I had the privilege to chat with Siddharth, someone I met over LinkedIn! He was gracious enough to volunteer to be part of our Mockerview Series. What is it you ask? đź‘€
It’s a little series that we’re starting here at Extempra! It’s one part mock interviews, one part Q&A, and sometimes includes chatting with industry experts! The idea is simple, I jump on a call with a guest and see what happens. In our first ever Mockterview, Siddharth, a recent MBA graduate, and I chat about some key questions: how to stand out in a crowded job market, staying concise, and I give him feedback on his answers to two very common interview questions.
Well, let’s get started! We’ve broken it down into 4 videos with the general transcripts below.
Staying Concise in Interviews
Siddharth:
I feel sometimes, I just ramble a lot… I kind of digress from the point that I want to make. Conciseness and brevity is something that I really want to get better with. Sometimes, really hitting the nail on the [head] becomes a little bit of a challenge.
Marco:
Yeah, no! That’s definitely something that a lot of people struggle with, interviews aside! Even just in general communications, knowing how to conceptualize things for your and audience is really important. So in your head before you try and answer anything in an interview, for example, think to yourself, what are the one to two things that you really want to talk about and how do you group those things together?
If you want to start by saying “one of the things that I think is my blind spot is my ability to be concise,” you’re conceptualizing it – you’re priming your audience to be able to capture the example or rationale that you’re about to provide! That, in itself already adds 50% of the clarity to your message. From there, it’s about picking a piece of information or story that you think is most important, then moving on to conceptualizing your second point. TLDR; if you can start to think of things in concepts as opposed to “this is just the general idea of what I want to talk about”, that generally helps people who are maybe big picture thinkers shrink down and really focus on some of the more micro things that they need to convey!
Standing Out in Interviews
Siddharth:
Another question that I really had in mind that I wanted to ask you is I’m an MBA student…I have solid experience. Now I’m just trying to understand, how do I make myself indispensable to the other person? There might be another candidate with an equal number of years of experience, perhaps with a specialization in data science. How do I deal with it?
Marco:
So I think when it comes to the job search, there are a couple of things that you’re trying to demonstrate. The first is how are you unique? What areas can you say I either have really strong know-how about or maybe above-average know-how about relative to other people?
How do you step away from buzzwords and how do you translate that into actionable things that you did? Let me give you an example. There are some job seekers that I speak with who will say things like, “oh I launched a product.” That’s great and buzzy and really on-trend with a lot of startups or tech companies, but what does that actually, mean? How do you demonstrate that you know what it takes to launching? What are the milestones that you were involved with? What are the tasks that you did? What’s the impact that you provided? Right?
That’s what makes you stand apart. The second thing is thinking about the context and the scope in which you’re doing things. So let me give you an example. I can say that I train people, and that’s kind of the beginning end of it, but am I training people one-on-one? Am I training a group of 300 people? The scale, in this example, highlights very different skills me. Being able to engage 300 people at once versus me being able to engage one-on-one are very different things. The more you can highlight some of these scale or contextual factors, the more you’re able to stand out as unique.
And then finally, I would say think a little bit about metrics and stories. How you can merge them together? It’s great to say “I had a 95% customer satisfaction score.” That’s fantastic and may be above industry standard. But what if I can also merge it with a customer story and say “hey, these are the types of things that I experience with customers and because of that, I developed really long-lasting relationships even after I left my company. I’m still in contact with everyone. Oh, and by the way, I have a 95 success rate.”
When you can merge these two worlds together is when you’re really going to see that you can make that impact moving forward. So those are the three major things that I would really focus on. Is what is the actual tasks that you’re doing? What’s the context in which you’re providing your value And then merge those stories and build a narrative using metrics and using you know your unique stories. And when you can find that magic formula across your interview, not necessarily in every single answer, but when you can show bits and pieces of each piece within your entire interview that’s when you’ll stand out.
Tell me about yourself: Answer & Feedback
Marco:
Well let’s start off with the million dollar question: “tell me about yourself!”
