Navigating the labyrinthine process of MBA admissions interviews can be daunting, but the team at Poets & Quants—John Byrne, Maria Wich-Vila, and Caroline Diarte Edwards—offers crucial insights to set you on the right path. The hosts delve into what to expect when facing the interview gauntlet at business schools. As Caroline notes, different schools have distinct approaches, which range from admissions staff-led interviews to alumni and current students taking the helm.

One essential piece of advice shared by Caroline is the importance of understanding the interview format before stepping into it. Schools like Harvard Business School (HBS) and MIT dive deep, with interviewers who are well-acquainted with your application, demanding detailed discussions and evidence of decision-making and leadership. Conversely, alumni-led interviews at schools such as Stanford often have a more conversational tone since interviewers typically only review résumés.

The discussion also emphasizes the interview’s critical role in the admissions process. Maria asserts that interviews can be as important as standardized test scores, if not more so. Admissions committees are keenly assessing candidates’ fit and potential for representing the school to future employers. As Caroline points out, while interviews are crucial, they are part of a holistic evaluation. The decision ultimately reflects the entire application package, balancing interview impressions with the broader context of the candidate’s profile. For MBA hopefuls, this podcast episode is a vital guide for preparing to make a lasting impression.

Episode Transcript

Note: This transcript was generated by AI and may contain minor inaccuracies.

[00:00:07] – John

Well, hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets & Quants. Welcome to business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co-host, Maria Wigvilla and Caroline Diarte Edwards. For those round one applicants who got an invite to interview, your day of reckoning is coming up soon, if it has not already. We I want to talk about what to expect. Of course, different schools do these in different ways. Some actually have their admissions staff do the interviews. Many have alumni interviews. Some even have current students who are trained to do interviews. How a school approaches the method of interviewing is important. But of course, the most important thing is, what are they going to ask you and what should you be saying? Caroline, what’s your general advice?

[00:01:01] – Caroline

Well, first of all, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the format of the interview. As you mentioned, there is variation. There is considerable variation in how different schools approach the interview process. For example, if you’re interviewing with HBS or with MIT, then you can expect to interview with a member of the team who has read your application in detail, and they will be really drilling in to find the points of your profile, and you should be prepared to discuss anything that you’ve put down on paper in greater detail, as well as be prepared for behavioural-style questions, where they’ll be looking for evidence of how you make decisions, and how you lead, and how you influence people, and so on. Perhaps we come back to behavioral questions and how to tackle that. But that’s something you would see, for example, with MIT, and those interviews where you’re interviewing with a member of the team who has scrutinized your application. It’s typically quite an intense interview. So be prepared for a fast pace, and you need to be prepared to show encase different examples, not repeat things that you’ve already put in your application, and be prepared for some left-field questions as well.

[00:02:22] – Caroline

And then other schools, of course, use students or alumni in their interview process. So that’s quite a different style. So for example, INSEAD and Stanford and GSB both use alumni in their interview process. So typically they will have only reviewed your resume, so they will not have the same depth of insight into your profile. So they’ll be probably asking some more background questions that an MIT or an HBS interviewer would not be asking. But they will also ask some behavioral questions. So Stanford, for example, prepares and trains interviewers to ask behavioral questions, and so they will use that format also. But it typically tends to be a bit more of a friendly conversational style interview than the interview where you’re interviewing with a member of the admissions committee.

[00:03:15] – John

Right, exactly. Maria, is the interview all that important? It can’t be as important as even a standardized test score, can it?

[00:03:24] – Maria

I think it can be just as, if not more important than the standardized test I mean, business schools are assessing people on their future leadership potential. They want to get a sense of who you’re going to be when you’re on the campus, but also who you’re going to be when they put you in front of their corporate recruiting partners who go out of their way to come to campus to hire the graduates of the programs. And so in the interview, I can get a sense or any person can get a sense. When you talk to a person in real life, what are they like? What’s their actual personality? Who are they authentically? And also thinking ahead to, okay, if I put this person in front of that McKinsey recruiter or that Goldman Sachs recruiter, are they going to represent the school well, or are they going to, in some way, embarrass us on some level? So I think somebody with a perfect GMAT score and a sterling resume, if they get to that interview and they blow it, I don’t think anything can really salvage it at that point. So I would actually argue that the interview is probably the most…

[00:04:28] – Maria

If you get to the interview stage, the interview is the most important element. I’m not sure, Caroline. Caroline used to run admissions at INSEAD. So, Caroline, what role would the interview play when you were in that role?

