How This Candidate Turned a Billion-Dollar Crisis into a Game-Changing AI Blockchain Solution
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Complete interview transcript & analysis below
Enhanced transcript with interviewer insights
INTERVIEWER
Shift, shift gears and the next question. So from, and this can be from anywhere uh in your work experience, you know, recency always helps, but One of the things that's that's tougher about the types of roles that you're, you're going after is it's, it tends to be amorphous ownership, right? Sometimes it's a deal, sometimes it's a structure, sometimes it's a customer, but it's, it's, you know, the ownership structure tends to be a bit strange, uh, for, for some of the things that you're gonna have to work on. So, uh, what I'd really like to focus this specific question on is a time where you basically took on. Any initiative That was outside of the scope, the defined scope of your responsibility. What was it?
CANDIDATE
Uh, uh, this, this project was a couple of months ago. Um, it, it just, uh, finalized, but, uh, uh, we're engaged in, uh, with the state, um, To their initial problem was uh To reduce the The, the patient care loss within hospitals within the state. And uh they want to figure out how to do that, um, and bring in a bunch of hospitals to, you know, see what the true problem was and we identified that there was uh north of a billion dollars in uh charity, uh, charity care reimbursement that uh was lost due to several reasons. Um, So we were engaged to, uh, you know, Create an AI enabled blockchain to put the charity care, um, Peer to peer network, uh, in place with, uh, with some other providers with insurance companies and, uh, uh, some state agencies. I got involved because we really didn't get details related to what the true charity care losses were. So, I actually had to, you know, reach out to, um, you know, hospital associations, uh, there to really leverage, you know, what the root cause was, um, you know, digging deeper and understanding where the true financial losses, uh, were and what the biggest, biggest issues are, you know, hospitals are having today, and there were several. Um, So, I personally, you know, picked up the phone and called leaders within the industry to identify what those problems were. Um, so as we created this architecture, you know, we're, we're providing true value, you know, upfront right away opposed to, yeah, we've created this blockchain network. showing value that uh we're dig digitizing uh the healthcare uh network but uh we're still seeing some losses, right? So, um, that was the biggest takeaway that I did that was outside the preview of my, you know, position.
Interviewer Insight
this answer started out strong and immediately went into a jargon laced solution without clearly outlining what was actually outside of the scope of the candidate. Without a clearer picture of the role of the candidate in the effort, what was ultimately presented could be interpreted as their job vs something that was outside of scope.
INTERVIEWER
Well, so I guess Two part question, but they're they're they're related, which is, you know, one, what, what caused you to start calling these leaders. But two, what help me just understand a little bit better and I guess lead with the second part of this question. Why was this specifically outside of your responsibility? That's, that's what I guess I'm missing here.
CANDIDATE
Um, because our sponsor was actually the state. Um, so the state had an initial scope and initiative to build this out on behalf of, you know, the hospitals, um, but, uh, in the same token, you know, we felt like if we didn't get, um, Enough buy-in from the hospitals that uh this project that we're doing for the state will just, you know, fall out. So I, I really want to build some specific, you know, use cases and figure out what the true issues are with, with the charity care losses. And in order for me to do that, I had to really dig deep and reach out to, you know, different uh relationships across, you know, the state.
Interviewer Insight
Trying to assess if this was a career focused decision, company focused decision, or customer focused decision
INTERVIEWER
OK. And so When you think about. Your internal decision making process for for taking this on, for kind of taking on this this outside of your scope responsibility and initiating the work to make that happen. What was the projected benefit to the company, the customer here, uh, of you doing this and. I want you not to, instead of thinking of like, well, you know, the project doesn't fail. I think more specifically. In answer to the question, how, based on what you were going to do, how were you going to know that what you did was being successful? Right, that it was contributing to success of the overall project. How, how did you know? How were you able to quantify that or think about it or present it, you know, if you were asked about it?
CANDIDATE
Yeah, so the success, uh, measurements there was, uh, the charity care reimbursements, right? So, um, we, we know, we knew that 2020 there was a charity care, uh, reimbursement losses of up to a billion dollars. So within that specific state, if we saw that measurement go down, um, just from a high level, we, we understand that, that, that's a win. In addition to that, um, We also want to provide value back to, to the hospitals, so, you know, making things much more efficient, you know, digitalizing that whole process, you know, basically from patient point of care all the way in to the end. So if you go in as a patient and, uh, you know, you're, you're scheduling care but you, you don't have insurance to cover it, you know, what happens today, um, prior to, I won't mention the state that did this, but prior to um This whole solution in place. Uh, you go in, you fill out a bunch of paperwork, um, you say that you're, you're uninsured, you know, you provide income information, then, you know, two weeks later, the billing department is calling you because they're saying you have a bill, but then, you know, in the same token, as a patient, you say, well, I came in, I, I filled out for funding for charity care, uh, you're supposed to have this information. So there's, you know, loss of communication, loss of, um, Uh, loss of time, obviously that's quite frankly the number one reason why they didn't, uh, get reimbursement. They have a 30-day window for the hospital to 30-day window, OK, yeah, um. So that's where we did a deep dive and, you know, who, who the patient was, the typical problem, the CFO's problem in, in the hospital and the state agency. So we, we try to really understand um that entire use case and all those personas to provide as much value back to the you know, to, to the patient and the customer. Yup.
Interviewer Insight
A secondary answer which is again not quite addressing how this was out of the scope of the candidate. A common occurrence in an interview, especially those who have not interviewed for a new role outside of their own company in a long time, is to forget who unbelievably knowledgeable they are on a topic vs anyone outside of their company. As such, the pitfall is to make assumptions about how much the interviewer knows about the candidate's company, role, or project being discussed. There is high value in taking a step back when walking through an answer and ensuring that a 6 year old could understand the bridge a candidate is making in their content to the question.
CANDIDATE
The success measurements were the charity care reimbursements. We knew this was up to $1B at the state. We knew that if this went down it was a win.
Interviewer Insight
the follow up was trying to get at the value of what the extra responsibility was, not the value of the overall project. Candidate did not answer the question as asked. This was a third attempt in this answer block to understand what exactly the candidate did that was outside of their scope and why it was outside of their scope, and whether or not someone else was failing to do their job, or if this was a miss in how the company was taking on projects.
Expert Assessment
Interviewer assessment - would be used in a hiring meeting
There was a certain presumption of Ownership which came through in the candidate's answers but it was hard to determine if what the candidate was discussing was very much outside of their responsibility or only slightly so in this answer block. Without clarity on that topic, it becomes hard to determine the degree of Ownership. As such, the candidate presents as a lower level manager who will take on some work that appears closely related to the expectation of their role vs someone who was willing to take on work very much outside of expectations of their role.