How to Storytell & Ace Interviews
Hi! I’m Shreyas. I’m a student at Cal Poly and have interviewed with places like Deloitte, PwC, Goldman Sachs, LinkedIn, and more. I realized that my experiences could help other students like me with recruiting and interviewing.
Breaking down the process of finding an internship/job, this post is meant to target the interviewing block (below). More specifically, this post is aimed towards college students looking to learn how to prepare for interviews, especially for behavioral questions.
I’m publishing this post now, because it’s October and most people I know at Cal Poly are interviewing.
Okay, let’s begin!
1.) Understanding the point of an interview
Interviews are the greatest medium in the world to brand oneself. A company literally puts you with someone with decision-making power and you talk about yourself, the company, and experiences. What more could you ask for when you are looking for a job?
In all seriousness, from a hiring manager’s perspective, an interview has multiple purposes to see:
- If this is someone I could work with, mentor, coach, and/or grow
- What type of work has the candidate produce and with what level of quality
- Is this person a team player? Do they have drive?
One tip I’ve found is that it’s extremely valuable, is to make the interview less of a Q&A and more of a discussion. Find a way to discover common ground. Moreover, it’s important to note that no interview is meant to intimidate you. If you can come out of an interview and say “what a great conversation” then celebrate!
Also, for interviews, there are always different types so you should prepare accordingly. Through my experiences, the usual interview process goes as follows (not saying this is 100% true for every firm):
Phone Screen
- What to expect: Typically this type of interview screens for a culture fit, any red flags, candidate’s understanding of company/position, and how qualified a candidate is. If you are applying for a more exclusive program/position, expect these questions to be harder and have some type of case aspect too.
In person / On Campus interview (If this is a campus hire position)
- If I recruited with the company on campus, I would most likely have my last set of in-person interviews on campus as well
- These usually were split between behavioral (looking for culture fit, leadership, & problem solving) and case/interviews.
Final Round Interview
- These usually were split between behavioral (looking for culture fit, leadership, & problem solving) and case/interviews. Sometimes companies make these into “Super Days” where you have multiple interviews back to back that could go on for 2–4 hours.
Now that we are looking at interviews in the right light, let’s talk about how to convey your story.
2.) Finding Stories
Through college, most people are involved in a variety of things. It’s funny how much people forget what they have done, achieved, been a part of, or impacted in any way or form. Take out a piece of paper and document everything you have done through college. My shortened version is shown below.
The point of this is to literally remind you of everything and anything you can shape into a talking point in an interview. Trust me, you will have forgotten so much you have done. This exercise should take at least 20 minutes. If you just have two bullet points per year, you either drank too much or have a 4.0 GPA (good for you!).
Now let’s prioritize and bucket all these amazing things you forgot you did, into the themes detailed below.
For my interviews, I chose my stories to be:
Subject Matter: IS classes + SQL Final Project
- I was applying to a tech consulting job. I wanted to show IT strategy, Program Management, & SQL knowledge.
Analytical: UCLA Datafest or PwC
- At UCLA Datafest, my team and I created a pricing model that determined the where Ticketmaster was underpricing or overpricing. Working with massive datasets in SAS, R, and Tableau at data science hackathon would fit the bill.
Leadership/Accountability: Mustang Consulting or Blue Shield of California
- Mustang Consulting would show Leadership. I created a student org. and the story of leading engagements & building a team would transfer well.
- Accountability would be a Blue Shield related answer. I could talk about high-level projects and the amount of ownership I showed.
EQ/Team: Mustang Consulting
- I could talk about building a team of 17 people and the different challenges through that journey of developing talent and motivating people.
3.) Telling stories
So now your ego is raised a little bit. You have identified talking points that demonstrate the relevant 4 qualities any manager wants in a candidate. Now lets structure those talking points into succinct anecdotes so that people who know nothing about you (aka interviewers), can understand your stories.
Basic Framework:
- Give Context: Where were you working? What were you doing?
- Give Situation: What was happening? What was the problem?
- Give Action: What did you do? Why? HOW?
- Give Impact: What was the impact? How did it result? Did it work/fail? What did you learn?
Question: What was a project you did during your internship at Blue Shield of California?
Sample Response:
Context: Sure! At Blue Shield, I was lucky to be part of the tight-knit Corporate Development team that worked on high impact and high visibility projects for the company.
Situation: One of these was to understand the impact of large Healthcare M&A activity such as the Anthem-Cigna and Aetna-Humana mergers. To aid with this process, I answered three main questions:
Who are the regulatory parties involved in reviewing these deals and how will they look at the deals in terms of Market Share in CA?
Where can I get market share data, understand it, and then visualize it?
Applying the knowledge gained in both questions above, what does that implicate for Blue Shield?
Action: By attending analyst calls and understanding DOJ guidelines, I understood how regulators look at geographic market areas for market share calculations, which in this case would be US counties. Getting county level data would allow me see the effect of market share per each merger and thereby areas where potential divestitures would happen. I partnered with BSC’s competitive intelligence team and pulled online Health data into SAS. There I, cleaned the data and organized it by county and product group. Then I exported to excel where I build a dashboard where we could easily see counties with high/low potential for divestitures per whatever merger we were analyzing.
Impact: This view helped my team understand what mergers would have to drop members in which counties, with the resulting market share changes. We identified 5+ counties where we could increase our competitive position through divestiture capitalization and product promotion tactics.
