology department we had produced dissatisfying results. I argued that we should review the steps of the experiment identify which one went wrong and then redo the experiment while correcting that step. The experiment was done succesfully
What is your greatest professional achievement so far?
While working as a marketing intern for a startup beverage company I was given a list of 50 competitors to do a competitive analysis on and I had no prior knowledge of marketing or business prior to this point. I made up for this gap in knowledge by putting a lot of research and strategic thinking into how to develop a strong competitive analysis and I ended up developing a competitive analysis which the CEO was so impressed with that she that it was the best competitive analysis that she’s ever seen.
How would your co-workers describe you?
Enthusiastic, motivated and able to work well both independently and as a team player.
Why do you want to work here?
I want to work at nestle because I understand that it is a major company with a wide variety of different types of food products (plant based protein to baby food) to work on and I believe that due to it’s diversity and it’s size I can have the most impact on the most people.
- Give a time when you had a lot of work to do and a tight deadline. What did you do
While working at new age drinks the start up company over the summer the CEO of the company asked me to do multiple time consuming assignments in a single day. I prioritized which task most important and the most difficult and focused on completing that before I approached the other ones on my list. As a result I was able to complete everything very smoothly.
- Describe a situation when you took an initiative
CEO of New Age Drinks was asking which one of my team members would be willing to do a competitive analysis and I volunteered.
- Describe a situation when a fellow team member wasn’t doing their share of the work (work on this)
While working as a secretary for the food science club, I was assigned to work on a group of slides for a presentation and I saw that my fellow team member had not started their work yet. I reminded them about the due date and asked them how far they are in their work and then we worked together to create a plan of how when they would complete each task and we both ended up completing our work before the deadline.
- Describe a situation when your manager wasn’t around and you had to work independently
While working as a member of the IFTSA Rutgers food science product development team the team captain asked me to complete a HACCP plan. I wasn’t familiar with how to do this and the captain wasn’t available for questioning so I used my research to develop a diagram which he thought he was very impressed with when I presented to him.
- Describe a situation when you had a disagreement with a fellow team member and how did you handle this
While working in the food science club the president was showing me how to create my first email to send to club members to advertise about our meeting. She wanted me to include a lot of in depth information which I argued would be overwhelming to club members. Instead I suggested that we focus on including more pictures and flyers into the email which would be better at explaining things. We continued to disagree but I suggested that we could compromise by including both and conduct a survey of how club members felt the emails should be in the future. This resulted in a success.
- Are you a leader or a follower why?
I can be both. If I have a lot of knowledge in a particular area I am very good at coordinating with team members, creating plans and explaining how things should be done relative to that task. I can also be a follower in which I don’t have a lot of knowledge I’m willing to listen and learn from whoever does have it.
- Describe a situation where you had to handle multiple projects how did you handle this?
While working at new age drinks the start up company over the summer the CEO of the company asked me to do multiple time consuming assignments in a single day. I prioritized which task most important and the most difficult and focused on completing that before I approached the other ones on my list. As a result I was able to complete everything very smoothly.
- Describe a situation where a manager wasn’t around and you had to take a risk and what did you learn from this/made a mistake and what did you learn from it?
While working as a research assistant for the food microbiology lab at Rutgers I was asked to inoculate various petri dishes. I’ve been only recently been taught the technique and I wasn’t fully confident about it. The supervisor wasn’t around and I could not get in contact with her at the moment. I didn’t want to delay the experiment and so I performed the technique in a slightly in correct manner. This method had ruined the results and because of this the experiment had been delayed a week. Next time always wait until your question or uncertainty is cleared up.
