Preparing for business school interviews

INTERVIEW SEASON IS HERE

It’s mid-October, so Round 1 interview invitations are starting to go out for many schools.  Here are a few things to think about as you prepare for your interviews:

Receiving your interview invitation

Every school does things in a slightly different way, but in general you can expect to receive an email congratulating you on your selection for an interview then a subsequent email with instructions on how to log into your account and choose a slot.  Expect to see some combination of the following choices: on campus with AdCom or a student, off campus with AdCom in a hub city, off campus with an alum, or Skype/phone.  Regardless of the method, you’ll want to act fast—slots tend to disappear in a hurry (particularly for schools like HBS that release invitations en masse) and you don’t want to get stuck with whatever is left over. 

On campus vs. off campus

When at all possible, I strongly recommend making every effort to interview on campus, especially if you have not already visited that particular school.  Obviously, your optempo will play a role in when/where you’re able to interview—predeployment training schedules may completely preclude any long-distance travel.  Additionally, someone at Camp Pendleton would probably find it difficult (both cash and time-wise) to fly across the country to interview at HBS, Columbia, and Wharton unless he/she can manage to pack all three interviews into the same week of travel.  If on-campus is not feasible, the next-best option would be a hub city with AdCom, followed by a local interview with an alum. 

Aside from having an opportunity to visit campus, sit in on classes, and get up-to-date intel from current students prior to your interview, the main benefits of interviewing on-campus are related to the interviewers.  On-campus interviews are typically conducted with AdCom members, though some schools allow second-year students to interview applicants.  The upside here is that you can expect a more consistent product and less chance of a poorly-conducted interview—you’ll be interviewing with someone who is experienced in screening applicants, who is read-in on all the latest news about the school, and who (hopefully) won’t need you to explain the difference between a platoon and a division.  There’s a good chance they will have read your entire application beforehand, so you won’t need to spend too much time recounting basic personal facts before diving into more meaningful questions.  Since AdCom members interview dozens if not hundreds of applicants each year, they should have an easier time ranking you relative to your peers.  

Another factor to consider for on-campus interviews is that they’re usually run on very strict timelines.  For instance, an HBS interview is exactly 30 minutes.  This means you’ll have to be very concise with your answers and that things may feel rushed—definitely not the feel of a relaxed conversation with an alum off campus.  It also means you won’t have much of a chance to ask questions. 

I can’t speak about hub city interviews from personal experience, but from what I’ve gathered they’re very similar to on-campus interviews with AdCom.  In some cases schools have AdCom members alternate travel weeks which means that hub city interviewers will be the same people who were conducting on-campus interviews the previous week.

As for interviewing with a local alum, there’s a wide range of possible outcomes.  Your interview could be anything from a very formal sit-down in a COO’s corner office to a casual conversation in a Starbucks.  The main difference between this route and an on-campus interview is that your interviewer probably only talks with two or three applicants per year and may know nothing about the military.  Expect to spend plenty of time explaining basics about how the military is organized and what your job means.  It’s also unlikely that he/she will see your application in advance, so you’ll end up having to repeat a lot of the stuff you already talked about in your essays and fill-in-the-blank portions.  Don’t expect a strict time-cap for an interview with an alum—two of mine went over an hour and the third was over 90 minutes, but going long can be a good thing if the interview has the feel of a free-flowing conversation rather than a grilling session. 

I didn’t go into details on Skype/phone interviews because you shouldn’t consider them as a serious option unless you’re on a combat/underway deployment.  If that’s the case then obviously Skype/phone is your only option.  If you’re overseas in Germany, Italy, Bahrain, etc. you should make every effort to interview locally with an alum or to take leave and travel to one of the hub cities. 

Early vs. late in the cycle

If you’re interviewing locally with an alum you won’t have much wiggle room on the date—the email from the school will typically say something along the lines of “email this person and arrange an interview to be completed within the next two weeks.”  There’s no advantage to leaving him/her hanging, so you’ll want to get it completed promptly. 

As for early or late in the cycle for on-campus or hub interviews, it’s a wash.  There’s no inherent advantage to being in the first batch or the last batch.  The only way to “game” your interview timing would be to put off your interview for your #1 school until late in the cycle so you can use your #2/#3 school interviews earlier on as “practice” for the one you care about most.  Otherwise, just pick the date that works best for you. 

