Business Consulting – Worst Fit Interview Mistake
Written by John Chang on June 10th, 2009 in Self Development.
Giving generic, impersonalized answers is the worst thing you can do.
When you don’t provide personalized stories and anecdotes, you are simply not making the extra effort to stand out with distinctly different responses.
To begin with, let’s talk about anecdotes. If you are not a very good consulting interviewer, you will not give anecdotes. Look at this example:
Why do you want to be a management consultant?
I like to work with smart people and face difficult business and intellectual challenges.
Well, that’s dull. There is certainly nothing special in that response. What’s the story behind your desire to be a management consultant?
Click here to learn more about consultant fit and behavioral mistakes.
Do you understand the problem with this answer?
If you tell a little story or an anecdote about why you want to be a management consultant, it will stick out in the interviewer’s mind. If you just give a run of the mill, plain answer, it will just blend in with all the other run of the mill plain answers. You won’t get a job offer, and neither will anyone else who answered that way.
At the end of the day, the consultants usually have a meeting to discuss all the applicants. If you said something that really stuck with your interviewer, you are likely to be discussed favorably. If you just gave a dull, unimaginative answer, your interviewer probably won’t even think to mention you.
So what would that answer look like with an anecdote?
A takeaway is defined as a conclusion. You tell about something you have learned or something you realize now.
In the example, there was no takeaway. The interviewer didn’t get a satisfying conclusion.
So let’s put in a takeaway, and you will see that just one sentence will make a big difference in the strength of the final response.
What is it about management consulting that interests you the most?
Ever since I did my internship in asset management, I have realized that it is important to me to work with a top-of-the-line team facing difficult business challenges. The people I worked with then really knew what they were doing, and I admired that. The work I did every day was a little dull, but I liked watching them. Now I know that if I want to get ahead in the business world, I will need to have work that challenges me and become a key member of a top-notch team like that.
Click here to learn more about how to dominate business consulting interviews!
