Guide to B School Interviews!

A Not-So-Comprehensive Guide to Interviewing

Resume Question(s)

Most of the time, the interview starts with a resume question, with the exception of Sloan which generally starts with the question "do you have any update since you submitted your application". Now, resume questions can be in many forms but the generally popular versions are:

1. Walk me through your resume
2. Tell me about yourself

Now those two are essentially the same questions but the second one gives you a bit of a wiggle room to share some personal stories. One of the things about me I wanted to highlight that, even though I came from a very middle-class family, my parents never compromised on my education. They always encouraged me to take risks and supported me in my pursuit of a very nontraditional career. Now, this made sense to me because the overarching theme of all my applications were challenging the status quo, taking risks and investing in my own growth. It could be hard to include that in the "Walk me through your resume" question because none of this stuff is going to be on your resume (if it is, then it is a bigger problem). Another issue that I have seen is that people often go into random tangents describing things that do not really matter. The clearest way to illustrate this is the concept of Chekov's gun (if a play shows a gun, then it acts as a foreshadowing of a future event when the gun will be used; look it up it's pretty cool). My point is that if you are telling the interviewer an interesting fact about yourself, it should be applied in the broader context. For example, the fact that you went to a boarding school growing up may or may not be super relevant to the rest of your story. If it is, share it. If it is not, skip. Generally speaking, this answer should be longer than others, but if you are speaking for more than 4 minutes, I would recommend shortening it.

B School Questions

The normal transition from a resume questions can be both towards business schools or behavioral questions. For the most part, in my interviews goals and MBA questions followed the resume question, so I am going to arrange it that way. B School questions can be 1-4 depending how how the questions are framed and what your interviewer ate for breakfast in the morning. From what I have seen they tend to go like this!

1. So why an MBA? Why Now?
2. Why this school?
3. How will you contribute to this school?
4. What will you learn?
5. What are your goals (sort of similar to the why MBA why Now bit)

I would recommend being very specific on all these questions. There is a fine balance between an emotional pitch and an informational overload and you have to find that out for yourself. An answer that only relies on an emotional component can signal that you have not done your research and that relies only on reciting specific resources could mean that all you have done is memorizing the website. Both of them are not great scenarios to be in. I will share my own answer which will be a combination of all the questions. But before doing that, here's a few disclaimers on how to answer these questions coherently.

• Have a lingering hook for your long term goals. If you do not have something passionate in the long term, then it is a hard sell to be honest. You are going to spend $200K to climb the MBB ladder is too vanilla in my opinion. Even if it's that - is there a particular practice you want to lead? What are the motivations behind that aspiration?
  
• When talking about school specific stuff, make sure to cite your sources. For example, if you are going to namedrop a current student, make sure to give them some context - why you talked to this person? What did this person recommend? You get the drift.
  
• When you mention school specific resources, make sure to add the long-term vision as to how this resource will actually help you. Otherwise it is just things in the air with no real weight to tie into the ground.

So basically, these questions will form the major chunk of the MBA interview, and then for most schools, a few behavioral questions will follow.

Behavioral Questions

Behavioral questions almost takes up 30-40% of the interviewing time and this is the perfect place to really demonstrate some of your leadership chops. I think different people have different approaches to this, but I had a special one which was based more on stories than questions. Anyway, here are some common beahvioural questions.

1. Tell me about a time when you faced an obstacle.
2. How do you function in a team?
3. Tell me about a time when you received critical feedback. How did you respond?
4. Tell me about a time when you had to give critical feedback. How did you handle it?
5. Tell me about a time when you did not succeed.
6. Tell me about an experience when you had to push the status quo?
[some questions that do not look like behavioural questions but are…]
7. What are you strengths and weaknesses?
8. What would your supervisor say about you?

Basically these are all questions from your past and it is a way to demonstrate leadership potential - sort of similar to essays. Of course, I am not going to detail about my responses to all of these questions, but I will leave one and then we will go over some tips for behavioral interview questions. This question was "Tell me about a time when you faced a challenge" - It could also be used for "Tell me about a time when you faced resistance", "Tell me about a time when you were a leader", "Tell me about a time when you faced an ethical dilemma", "Tell me about a time when you had to persuade someone"

Tips for behavioural questions

1. Do not try to prepare for 103 behavioral questions. You will never be able to cover them. As you can see, I could use the same story for a number of behavioral questions (leadership, persuasion, convincing someone, challenging status quo) etc.
2. I recommend preparing for five to seven very strong stories that demonstrate - leadership, teamwork, pushing the status quo, failure, feedback. If you prepare these, you will be able to weave them in pretty much any behavioral questions.
3. Do not sound like a robot. You should not come off as a person who is reciting the answers. Take pauses, think about them, and sometimes even ask for a minute to organize your thoughts - your interviewer would appreciate your thoughtfulness.
4. Do not badmouth your peers. If you have a question on a time you had to give meaningful or critical feedback to a peer or a direct report use maturity. Explain that you could empathize with them. Show that you went an extra mile trying to understand the why of a problematic situation rather than jumping into solving it.
5. Know your resume inside out. Most of your accomplishment that you will talk about in the behavioral questions are probably products of your resume. Do not mix numbers. Your interviewer is more careful than you might realize.

That's all folks. Did I miss something? Let me know in the comments and I will keep on refreshing this sticky!