Business Strategy & Performance Topics
Business strategy, competitive analysis, market opportunities, and strategic innovation. Includes market research, competitive positioning, and business planning.
Business Judgment and Risk Tradeoffs
Assess and communicate tradeoffs between business value, legal risk, operational cost, and security and compliance outcomes to enable informed decision making. This competency includes making sound decisions with incomplete information, exercising appropriate initiative, and judging when to escalate versus decide independently; providing advice that is proportionate to the business context and supporting calculated risk taking when business justification warrants it; quantifying investments and initiatives using business metrics such as return on investment, total cost of ownership, and risk reduction value; building business justification that balances cost effectiveness, operational efficiency, and risk mitigation; distinguishing between showstopper risks and manageable issues; avoiding overly conservative approaches that prevent action or innovation; and aligning recommendations with stakeholder priorities and organizational risk appetite.
Industry Trends and Future Outlook
Assessing industry perspective and future outlook evaluates a candidate's ability to identify and analyze emerging trends, technologies, and structural shifts within a domain and to translate that understanding into strategic implications and actionable recommendations. Questions probe knowledge of drivers such as artificial intelligence, personalization, changing user behavior, platform and search engine evolution, the future of work and skills, and shifts in organizational practices. Candidates should demonstrate awareness of credible signals and sources, be able to compare short term versus long term impacts, propose how a company or team should prepare and adapt, and discuss risks, metrics for success, and trade offs. This topic covers both domain specific futures such as search engine optimization trajectories and broader field level futures such as the direction of learning and development, testing for thought leadership, situational analysis, and pragmatic next steps.
Measurement Strategy and Frameworks
Covers how to create and apply structured measurement approaches that connect activities to business outcomes. Candidates should be able to define leading and lagging indicators, build measurement frameworks and dashboards, baseline current performance, set targets, choose appropriate KPIs, and design attribution and reporting approaches. Includes thinking about vanity versus meaningful metrics, frequency of measurement, sampling and data quality considerations, and how to use measurement to drive learning and course correction across programs or initiatives.
Business Acumen and Strategy Alignment
Demonstrates the ability to understand core business drivers and translate them into coherent organizational and human resources strategies. Candidates should show how they analyze strategy, market dynamics, financial implications, and competitive positioning, and then derive implications for organizational design, workforce planning, talent acquisition, change management, culture, and performance management. Expect examples of aligning programs and change initiatives to business outcomes, prioritizing initiatives based on impact and feasibility, engaging cross functional stakeholders, and measuring success through relevant business metrics. This topic covers both translating business strategy specifically into HR strategy and the broader task of aligning organizational strategy and change efforts to deliver planned business results.