How NOT To Mess Up Your HBS Interview

Harvard Business School plans to begin notifying round two applicants tomorrow (Jan. 30) whether they will be invited to admissions interviews that will begin in mid-February.

After the first batch of notifications for Harvardā€™s largest round of applicants goes out today, the second batch will occur on Feb. 7.

Interviews with admission officials will be held on campus as well as in London, Paris, Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai, Sao Paulo, Palo Alto, and New York. The one-on-one sessions will be conducted between Feb. 11 and March 8th, according to Dee Leopold, managing director of admissions at Harvard.

Harvard said it would get out all the bad news for round two candidates by Feb. 7. ā€œAll candidates not being invited to interview will be notified of their releaseā€ on that date, wrote Leopold in a post on her admissions blog.

The big question now: How do you not screw up your interview?

Sandy Kreisberg, HBS Guru, in Harvard Square

Sandy Kreisberg, HBS Guru, in Harvard Square

For some smart, tell-it-like-it-is counsel, we again turned to Sandy Kreisberg, aka HBS Guru, the rebel savant of MBA admissions consulting. The highly opinionated Kreisberg has been advising applicants to Harvard, Stanford, Wharton and other elite B-schools for some 15 years. During the 2011-12 application season, Kreisberg conducted mock interviews with more than 120 applicants to Harvard alone, a service he offers for $450. (For details, see his website.

Obviously, if you made it to this stage in round one, itā€™s a big deal. The interview is the only thing separating you from a seat in the class, right?Ā 

Yes, but itā€™s like being born. Itā€™s a special passage where awful things can happen. Tremendous damage can occur in a very short period of time. You should worry about it, and you should prepare for it.

What have you picked up so far in your coaching of applicants who are prepping for these interviews?

Well, the big news is that Wharton has changed the format to group interviews, and the response to that has been mixed,

See the PoetsandQuants story about this written last October and the comments.

https://poetsandquants.com/2012/10/09/wharton-giving-interview-questions-to-applicants/

Stanford is still one-on-one and the trend there is towards more ‘behavioral interview’ questions such as

‘Tell me about a time you worked in low performing team and what you did and said?’

If you are being interviewed by Stanford, you should Google behavioral interviews and youā€™ll get some so-soĀ Ā  advice about how to answer those questions but at least it will help you get some standard questions such as,Ā  ā€˜Tell me about a time you worked on a great team, or a bad team, or worked with a great leader. Tell me when you disappointed yourself and what would you do differently if you had to do it again. Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a person and how you resolved it. Tell me about a time you dealt with an ethical issue.ā€™

HBS, at least in the first round interviews this year, stayed true to their more fact-based questions such as

‘Why did you join company X?’

‘Why did you leave company X for company Y?’

‘Looking back at your time at company X, what would you have have differently?’

‘Who is the best leader you ever worked for?’

‘Why?’

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