It is better to be concise than long-winded. If you feel you should have or want to expand more, after your succinct answer ask “Do you want to me expand on a certain part or was that sufficient?” If yes, then go for it! If no, move on.
Now that you have framed your stories, test them. Literally, google “leadership questions” or “top 20 behavioral questions,” and see how well you can spin your 5 stories to answer those questions.
4.) Stop using a hammer — use a scalpel
Now, you have a great foundation of stories that show key qualities. These are stories you can spin to answer most questions or use to show a different quality not touched upon in an interview.
Next, is fine tuning those stories to the specific position you are interviewing for. For example in the previous example of my response, if I was applying to a role in product marketing I would have placed emphasis less on the finance part, and more the communication with legal and competitive intelligence teams and addressing stakeholder interests. If I was applying to an M&A related role, I would highlight my understanding of how health care market share is calculated and how I built the dashboard in excel (shown below).
Question: What was a project you did during your internship at Blue Shield of California?
Sample Response (Finance Spin):
Context: Sure! At Blue Shield, I was lucky to be part of the tight-knit Corporate Development team that worked on high impact and high visibility projects for the company.
Situation: One of these was to understand the impact of large Healthcare M&A activity such as the Anthem-Cigna and Aetna-Humana mergers. To aid with this process, I answered three main questions:
Who are the regulatory parties involved in reviewing these deals and how will they look at the deals in terms of Market Share in CA?
Where can I get market share data, understand it, and then visualize it?
Applying the knowledge gained in both questions above, what does that implicate for Blue Shield?
Action: Using DOJ guidelines and information from analyst calls, I that regulators look at geographic market areas by US counties. From Horizontal Merger guidelines, I learned to calculate the HHI (Herfindahl-Hirschman Index), which the DOJ uses to analyze market share effects. Then, I got access to market share data through the Competitive Intelligence team. Using excel, I created a dashboard that showed a table with each county in CA and different health products group (HMO, Exchange, etc..), and the divestiture capitalization potential (low, medium high), with the resulting change in market share per whichever merger we were analyzing. Behind the dashboard there were hidden 7+ engine sheets that ran auto calculations and formatting.
Impact: This view helped my team understand what mergers would have to drop members in which counties, with the resulting market share changes. We identified 5+ counties where we could increase our competitive position through divestiture capitalization and product promotion tactics.
Fine-tuning quick tips:
- Get a chat with people who have interviewed/worked in the industry or company
- Ask what skills they value and the profile of an ideal candidate
- Tailor your stories/answers accordingly
Before my interviews with Deloitte Consulting, I already talked to 10 people who gave me advice, helped me frame my story, and practiced interview questions with me.
5.) Practice & practice — you’ll never be perfect but will come damn close to it, which is good enough
Captivate Test: Practice in the mirror to see your facial features, body language, and tone/emphasis in telling your story
- If you aren’t captivated or interested in your own story, why would someone else be?
Coherent Test: Practice with someone who doesn’t know you too well or someone who is good at giving you brutal criticism
- They should tell you when your answers/story lose a logical progression or don’t seem to make sense
- This tests whether people understand your answers and why what you did was important
Relevant Test: Practice with a previous intern or current person holding a job you are interviewing for
- This will help you shape your answers and mindset to display the qualities that are pertinent for the job.
6.) Don’t forget the basics & specifics
In addition to having stories, you need to hit the basic behavioral questions too. Below are a very small sample of the questions you should always have prepped.
- Why X company?
- Why X position? Why X position over Y position?
- Tell me about X on your resume.
- What is your proudest achievement?
- Tell me about yourself.
- How would you resolve a team conflicts? Let’s say one person didn’t buy into the group vision.
- What’s your biggest weakness?
- Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
- Tell me about a time you failed. How did you deal with this situation?
In addition, you of course need to prep the proper technical questions. If you are aiming for investment banking you need to answer questions like:
- How are the financial statements linked together?
- What is the difference between PE multiple vs. EBITDA multiple? When would you use either & why?
- How do you value a company?
If you were going for product marketing:
- How would you launch X product?
- We are releasing X product. How do we price this?
- We want to increase Market Share by X%. How do we promote our laptops?
- How would you position X product?
7.) End strong & curious
Questions are the last part of an interview process. Good questions tell an interviewer, “Hey, not only is this person a good candidate, they actually are genuinely interested in the team/company/product!”
You should use the last 5–10 minutes of every interview to show at least one of the following:
- Curiosity in the company and its future direction
- Interest in the interviewer and what they have done/learned
- Insights into the position you are applying to
- Capability of having a decent conversation
Everyone has their one approach to asking questions. Personally, I love to learn about the person interviewing me and then tailor the conversation to flow into topics like “how they have learned at X company”, and the “challenges they faced”. Of course, if we find a topic we are both passionate, I would just dive into that.
Other approaches could be asking about products, teams, learning environment, company direction (With Deloitte, I had a 10 minute discussion about Deloitte Digital and the projects that division does), or shared interests (With EY, the partner and I found common interest in Fintech and we proceeded to discuss that for 15 minutes).
The most important point is to have a genuine conversation/discussion.
This is a very basic way to approach interviews that allows you to adapt per question and tell your story. I’ll follow this with posts addressing how to tackle recruitment, how to think about a career, and writing an impactful resume, and a consulting case interview guide.
Any constructive comments or questions are welcome! Hope this helped in any way or form!