How to Prepare for an MBA Interview

Congratulations on submitting your Round 2 applications on time! As you wait for the schools to review your candidacy, this is a great time to begin prepping for the interview invitation you will hopefully receive.  Note that Stanford interviews take place from “late January to mid-March” so the first interview invites should start going out about mid-January. You may only have 10 days to 2 weeks between the invite and the interview. HBS will send its interview invitations around Feb 3.

While different schools approach the interviews in different ways, the interview represents your last opportunity to provide the admissions committee with a holistic view of yourself and positively influence them toward an admission offer. Here are six critical tips from Admitify founder, Paul Bodine, to keep in mind as you prepare for an MBA interview:

1. Review the Admitify interview guidance document that your consultant gave you for your target schools. These contain several years of actual interview questions posed by your schools as well as guidance on the schools’ interview approaches.
2. Mentally or concretely identify your core 8-10 stories (i.e., accomplishments) — the go-to examples that you’re proudest of and that capture your impact across your life. These can certainly be from your essays; no need to come up with completely fresh examples. Using your strongest examples is what matters most.
3. Go through your resume and essays and mentally align your core stories to the relevant questions that interviews are likely to ask (see your Admitify interview guidance document). Make sure to practice tailoring your examples/accomplishments so they can be flexibly applied to different types of questions.  It is likely that your stories have different angles that you can highlight in response to different questions. For example, a leadership example is often also an accomplishment and as such can be used for a wide range of interview questions about leadership, achievements you’re proudest of, even people skills or innovation.
4. Begin to practice verbally framing to yourself your responses into 1-2 minute responses.
5. Begin doing simulated timed interviews with actual people (friends, family) to get a sense of how natural and on-message you can be and how you are ‘coming across’. Are you smiling? Are you sounding natural? Are your answers too long or short?
6. Practice with Admitify. You may want to practice with a different consultant than the person you worked on your applications with to test your ability to be effective with different personalities (we have MBAs from Stanford, HBS, Wharton, Chicago Booth, Columbia, NYU Stern etc. on staff). Note that usually, it’s not necessary to literally script responses to every conceivable question. That could take a lot of time, might become too much of a ‘crutch’ for you and might yield responses that sound scripted or written.

Here are a few bonus tips: Stanford and HBS are the toughest interviews: Stanford because they ask a behavioral question which you must answer but also be prepared to respond to follow-up questions on; HBS because their interview is 30 minutes sharp and is based only (95%) on your application — any part of your application.  Time to start prepping now.

If you’re ready to start practicing for your interviews, contact Admitify today!