[00:04:42] – Caroline

Yeah. So The interviewer sometimes, and I would have this issue sometimes at INSEAD, the interviewers sometimes feel that they are the final gatekeeper. And so if they say someone should get in, then they should get in. If they say someone should not get in, then they should not get in. And they sometimes get upset when the decision doesn’t go with their recommendation. So whilst the interview is very important, the post-interview, the admissions file reader will review the entire application again in the light of the interview. So the final decision is based on the overall candidacy and all of the different elements. But having said that, you’re not going to get dinged post-interview because your GMAT score was weak. They knew before the interview. So if they really feel that the GMAT score or some particular element of your profile is too big of a red flag, then they’re not going to invite you to interview stage. So if you’ve got to interview stage, it means that they see you as a very credible candidate, as someone who has great potential to be a wonderful fit for the school. And so typically your chances have gone up to around 50 % at interview stage, roughly.

[00:05:59] – Caroline

And And as we know, the top, the M7 schools, when you start out, the chances are very much lower than that. So for example, at MIT, I think it’s about 15 %, at HBS and GSB, it’s lower than that. So your chances have shot up tremendously at interview stage, but they will be reviewing the entire application. But it’s rare that someone will get in to the school if they really fluff the interview. It’s very difficult to get beyond that stage if you don’t impress your interviewer.

[00:06:37] – John

Yeah, and I’m thinking that that ratchets up the pressure on the candidate, because for one thing, we all know that applying to a highly selective MBA program is something of a marathon in and of itself. After you’ve run so far successfully, meaning you actually got the invite, and now it’s down a one and two chance of getting in, you might approach that interview with a fair amount of anxiety. Is that what you find when you help prep people, Maria?

[00:07:11] – Maria

Yeah, absolutely. I think the anxiety and the pressure is enormous, and I have a lot of empathy for that. The good news is I think you can try to do some, I don’t know if it’s breathing exercises beforehand, or you can practice also beforehand to feel more comfortable Don’t practice too much, and we can talk more about this in a second. But just realize that it might help if you think about the fact that everyone being interviewed is also just as nervous as you. Presumably everyone else being interviewed wants it just as badly as you. And as a result, they’re probably also just as nervous as you. And so it’s not uncommon for people to be very nervous, especially in those first few minutes. The butterflies in the stomach are probably a fairly universal experience. So don’t beat Get yourself up if you’re walking into the interview and you’re feeling very nervous and just try to power through those first few minutes. And then you’ll find, I think most people find that as they start talking, the butterflies go away as they get more engaged in the conversation. And yeah, again, everyone has those butterflies, so don’t start to get too much into your head about what’s wrong with me.

[00:08:21] – Maria

Everyone feels that. And I think especially experienced interviewers are familiar with that. And so I think They’re not looking for perfect robots. I think it’s okay. It’s okay to be a little nervous.

[00:08:36] – John

While the questions are going to obviously vary from school to school, there are a set of questions that tend to come up again and again. Walking into an interview, either on Zoom or in person, generally, what are the questions that are getting asked here? Caroline?

[00:08:55] – Caroline

Well, you should definitely be prepared to talk about why you want to do the MBA and why school in particular. And then you may be asked to walk the interviewer through your resume or walk them through your background. So have your elevator pitch prepared. And they will likely dig into your post-MBA goals and look to understand how you see your career evolving over time, how you plan to use the MBA to enable you to achieve your goals. And then they are going to, in many cases, they’ll ask you behavioral questions. So behavioral questions are questions that are looking at examples of what you’ve done in the past, because admissions committees take the perspective that your past performance is the best predictor of future performance. So they want to hear not just hypotheticals about how you would behave in a given situation, but they want to hear concrete examples of actually what you’ve done and how you did it. Those questions There’s a huge variety, so you can’t anticipate every behavioral question that you might get. They typically start with a phrase like, Tell me about a time, you. So tell me about a time you had to persuade someone to do something that they didn’t want to do, or tell me about a time, you had to influence a situation without having formal authority.

