Blog Archive Fixing Common Interviewing Mistakes, Part 1 Follow the Answer First Model

Blog Archive Fixing Common Interviewing Mistakes, Part 1 Follow the “Answer First” Model This post was written by our resident Career Coach, Elissa Harris. To sign up for a free 30-minute career consultation with Elissa, please  click here.   As many MBA students are preparing for their internship interviews, we at mbaMission are hearing several common (and easy to correct) mistakes in our clients’ answers to sample questions. Today’s post tackles the issue of taking too long to get to the main point of the story. Doing so is problematic for three reasons: (1) the interviewer does not know why the candidate is telling the story; (2) the answer does not relate to the competencies sought after for the role; and/or (3) it is boring for the interviewer.   To help improve your answers, we have provided the following “before” and “after” examples. Please note that these examples are for illustrative purposes only and should not be copied verbatim in upcoming interviews. Q. Tell me about yourself. Before: I am a first-year MBA at School X, majoring in strategic management. I grew up in the Bay Area and went to college at School X. I joined Company X’s leadership rotational program and served across the marketing, operations, and finance functions of the company. After two-and-a-half years and a promotion, I decided to leave Company X to join a start-up and get more hands-on experience and more project ownership. There, I helped scale the company from ten to 200 employees and increase revenue to more than $3M… Revision Tips: Start with a headline or roadmap for your answer. Before launching into your experiences, try summarizing them into themes such as relevant attributes for the job, specific examples of accomplishments, the rationale for each step in your career, and evidence of a connection to your target role.   After: I am really excited to be here today interviewing for a consulting position with Firm X, as I believe my previous experiences will enable me to drive impact for your clients. Throughout my personal and professional life, I have chosen opportunities that developed my analytical problem-solving foundation and pushed me to build strong leadership and client engagement capabilities. After attending college at School X, I decided to join Company X’s leadership rotational program in order to apply the business acumen I developed as an undergraduate economics major. Throughout my two-and-a-half years at the company and rotations across four different functions, I frequently collected and analyzed large data sets to form hypotheses and propose potential solutions to senior leadership… Q. Tell me about a time when you had to convince somebody of your way of thinking. Before: I would like to tell you about a time when I disagreed with senior management of Company X about the company’s marketing strategy. The challenges I faced were… Revision Tips: Hook in the interviewer. Use language from the question prompt. Add context (i.e., numbers) to help the interviewer see that persuading senior management was a true challenge and that your actions were really impressive and impactful to the organization.   After: I would like to tell you about a time when I convinced the senior director of innovation at my company to shift from a traditional to a social mediaâ€"focused marketing strategy. This change led to an 8x increase in visibility for the firm’s innovation initiatives and three new client contracts worth more than $2M in revenue. To do this, the challenges I faced were… To learn other strategies for improving your interview performance, connect with mbaMission for a complimentary consultation call with one of our MBA Career Coaches. We also recommend that you review case coach and interview expert David Ohrvall’s book, Interview Logic.     Share ThisTweet Career Advice