Don’t forget to factor in time of day—i.e. if you know you’re not a morning person, don’t pick an 8am interview at HBS if you’re traveling from the west coast where your body will still be feeling like it’s 5am.  Otherwise, there’s no advantage to a morning vs. afternoon interview.  Just pick the time of day where you’ll be most alert and comfortable. 

Planning your trip

If you haven’t already, get in touch with the veterans’ club at the school to let them know you were selected for an interview and (if applicable) that you’ll be on campus on such-and-such dates.  They should be able to help you arrange class visits, campus tours, and Q&A sessions with vets even if admissions tells you there are no class visits on those particular days.  I recommend arriving on campus at least one full day prior to your interview so you can visit a few classes and talk to as many people as possible beforehand. 

How to prepare

There’s no substitute for preparation.  Plan to spend at least 5 hours preparing for each of your interviews.  Get as much practice as possible giving your answers out loud and not just in your head—during my application process, I used my drive to and from work every day to ask myself questions and say the answers out loud so I could get use to speaking fluidly and to identify where I needed to give more or fewer details. 

However, you’ll want to do as much preparation as possible with a live interviewer so you can get feedback on the clarity of your answers, eye contact, mannerisms, and use of “um,” “like,” and other filler words.  If you can’t find anyone to rehearse with you, get your answers on video so you can analyze them.  MtB also offers a la carte interview prep here (http://www.militarytobusiness.com/purchase/)

Be ready to give 10 second, 30 second, and 1 minute versions of your answers to each of the following basic questions which you can expect from pretty much any school:

-Walk me through your resume.

-What’s your elevator pitch?  

-Why did you choose your particular undergrad school?  Were you happy with it?

-Why did you choose your particular major?

-What made you want to go into the military?  Did you accomplish what you hoped to accomplish?

-Why are you getting out of the military?

-Why an MBA?  Why an MBA from this school?

-What clubs do you see yourself participating in at this school?

-What elective courses would you look forward to taking at this school?

-What are your short-term and long-term career goals?  What makes that career choice a good fit for you?

-What companies are doing interesting work in your desired field?  Where do you see the industry going over the next few years?

-What do you want your legacy to be in 50 years?

-What are your strengths and weaknesses?

-What do you identify as the biggest problem facing the world (or your branch of the military) today, and how would you fix it?

-What do you do for fun?

-How do you interact with large groups of people you’re meeting for the first time?

-How do you see yourself contributing to the learning of your peers at business school?

-Tell me about an interesting book/article you’ve read recently. 

-Tell me about a business leader you admire. 

-Tell me about a situation where you displayed integrity.

-Tell me about your greatest accomplishment.

-Tell me about a significant failure and what you learned from it.

-Tell me about your best/worst boss and what you learned from him/her.

-Tell me about a time where you had to deal with a difficult subordinate.

-Tell me about a time you came up with a unique solution to a problem. 

-Tell me about your decision process for tough decisions.

-Tell me about a time you embodied one of this school’s core values (Berkeley in particular loves this one). 

That’s just a small list off the top of my head—you can find more examples in any MBA or job interview question bank online.  The key is to be able to answer each question concisely, especially for schools with a hard time-cap.  Unless otherwise instructed, stick with the 30 second version of your answers unless it’s a story that simply can’t be told that quickly.  If your interviewer wants more clarification, they’ll usually ask for it before moving on to another question. 

And it goes without saying that you’ll wear business formal (i.e. a suit and tie, or the female equivalent) for your interview unless explicitly told otherwise.  Stick with a conservative suit in dark gray, charcoal, or navy blue, a white shirt, and a fairly conservative tie—us military people aren’t really known for our fashion sense, so keep things simple and get help from a friend or clothing store employee if you’re completely clueless. 

Within a few hours of your interview, send a quick thank-you note to your interviewer.  Keep it simple and don’t try to tell him/her a bunch of stuff that you didn’t have time to say during the interview.  Something as basic as “Thanks for taking the time to talk about school X today, it was interesting to hear your perspective on Y and Z, and I look forward to hearing back from admissions on the notification date” will do the job.  Do not ask how you did. 

Note: Consider how much time you spent preparing for the GMAT... it was probably several months and hundreds of hours. Now consider how much time you may prepare for the interview. A few hours? How does that make sense, given that the interview will be so much more important now than the GMAT? MtB clients have an 80%-90% admission rate once they receive their interview. Part of this is our prep work, but part of it is also how we push our clients to properly prepare for the interview. If you're curious how much time is right, just put the weight of the interview in perspective to your overall application process, and that should get you on the right track...

Good luck, and feel free to contact MtB for any additional guidance.