[00:10:24] – Caroline

There’s a tremendous variety of questions that you could face that fall that umbrella. And a good way to tackle that is to have a framework in mind to help you structure your responses. So a common framework is the STAR framework. Star stands for situation, task, action, and result. You explain briefly the situation and the task that you were faced with, and then you should quickly get into what action you took. You need to remember that it’s not just about what your team did, but it’s about what you specifically did. Then you can talk about the result. That gives you a nice framework for presenting the detail of what you did. And then you should be prepared for follow-up questions because they will often want to drill into some specific aspects of what you have described. So you should be prepared for the detailed follow-up questions as well. And I love Maria’s Swiss Army knife stories. So perhaps you could talk about your Swiss Army knife approach, Maria.

[00:11:35] – Maria

Oh, thanks, Caroline. Yes. So I advocate, as Caroline mentioned, look, you cannot possibly anticipate every single question or every possible question you might get asked. And you certainly shouldn’t have a fully thought out and memorized and prepared answer for any question, but much less for a bank of, say, 80 to 100 questions. That is a sure way to not only drive yourself crazy, but it also leads to very poor interview performance. When somebody has clearly memorized an answer, the interviewer can tell, and it’s very easy for that answer to go off the rails. So for example, recently, I was doing a mock interview where I asked someone a variation of a question. They were clearly expecting a slightly different… They were expecting a question on this topic, this project they had led, but they were expecting very clearly a different question about that topic, about this project. And I asked a different question, and it really flustered them, and they took off talking and not answering my question at all. And that’s one of the dangers of memorizing answers. So that is why I advocate having Swiss Army knife stories, where to prepare for it, you think really carefully about Okay, what are some of the better experiences that I’ve had?

[00:12:47] – Maria

Positive and negative. Even failures can be good learning experiences, and say, Okay, what did I do in that situation? And okay, if I get asked a teamwork question, I pull out this facet of the story to talk about. If I I get asked about a persuasion element, I can pull out this facet of the story. Because frequently, especially if we’ve worked on large projects, there’s a lot of different elements to it. So instead of trying to memorize 20 different stories, think about one story that you know really well, but then ask yourself, what are some of the different facets of that story that I can pull out as needed and emphasize, depending upon which behavioral question I get?

[00:13:26] – John

Right. Yeah. And then, of course, you really can’t prepare for an odd-bull question. And there are tricky or odd-bull questions that tend to be asked here and there. Now, I know for years, The Harvest, which is the MBA student newspaper at Harvard Business School, would actually ask the new enrolled MBA students what questions they were asked during their applicant interviews. They would publish this stuff in a book, and we often wrote about it. Some of the questions you would never imagine listening to. I mean, it’s like, here are a few of them, and I would love to get the two of you to react to this. What’s the one thing you’ll never be as good at as others? What’s the most interesting conversation you’ve had this week? Do you read for fun? What was the last book you read? Describe something that you should start doing, do more of, and do less of. What’s one thing I never have guessed about you, even after reading your application? That’s a good question, I think. How did you prepare for this interview? Or how about this one? It’s six months after the MBA. It’s Monday morning. What will you be doing?

[00:14:43] – John

If you could change one thing about the organization that employs you, what would it be? Those are real interesting questions that go beyond what you might expect in an admissions interview. I don’t think they get asked that often. What do you think, Maria?

[00:15:05] – Maria

I think it really depends upon how the interview has gone up until that point. Sometimes the oddball questions do tend to come a little bit later. If I’m doing a mock interview with someone and I feel that they are way too scripted, then I love throwing an oddball question at them because for HBS, specifically, one of the many things they’re trying to ascertain is, is this person going to thrive in our very specific case method classroom? And the case method classroom is one in which you cannot possibly anticipate where that conversation is going to go before you walk in. So you have to be able to think on your feet. You have to be able to respond. If a professor calls at any point in the class, the professor can literally point at you and say, Okay, Maria, what do you think about what Caroline just said? So you have to be constantly thinking and paying attention. So anyway, part of why they put these oddball questions in there is not because they’re sadists, although I mean, maybe some of them are, but mostly it’s because they’re trying to get a sense of like, Okay, you can’t possibly script a case method discussion.

[00:16:08] – Maria

So if I know that you’re good at memorizing, that tells me nothing about how you’re going to be in my classroom. So let me try to pick something that will destabilize you a little bit and see how you’re going to react. So, yeah, so that sometimes those questions do come out, but you shouldn’t read too much into them. It’s just trying to get a sense of, are you a real person with a myriad of interests? Do you contain multitudes? And if we ask about them, can you think on your feet, or are you just going to flail around and self-destruct?

[00:16:43] – John

All right. Now, Caroline, when you were running admissions at NCI, were there any questions that you might even consider to be a little bit odd?

