MBA admissions process for all business schools includes a mandatory MBA interview. Most business schools invite students for an interview after a careful evaluation of their online application. Only if they like your experiences, essays, and career vision, and see a strong possible fit with their MBA program, they will invite you for an interview.
MBA interviews give the MBA admissions team another crucial opportunity to evaluate your readiness for admission. In an MBA interview, you are evaluated for your ability to present yourself, articulate your thoughts and experiences, and share your career vision and passion for the school. You will be judged also on your confidence, communication skills, and ability to think quickly and respond smartly. Many business schools also gauge your cultural fit by how your handle the interaction, your friendliness, your ability to establish rapport, and your body language. Sometimes it might simply be about how you make them feel.
Before you start preparing for the interview – you need to know how your interview would be conducted.
It could be face-to-face, on campus with either the admission committee or a current MBA student, or off-campus with alumni in your city. Alternatively, you would do a virtual interview, through online platforms such as Zoom, Skype, or MS Teams.
For an in-person interview, you need to prepare not only your answers but also pay attention to your body language as your entire presentation would be evaluated. For a virtual interview, you’ll need to practice how to deliver your answers while engaging the interviewer through good eye contact and personal touch.
In most cases, the interviews are divided into four sections:
- Background and profile
- MBA plans
- Behavioral questions
- Questions for the interviewer
Let’s review each in detail along with the best tips to answer the questions.
Most of your interviewers would not have reviewed your essays or applications, especially if they are alumni or current students. They will be mostly given a resume and a set of questions given by the MBA admissions team to ask you and send their notes back to the admissions office.
However, if the admission committee member is interviewing you, there is a higher likelihood that they’d have looked at your application essays and might ask more specific questions regarding the essays as well. But that is rare.
“Walk me through your resume” is the most common opening question. Here you are expected to talk about your career, starting from your graduation till your current job - in that order.
The best approach to answering this question is to talk about your reasons for taking a particular path, what you learned and achieved, and why you left that role. So for example, start with why you joined the particular university. Why were you excited by that major? Why did you take your first job? What was your role and what you learned and achieved in that role? This way the interviewer gets to understand who you are and what is your motivation. They also get to see what kind of skill sets are you bringing to their MBA program.
For this interview questions, make sure you have gone through your MBA resume thoroughly. You must understand why each and every bullet point is there on your MBA CV and you can talk about each and every small detail on your resume even to the last bullet point in your extracurricular section!
In your narration, give enough details but do not spend too much time on this part - as more detailed questions will come in the behavioral section. Be also ready for follow-up questions – either while you are narrating your journey or immediately afterward.
The most important tip here is to already start connecting your career goals after your MBA with some elements in your past experience – it could be your passion for the field or certain skills or experiences that have motivated you towards your future goals.
The flow of the interview might vary and some interviewers might ask behavioral questions before asking about your MBA plans and career goals – so be ready either way.
The most common questions in this section are:
- What are your short- and long-term career goals? Why such goals?
- Why MBA? Why now?
- Why this business school?
- How will you contribute to this school?
- What if you don’t get admitted this year?
This part ideally would be easy for you as you would have written the career goals question and your why MBA should be connected to that. So this should not be very difficult. Make sure you go through your essays again! Just in case your MBA application didn’t have a detailed career goals essay- you’ll have to now think and write them with enough depth and details.
Sometimes some alumni or current students might grill you on your goals – especially if they are from the same industry. They might not be convinced that you need an MBA and might even say your goal doesn’t make sense. If you are being challenged, stay calm and composed. You should have done your research, so you'll be able to back your career plan with reasons. But if you feel that despite that you're being challenged or grilled, don’t get intimidated or afraid. It’s okay, it happens often. The interviewer might do it simply to check your character, to see how you respond to a challenging situation like that. So, handle it with humble confidence and stick to your rationale.
"Why MBA now" question seldom comes up in most interviews but some schools and students might ask, especially if you are either a young or mature applicant. They're curious to know why now, why not later or why not sooner? In your answer, you can cite both professional and personal reasons. Both are okay as long as they are authentic and sincere.
"Why this business school" question becomes the most challenging for most students You will need to conduct in-depth research and talk about how the unique aspects of their MBA program and its incredible opportunities - the academics, exposure, clubs, initiatives, network, location, and industry connections will help realize your dreams.
These questions are designed to check your ability to work in a team, lead teams, and many more qualities that would make you a good MBA candidate.
- Tell us about a significant accomplishment.
- Tell me about a time when you worked in a difficult team.
- Describe a time when you faced conflict and how did you resolve it.
- What is your leadership style?
- How do you deal with diversity? Give an example.
- How do you manage failure? Explain with example.
- What are your strengths and weaknesses?
Some of these questions would have already been covered in the MBA essays and applications, so that might make it easy. Still, you need to practice answering in a limited time and conveying all the information accurately and impactfully.
For most of these answers, try narrating them like a story. Start by giving a very clear context, then elaborate on your actions, and finally the result.
Many times, students end up making the mistake of elaborating a lot on the context and quickly summarizing the result and not talking about their actions or maybe not even talking about the result. So be very mindful of your narration.
Since these questions are not standard, they might often be misheard or misinterpreted. So listen to the questions fully and carefully. If you are unclear, feel free to ask them to clarify.
For the strengths and weaknesses question - try to have at least three of each and a brief example to add credibility.
99% of the time your interviewer will wrap up your MBA interview by giving you an opportunity to ask them questions. Here a lot of students tend to fail. Either they don't have anything much to ask or they end up asking something trivial, or irrelevant and that ends the interview on a bad note. You don’t want to do that!
Take this section seriously. You are still being interviewed!
Ideally, you should have done your research about the school, and based on that you will have specific questions. You could also ask the interviewer about their personal experiences. You could also seek their guidance for you before you join the program.
Please do not ask questions that should have been asked in the initial research or information that can be found online. These questions are not all appropriate at an interview level. So, think and ask questions that are relevant to your situation and help you leave a good impression.
Give your best!