My Favorite Interview Question

I’ve been doing a solid amount of interviews now for awhile now. So by now I’ve answered every question you can possibly think of…at least three times. How I got here, what my strengths are, what my worst failure is, what type of animal I’d be, I’ve answered them all.

There’s one question that I think is indicative of people who really know how to interview and find out about an individual. This one is my favorite: “Tell me about the best day your career.” It allows the candidate to tell them literally everything about the best and worst of the highest point in their career. I’m told many people hem and haw over the answer. For me, it was simple. I knew right off the bat. It was May 13, 2008.

A lot of people know how LIVESTRONG Day was started. It began as a simple lobby day event in DC. However in 2006 so many people signed up that they were struggling for a way to keep the others engaged who couldn’t be accepted into the event. Thus the idea for a Local LIVESTRONG Day was born. Anybody, anywhere could participate in the event. Over 100 people across the country stood up in 2006.

By 2008 things had changed. We’d just come off the heels of an amazing LS Day in DC and had boosted that effect by having more than 200 events across the country.

But it was 2008. Nobody cared what happend in Congress in 2008, the action was in the communities. So we made the hard choice to scrap the DC portion of LS Day and concentrate on where it really belonged.

We threw out what at the time seemed like a mammoth goal, 500 events across the country. Two questions still lingered. How do you utilize Lance and what can we do to energize the staff on that day.

I was in DC at an airport bar when the idea first came to me. Two months before that we had done a statewide bus tour in support of Prop 15. What if we took a page out of that playbook and flew Lance to a few events around the country that day? And what if we copied that idea and deployed staff across the country in the same fashion?

I thought it was a brilliant idea that nobody would ever buy into. Talking through it with a friend beforehand, it sounded nuts Luckily for me, our CEO quickly challenged us to pull it off.

At the end of the day, we had more than 640 events across the world, executed a 4 city plane tour with massive events at each stop with Lance and sent out staff across the country. Thousands of media hits, dollars raised and hands shook. It was an amazing day.

And here’s the kicker: We did it and came in 50% under budget. And while it occupied about 5 staffers for awhile, it was pretty resource light given what we tried to pull off.

It’s my proudest day not just for the results but also because it was the opportunity to tackle a problem, build a strategy around it and see it through to completion. That day, we nailed it. Definitely a team effort, but I’ve never seen a team fire on all cylinders like that before. It was awesome.

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