[00:16:56] – Caroline

Well, it does happen, especially with alumni interviewers, where you’ve got often thousands of volunteers who are involved, that they will sometimes ask things that you’d really rather they didn’t. We would collect feedback sometimes from candidates as well on their interview experience, because it’s important for schools that you have a positive experience, and it does sometimes happen that candidates have an uncomfortable experience that really wasn’t running the way it should have been. I had a client earlier this year who had an interview experience with an alum where it came across from my perspective, from the debrief, that he was being quite sexist and dismissive of her. I encouraged her to give feedback to the school, which she felt very nervous about. But it’s really important for schools to be aware of what’s going on and also to give some context to the feedback that they may be getting from that particular interviewer. And certainly when I was running the interview pool, I would take that feedback extremely seriously. So you don’t want candidates to be having that type of experience. So I think if you have an alum interview, particularly, you do need to be prepared for a variety of experiences.

[00:18:20] – Caroline

Some alumni will be super friendly. It’ll be a very relaxed, easy-going conversation where you’ll get some predictable questions, and other interviewers might have a different style and be more challenging and ask more oddball questions. So you just need to be ready to think on your feet and just take a moment. If you get a question that you hadn’t anticipated and you’re not sure what to say, just take a deep breath. It’s fine to take a moment to reflect. And you can even say to the interviewer, just give me a second to think about that and take your time and then respond. I do see candidates sometimes in prep, both for the interviews and for the video questions that a lot of schools have. Sometimes they just dive in too quickly with a response and they lose their thread. So it is better just take a moment and reflect before you jump in. And if your response, if you kick yourself afterwards and think, Oh, damn, I should have said something else, and I didn’t give the best example. That happens to a lot of people. That’s fine. And remember, they’re not going to ding you based on your response to one particular question.

[00:19:37] – Caroline

And you can always, at the end of the interview, say, I just like to go back to the question you asked me earlier and add another dimension to that, or you can even follow up on email afterwards. So there are multiple ways of handling difficult questions, I think.

[00:19:56] – John

Well, also, I wonder if, in fact, a school uses students or alumni alumni to do interviews, do they weigh them as much as a school that actually invest in their admissions staff to do the interviews? Because across a sample of students or alumni, even when trained, the interviews are going to be rather inconsistent, and different people are going to be subjective in different ways, where if you just have your admissions staff doing these interviews, you have much more control over what’s being asked, what the assessments are saying, and how consistent they are from one candidate to another. Do you have a sense of whether or not a school that invest in its admissions staff to do all these interviews might weigh the interview more so than a school that just might have a second-year student do them? Maria?

[00:20:52] – Maria

Well, I think that with a second-year student, and I think Caroline could weigh in on this as well, if you have a second-year student or an alum, I should say, and the alum writes something negative, I do think it’s easier to perhaps say, Well, we are not really sure if that alum, maybe that alum had a bias that we’re not clear on. I’ve also had candidates, particularly female candidates, who are in more conservative countries, get asked by their male alumni interviewers very inappropriate questions about the role of women in society, and should women be bosses, and should women be working outside the home? So the alumni interviewers can definitely really be a wild card. And so I would like to think that if an alumni interviewer is like, Well, I didn’t like this person, that at least that is taken with more of a grain of salt. So my sense would be that the closer you are to the admissions team itself, the more weight it carries. Because if you go into committee and the person at committee actually had the conversation with the student and says, I really think that we should let this person in, or conversely, I don’t know, I didn’t really feel it, that’s got to have a lot more weight versus reading a report.

[00:22:04] – Maria

And so I think the second year students probably somewhere in the middle because the second year students are at least… Most schools do train them. They do take some anti-bias training. They do tend to follow a little bit more of a script. So if the school has a certain checklist of skills or traits that they’re looking for, certain values that the school has or parts of its mission statement or whatever, the second year students are less likely to be a wild card. But I would assume that an admissions officer doing the interview would have the most weight. But so, Caroline, actually, how did you ever… If you ever got a negative report from an alum… Because I think InSat, does InSat still do two alumni?

[00:22:45] – Caroline

Yes.

[00:22:45] – Maria

So that helps, too.

