Preface: The contents of this article are applicable to a wide range of job/internship roles ranging from management, finance, business, marketing, any analyst role, engineering, technology, product development, media, etc, and for undergraduate/ postgraduate college admissions. The contents of this article are best suited for freshers or people with less than 1 year of work experience.
Note for college (undergrad/postgrad) interviews: The article is written contextualized for a job interview, however the sample principles and components are applicable for a college interview. Can look at the analogy guide at the end of the article II.
Any interview can broadly be broken down into the following 7 exhaustive components. If you prepare across these 7 domains then you are able to better participate in the interview with well thought out responses. Additionally, you gain a lot of confidence walking into the interview and the exhaustive nature of this preparation reduces the probability of you getting caught off guard.
That being said, a single interview very rarely includes each of these 7 components. It will typically contain only a subset of these. However, it is almost impossible to know what your interview will entail before the day of the interview, so best to prepare for all of them. Also, companies often tend to focus on different sections/ skills across different interviews.
The 7 components of an interview:
1. CV and CV-adjacent topics
2. Basic Thinking Ability
3. Technical Questions
4. About the company
5. About the job role
6. HR Questions
7. Current Affairs
After seeing the list you might think that you are already aware of each of these components. However, I urge you to read through to better understand the breadth and depth of preparation required, the nuances of each section, and what role each of these sections plays in your interview.
1. CV and CV adjacent topics
CV
The first part is fairly obvious. You should know every line of your CV back and forth, including the background behind each point you’ve written. Follow a simple rule, for each point on your CV, you should be able to talk for at least 5-10 minutes excluding follow up questions.
Let’s look at an example to drive this point home. One of the candidates interviewing with me for a top tier company had a 40-minute interview just based on one point from her/his. So in case, there are points you’ve mentioned from more than two years ago and you might not recall specifics or details of it, do go back and refresh your memory. If you have added it to your CV then you are expected to know the details behind it.
CV adjacent topics
Now comes the less obvious and more interesting part, “CV adjacent topics”. You can be asked questions in an interview, in an area that is either directly or indirectly related to something written on your CV.
Let’s look at a few examples.
Say for example you have on your CV a project that you’ve completed 2 years ago, that relates to a certain industry, say telecom. The interview may, instead of asking you about the project that you did, might ask you something from the telecom industry happening today. This is one type.
The next example is from an interview I gave at IIM for the IPM program. I had mentioned 'photography’ in the very last line of my CV, under my hobbies. Bear in mind this an interview for a management program. I had a 7-minute discussion with the interviewer on the internal structure of a camera, what technology it uses and how it functions. This was a valid Q as I came from a science background while sitting for this interview.
I hope with these two examples you got a vivid picture of what I’m trying to convey. So go through your CV and identify potential topic areas that you aren’t very familiar with but you have work in and around it. Then just spend some time reading a little about each of these topics. However don’t overburden yourself here.
2. Basic Thinking Ability
Depending on the job that you’re applying for, the interview will test either of these two basic thinking abilities.
(a) Logical Think Ability - This is through either of the following - logical reasoning questions / quantitative ability questions/guesstimates/brain teasers/puzzles
(b) Creative Thinking Ability - This is tested through situational based questions, brainstorming rounds or asking you for ideas on the spot
To prepare for both of the above there are a large number of free resources available online. The key thing here is practice. If you have your interview in say 2 weeks, you could spend at least 30 minutes to an hour on this every day.
3. Technical Questions
Now comes the crux of the interview. Here, an interviewer will test whether you have the technical skills required for the job role you’ve applied to. In case you’ve applied to multiple roles, they will try and determine your best fit.
The technical Qs are highly job-specific. There will be a series of articles specific to the technical sections for consulting, finance, management interviews, and for any kind of analyst role.
Keep in mind, this section is a make it or break it section. No matter how well you perform in other sections, if you are not good in this section then there is a very small probability of your receiving an offer. On the other hand, if you excel in this section, the interview might overlook your performance in other sections (excluding perhaps the preceding one on basic thinking ability).
One important point to note here is that this section doesn't require you to already possess all the required technical skills for the job. But, you need to have the basic abilities and skillsets to be able to acquire and apply the knowledge on the job. Different types of job roles have different techniques for testing this in a candidate. At times, this may also be evaluated pre-interview via a test.
To continue to read the rest of the article click here: ‘How to prepare for any interview | The 7 key components | Part II’
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