Talking passionately about oneself doesn’t come naturally to us unless you are in Sales. MBA Applicants are not happy with their current responsibilities. They want a change in career or career progression in alignment with their potential and talents. Schools, however, will evaluate you based on what you have achieved. If you can’t talk with passion about your achievements, the admissions team will find you uninspiring.
We find people engaging for three reasons – humor, expertise, and similar values and interests. Unfortunately, you can’t use humor in an MBA Admissions interview. Matching hobbies always seems fake. So matching values with the Interviewer or demonstrating expertise is the key.
Here are 11 Tips to prepare for MBA Admissions Interview
1) Read your essays several times: The first thing that the Interviewer wants to do is to check whether you are the same person as revealed in the essay. Make sure that the context that you have captured in the essays is repeated, your values are visible in your conversations, and the Interviewer gets an early indication about your expertise in the core function highlighted in your resume.
Even If the school has a policy not to read your essay, make sure that your answer is consistent with the narrative captured in the essay.
Recently, I took a mock interview where the candidate’s essay revealed a failure of his teammate that cost the project significant delay. Since he was the team lead, the essay captured the ownership pattern where he revealed that instead of putting the teammate under the bus, he took responsibility for the failure and worked with the person to rectify the error. It became easier for me to cross-check this trait. I asked him, “What is your biggest failure.” And without skipping a beat, he revealed that not paying enough attention to the milestones of his teammate in reaching personal growth goals and meeting company goals for one of the projects was his biggest failure as a leader.
2) Project Details. If the Interviewer has a background different from yours, you will get the opportunity to teach them about your industry. Share your unique wisdom. They are also eager to learn something new. If they are from the same background, expect a lot of follow-up questions, sometimes technical, to check your depth of knowledge. Approach the interview positively even if you can’t answer all the technical questions.
One way to capture the relevant details is to create an IMPACT table with revenue, project cost, team size, your role, challenges, strengths, weakness, and IMPACT – all captured through the context of one project.
3) Research about the Interviewer: Find the person’s likes dislikes. Go through the person’s social media profiles. Don’t send a friend request just now. A LinkedIn request is fine but introduce yourself in a sentence or two. If the Interviewer has published blogs/white papers, read them. Don’t research too aggressively and creep them out. Don’t give the impression that you know everything about the person, including the name of their pet dog. Use the research to guide the conversation. Even if you know a lot about the Interviewer, the opening icebreaker should be about the person’s career and family.
4) List the top 50 Questions: The admissions team will ask you to introduce yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, greatest achievements, biggest failure, and close to 50 questions that get repeated across schools. You can check them out by Downloading F1GMAT’s MBA Admissions Interview Guide
5) Avoid Generalization. One big mistake that I see while conducting mock interviews is the tendency to find simplistic reasons for outcomes. Because it takes some scripting to create a good answer on why a project failed, those who don’t prepare for this answer will try to find a shortcut. They will have one point of failure like the culture or a person’s misjudgment or the team’s inexperience. The answer becomes a generalization about people, culture, or even brands.
Very rarely, such an answer covers the applicant’s weaknesses.
Avoid this tendency to find an easy answer. Bring multiple factors while articulating the reasons for an outcome.
6) Negative emotions: The Interviewer is trying to figure out your Emotional Intelligence. The questions will touch on disappointments, failures, and self-doubt. They want to know how quickly you switch to an analytical way of approaching the problem. Be mentally prepared for the questions.
7) Script your Answer: Interviews are like stand-up routines. Good Stand-up comedians will give the impression that they are telling the jokes for the first time. In reality, the comedian performs the same routine in multiple nightclubs for 6 months to 1 year before the routine becomes part of an HBO or Netflix special. Great ones are conversational. Make your interview conversational. But that can’t happen unless you know the script. All improvisation should happen within the structural limitations of the script.
8) Record Your Answer: While editing my videos, I learned a lot about how I talk, my energy, the non-verbal cues, and the mistakes in how I pronounce certain words. I became very conscious of how I talk. Then once I found my style, it became much easier to just talk to the audience. So a great way to be confident with your answers is to record your answer in a video format and play it back several times. Keep a note of all the problems that you see with your posture, voice modulation, the authenticity of your answer, the energy, and of course, whether your answer covers all the points asked in the question.
9) Don’t Put too Much Pressure: Think of this interview as an opportunity to connect with the Interviewer. This simple switch in attitude will make the interview a much easier hurdle. Don’t think of it as a roadblock that you must overcome. That is too much pressure, and it will affect your performance.
10) Be Familiar with the Format: Earlier, before COVID, when the interview was face to face, we recommended that you visit the venue, most likely a café, and get a feel of the surroundings, and when the interview happens, you won’t be intimidated by the aesthetics or distracted by the noise near your table.
Now with Zoom or Google Meet, you must be familiar with the common problems like poor network connection, soundproofing your room, or avoiding someone from your family or friends barging in while you are taking the interview. Also, make sure that all other apps are closed while you talk to the Interviewer
If you need any assistance with Interview Prep, Subscribe to F1GMAT's Mock Interview Service. Also, read F1GMAT’s MBA Admission Interview Guide. We have shared a lot of useful tips about interaction, first impression and on answering some of the tough questions you are likely to face.
