Today I analyze the 3-Step strategy to prepare for your interviews:
1) Maintain your Brand Identity
If you want to understand how personal branding is reinforced, observe politicians. They are experts in maintaining a consistent branding message. It is not that they didn’t have any life events that contradicted their core brand, but they are really good at highlighting and repeating certain examples that maintain a strong brand identity. Similar principles apply when you are reaffirming a personal brand. Schools, although, don’t openly share this. They must quickly categorize applicants into different buckets – Male Banking applicant from an Underrepresented community in South America, Immigrant Indian consulting applicant from the LGBTQ+ community, female applicant with an impressive career progression in a male-dominated industry. You get the point. The roadblocks and your identity should be repeated in subtle ways to make sure that they feel confident in accepting you.
Confidence without attitude is a big selling point in Top 5 schools. Work on the tone of the answers. Listen to the interviewer and take the role of an educator who is humble to teach the interviewer about a new project, technology, process, or market development.
With the admissions chances increasing considerably with an interview invite, you must understand the reason why your profile was shortlisted.
It could be the unique change in the industry, or function or struggles or growth stories or overall impact, or the way you approached a problem that impressed the admissions team. Once you understand the reason or multiple reasons for your shortlist, you must develop a strategy to maintain that brand identity in your interview. This means going back to your essays and reading them several times. Most interviewers won’t read your essays and use the resume as the only reference. Even so, you need to maintain consistency in your story.
Anyone in the industry for 3-4 years working in a global marketplace will have plenty of stories to share. But the reason why you chose certain stories for the essays and why they worked is a hint that the stories resonated with the admissions team. So don’t hesitate to reuse the story but of course, how you talk is different from how you write an essay. Customize the narrative for an interview.
2) Create a Story List from your Resume
In our resume editing service, we ask a lot of questions about the market your employer is operating, the team, the technology, the constraints, the power dynamics in the team, and the goals of the company. This is because the MBA admissions team expects a 1-page resume for applicants with 3-5 years of experience. So we have to ensure that each achievement entry is 1-2 lines. That means sacrificing some metrics to capture the most impactful metric in each achievement.
While scripting your answers for the interview, include at least one story for each entry in the resume and add back all the contexts that were edited out from the resume.
If the edits were all around metrics, ignore them, but if there were interesting developments around constraints, mention them in the interview.
The story should include – the context, the challenges, the team, and your approaches to a framework, process, design, strategy, team building, or the uniqueness of the solution.
You are allowed to repeat the examples in the Essay if the event was a huge milestone in your career or a pivotal moment in your life.
F1GMAT's Mock Interview Service - Interview Prep with Atul Jose (Admissions Consultant, F1GMAT)
The first value you will receive with F1GMAT's Mock Interview Service is the ability to answer questions in 1 to 1 minute and 30 seconds.
The second value is the skills to bring emotions and authenticity to your answers.
The third value is scripting your answers and making sure they are not clichés.
For any questions about F1GMAT's Mock Interview service, email me, Atul Jose, at editor@f1gmat.com
Covered in the 3-hour MBA Admissions Mock Interview session:
1) Planning and practicing the answers for the standard interview questions
• How to answer the “Tell us about yourself” introductory question?
• How to answer Walk me through your resume?
• What is the greatest accomplishment in your professional career?
• What is your leadership style?
• How would you contribute to the School Community?
• What is the most difficult obstacle you overcame?
• Are you a Creative Person?
• How do you define Success?
• How to answer about Innovative Solutions?
• Answering Frequent Job Switch
• How did you Handle Conflict?
• How did you manage Change?
• Give an Example of an Ethical Dilemma you faced. How did you handle it?
• Answering Greatest Accomplishment
• How did you Handle a Difficult Boss?
• Tell me a time when you made a Mistake. What did you learn from it?
• How to summarize your Career?
• How to explain low grades?
• How to answer Scenario Questions?
• How to answer the Backup Plan Question
• How to discuss about Industry Experience & your Role?
• What Questions should you ask the AdCom after an MBA Admissions Interview?
• Tell me about yourself that is not covered in the application
• What are your post-MBA goals?
• What is your plan B if you can’t achieve your short-term goals?
• Why consulting/finance/marketing/general management (if you are a career switcher)
2) Follow-up Questions based on your resume
3) Follow-up Questions based on your essays
If you need help, subscribe to our $349 (3 hours) mock interview session, where I will offer immediate feedback after each question on improving:
1) The tone
2) The transitions
3) The style and
4) The narrative of your overall story, covering the broader achievements in your career and the choices in your life
I will ensure that your answers sound authentic.
Next Step
1. Purchase the service from F1GMAT's Store
2. Send an email to Atul Jose (Admissions Consultant)(editor@f1gmat.com) with your latest resume and the essays used for the application.
A common mistake I see applicants from functional roles indulge in is spending too much time on the solution and less about the business impact of the solution or the context of the solution from competitor dynamics or a market’s perspective.
Unless the person is from your industry, going into the details of the solution is not going to impress the interviewer.
A more important data point in interviews is the motivation behind each career decision.
I have seen applicants pivoting in the wrong way, realizing that the path is not ideal for them, and then coming back to a traditional career path.
There were many who considered themselves a good fit for a startup culture but soon realized that the chaos was not for them. While they were others, who didn’t fit the culture of a traditional organization with a fixed learning curve. So they switched to a startup and are flourishing.
But in both these cases, the applicant reached a stage where an MBA became essential either for career growth, networking, learning opportunities or changing cities/countries.
The interviewer is figuring out whether you are really motivated to do an MBA. So all the stories about your career should lead them to believe that an MBA is crucial now.
If you need help customizing your story with Business impact and a personalized narrative, Subscribe to F1GMAT’s Mock Interview Service
3) Practice
An unfortunate side effect of confidence or overconfidence is that applicants who are in a customer-facing role or with strong public speaking experience or with strong oratory skills (marketing/lawyers) assume that because they are good at communicating, the interviews require just a few talking points.
Do remember that all your favorite talk show hosts, standup comedians have rehearsals.
Standup comedians in clubs.
Talk show hosts before the live taping.
These are people whose job is to talk.
I have seen this happen quite a few times where despite pushing and hinting at writing scripts, the applicants who just wrote talking points without practicing had surprising rejections that could have been avoided.
The ones who literally repeated the script I wrote got through, while in my opinion, a better fit for the school didn’t make it through because the person stumbled through a few answers.
Is it fair that just because you stumbled, you are rejected? It is unfair, but the fluency of your answer is associated with intelligence and communication skills. Maybe you were just nervous, or this was a one-off bad day. It doesn’t matter.
Prepare. Write a script. And Practice for the tone and storytelling.
I am Atul Jose. If you need help with practicing for your interview, Subscribe to F1GMAT’s Mock Interview Service