Siddharth:
Okay… my name is Siddharth. I’m currently pursuing my MBA program at HCC MontrĂ©al. I’ve had six years of work experience in the tech industry in India. I’ve had varied experience and it was in mobile application development and in consulting.
In MontrĂ©al, I’ve been doing my MBA in marketing. I really love the course that I’m currently enrolled in and am fascinated by various topics such as digital marketing product development. It exposed me to a lot of newer segments of the tech industry that I wasn’t previously aware of. I’m really keen to pursue a career in product management or consulting. That’s pretty much it about me.
Marco:
How did you feel answering that question?
Siddharth:
I’ll be very honest with you. I just felt like I was being very programmed. It felt like it was not coming across as really candid. I just wanted to have a bit more of a personal touch to it. It was just like I was giving you a broad picture of my LinkedIn profile.
Marco:
So here’s what I noticed. You tried to inject some history around what you’ve done and what your passions and ambitions are. Those are all really important elements when you’re answering this really key question. It’s your first opportunity to make an impression!
Where I think you could have taken it further is really explaining what you stand for and what it is that you should be known for. When you’re talking to a recruiting manager or an interviewer, they really want to be able to write down 1..2..3…these are the three things that I need to remember this person by. So it’s really important that you make it as easy as possible to do that. How can you do that?
It sounds like you have a lot of diverse experiences, so maybe you can filter it that way: “I’m doing my MBA and here are the three areas of expertise that I have.” Then, provide an example under each one. Or maybe you can say, “I started my career here, then I moved to do this, and now, I’m doing this or this is where I hope to go. Inject some structure so that you can really enhance your ambitions and your experiences with some more concrete examples. I think that’s what would really make it stronger and would tie it all together
With tell me about yourself, one thing that I also like to add to add that personal touch is actually explaining who you’re outside of work, just a quick “outside of work this is what I really love to do as well!” It automatically warms up the conversation and makes it feel more authentic. If that makes you feel better, it’s something you can try just to see if it feels right. You can inject your personality in different ways but that’s one that I think is really easy to implement!
đź’ˇ Side note: Want more detailed help on answering “Tell me about yourself?” Take a peek at our 5-step guide here.
What’s Your Greatest Strength?
Marco:
Can you tell me about your greatest strengths?
Siddharth:
IÂ refuse to give up that’s my biggest strength.
There have been situations in my past where the learning curve as well as the challenge in front of me was really tough. But I have never backed down. It sounds a little bit cinematic but it’s kind of true. I’m pretty resilient even when the odds are kind of tough, I try to dig within to find solutions, ask people around how can I navigate the situation, the problems, and discuss it. I feel like I have decent communication skills, so it helps me just throw out my thoughts or my problems to people around me, with my colleagues or friends. They give me their advice and then you know, I just try to combine them together and come up with a good solution. That’s my biggest strength.
Marco:
I love that you came up with, your resilience and your refusal to give up! I think that that is an underrated skill and a lot of people will immediately jump to something more technical. It’s completely fine to use something that’s more transferable or softer so long as you make it really concrete as well. What’s a strong example where your resilience really came through?
“I have an example! Once I did this project and I hit roadblock after roadblock after roadblock, but here’s how I overcame all these roadblocks and this is what I learned. As a result, that’s how I really built up my skills and resilience!” Try signposting as well – “these are the three concepts that help to demonstrate my resilience” If you can show specific examples, maybe to show your problem-solving skills in addition to resilience, then suddenly you’re taking it from “I’m resilient” to “I’m resilient and I know how to problem-solve!” So think about how to merge and be strategic with your time.
I did notice that you know you start off by saying, “I refuse to give up, the learning curve of some of the things I do that are really really tough”, then you circled back to and “I never backed down and, you know, I built my resilience and this is how I do it”, so it felt a little bit circular. If you can just say “resilience is my top skill and here’s why”, think of how much more concise that would be!
Final Thoughts
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