[00:22:47] – Caroline

That’s right. And that’s why INSEAD likes to have two alumni, because it brings two different perspectives. And sometimes there’s just not a good fit. For some reason, the interview An interviewer may not have good chemistry, or someone’s having a bad day, or there is some bias involved, as you said. And so sometimes you’re reading an interview report and you see that it doesn’t really fit with the rest of the picture that you have garnered of the applicant. And so you’re trying to figure out, is the interviewer right in that perception, or should we discount what the interviewer has said? And there’s often a lot of discussion at that stage. If there are conflicting interview reports, that’s often where the admissions committee will spend quite a bit of time in trying to analyze the situation and understand whose perspective should carry more weight. But I agree that if you’re being interviewed by someone who is a member of the admissions committee and they’re in the room when the final decision is being made, then that is going to carry more weight, I think, than a single alumni interview. So the alumni interviewers are an extremely valuable part of the process and provide very useful input.

[00:24:17] – Caroline

But at the end of the day, schools like Intel have thousands of these interviewers. And so, as we’ve said, there is not a clear their consistency in how the interviews are run and how the feedback, and the feedback they have a report to provide. So there is structure to that, but there’s just a lot of variety in how they conduct those interviews and how much feedback they give and how detailed it is and so on. So some interview reports are definitely more useful than others when it comes to alumni interviews.

[00:24:56] – John

Right. We’ve suggested the things that you can expect in and what you should do during an interview. What shouldn’t you do? Caroline, what’s your advice to a candidate to make sure they don’t screw it up?

[00:25:10] – Caroline

Well, go back to Maria’s point. Just make sure you’re answering the question. That’s a common mistake to answer the question that you wanted to be asked, not the question that you’ve actually been asked. Sometimes it’s a genuine mistake because, as we’ve said, candidates are often very nervous, and so they might not have listened as carefully as they should have to the questions, especially the early part of the interview. So just be really focused on listening carefully and making sure that you’ve responded correctly. Be concise because there’s often a time constraint on these interviews. Alumni interviews The length can vary a lot from 30 minutes to even some I’ve heard about that are like two hours long. So maybe at the start of the interview, if you’re interviewing with an alum, maybe check how much time they have for the discussion, because if they have a flexible schedule, then you may provide more detail in your responses. But if they only have 30 minutes, then you need to be very concise, because they do have a certain number of questions to get to. And then otherwise, just try to, as we said, you’re going to have nerves, but try to stay as calm as you can, take deep breaths.

[00:26:26] – Caroline

If you stumble, don’t let that derail you. And that sometimes happens, unfortunately, to candidates as well, where they feel that they’ve messed up one question, and then that destroys their confidence, and then the interview goes downhill from then on. So just think about how you can prepare your sofa that situation so that you can recover and move on if you do stumble and not let that torpedo your confidence. And then have some interesting questions prepared for the end of the interview. Usually, the interview will ask you at the end if you’ve got any questions for them. So have some interesting questions prepared and don’t ask them questions about things that you could easily have found out on the school website.

[00:27:15] – John

Right. Maria, your thoughts on that?

[00:27:18] – Maria

Yeah, I agree. I think maybe sometimes some advice that I give people is to think about it as a conversation and not a performance. So if you get asked a question, this isn’t about standing up and delivering a perfect three-minute soliloquy about whatever it is. And then you get a follow-up question, you’re like, I wasn’t ready for the follow-up question, or I clearly did not read my interviewer’s body language and see that they mentally checked out 90 seconds ago because I’m boring them. Treat it as you would treat… I like to use an analogy of pretend that you’re at a professional networking event, maybe an alumni event for your college, and you’re meeting people who went to your college but who might not know what you do. And if they say, Oh, wow, you recently led an AI project at your work? Tell me about that. How would you respond to that? So that more casual… In a situation like that, your response would be a little bit more casual. You’d be actually listening to the question the person asks. And so it would be more of a dialog in a two-way conversation, as opposed to, I am standing alone on a stage with a spotlight on me, and now I must recite my answers.

[00:28:28] – Maria

It’s not a recitation. It’s a discussion with another person. I think that maybe sometimes that paradigm shift can help people have more natural performances.

[00:28:40] – John

Exactly. Well, if you have been invited to interview, we’re wishing you good luck. Don’t overprepare. You’ll come off as rehearsed and scripted, which would be really a negative in the view of any admissions interview, whether it’s an alumnus, a student, or an admissions official. So good luck to you. And we hope the invite leads to a real invite to join a class. This is John Burnet, Potsu Kwan. Is John Burn with Boats and Quants. You’ve been listening to business casual.