Hi I'm Jenny Rae, the Managing Director of Management Consulted, and I'm here
today to talk about one of the most contentious areas of questioning inside
the consulting interview. I'm talking about questions about your strengths,
questions about your weaknesses, which nobody enjoys talking about, and finally
the ultimate question that if you're asked is the make-or-break it moment in
your interview. So first I'm going to talk about strengths. A lot of people
when they're walking into consulting interviews or interviews in general, are
concerned about overstepping their bounds, but one of the things that ends
up happening is that you're underprepared to talk about what you
really bring to the table. So I recommend for each of the clients that I work with
directly that they prepare three key strengths before they walk into the
interview. These strengths will both have a name to them, as well as a quick
illustration just afterwards. Beyond the three strengths, it's helpful to
understand a couple of key themes behind the strengths that will help you build
answers so you can effectively answer a question if someone asks you "What are a
couple strengths that you bring to the table?" The first one is that you do want
to portray confidence but you don't want to portray arrogance. What I found is
that a lot of people don't even portray confidence in the concern of becoming
arrogant, but arrogance is really only when you say I am better than other
people and everything else when you just say
I'm good at something, I'm proficient at something, that's just confidence. So make
sure that if you're walking into the interview you're prepared to quickly and
confidently say, "I'm good at this. I'm excellent at this. I have a lot of
experience in this," because that's what they want to hear from somebody that
they're going to bring onto the table. In fact, it's not usually good to come and
say, "I don't have a lot of experience doing this." It's way better to say, "I have
a little bit of experience doing that, and I look forward to doing it more."
So that's why confidence is so important in the interview, and as long as you
stay away from arrogance, you're going to be just fine. The next thing that's
important to think about is that you want to use "I" but in the context of a team.
What I mean by this is that a lot of people, when they're talking about
strengths, want to focus so much on how well they worked with other people. If they
say "we" did this together and "we" did that together, that doesn't convey a sense of
ownership for you, and it doesn't give me a sense of what you did. You could have
been the most active person in that group of "we," you could have been the
least active, you could have just been writing the tales of other people - so
make sure that as you're going through the interview and talking about your
strengths, you're really only telling what you did. Again, it's not saying that you're
arrogant, it's not saying you're better than other people or even it did more
than other people, it's just saying, here is what I'm able to do, here is what I
have done. Then finally, it's important to make sure that you use
quick supporting illustrations. These are not story questions, they're not hero
stories where you're going to lay out examples upon examples upon examples,
you're just giving quick illustrations. If you talk about problem solving, you
might say, for example, "I solved a problem here."
You don't give me the whole story, just a 10 to 20 second version of it, or if
you're great at communicating with people, you might give me an explanation
of it - not necessarily even one time, but just what that means is that I'm really
good at bringing groups of people together and driving them on towards the
same goal. So you're either giving an illustration with a story, or an
illustration with an explanation - either one of those is going to help
illustrate your strengths. Now let's move on to weaknesses - weaknesses are not that
fun to talk about, but in many ways you want to handle them in the same way that
you do your strengths. You need to show that you are confident but not arrogant.
Confidence in weaknesses says I have weaknesses, they show up, people tell me
about them and I respond I do something about it. Arrogance says, I have no
weaknesses, or my weaknesses don't matter, or I've totally solved them all.
None of which are believable statements or desirable statements in a potential
candidate. In consulting when you are hired you will go through multiple
review cycles, you will be reviewed at one month, at three months, at six months,
at twelve months; and then every time at the end of a project, at six months
and twelve months you get a lot of feedback, and the feedback is generally
constructive. So they want to know that you're the type of person who can take
prompting to do something better, put it quickly into action and then see results
from that. So they want to understand weaknesses that are tendencies for you
but that you've really done something about in recent times. Again you're not
trying to say they're not important, or they're not weaknesses or tendencies
that you have, you're just trying to say I recognize them - either somebody told me
about them I recognize it myself, and have done something about them. So here are a
couple of specifics when you're preparing for weaknesses. You want to
have two weaknesses that you talked about in the interview. You don't just
want to come in with one because what if they ask you, like I did as a mean
interviewer, well great, tell me about your second weakness. I would really want
to prompt somebody to make sure that they understood that just having one
weakness wasn't enough. Then the next thing you'll need to understand is they
want you to choose examples from the past to distance yourself. The further back your
issue with your weakness was demonstrated, the less pressing and
concerning will be to the interviewer. So if it happened three years or five years ago
and since then even building toward something different they're really going
to think it's believable. They'll appreciate that you've made subtraction
as well. Then finally, it's important to acknowledge boldly what you've done,
but acknowledge how you've been improving. So say what your weakness is,
name it up front, but then go through the process of explaining how we recognized
it and what you're doing better. Finally there's one question that you absolutely
have to know the answer to - I call this one the ultimate question in an
interview. The question is "Why should we hire you?"
This is a terrifying question to get because usually it means that your
interview is hanging in the balance. A lot of people don't ask this question if
they've already made their decision; they ask it when they don't know and they
want to have you answer for them, and your ability to lay out some key
strengths that you offer in the "why we should hire you" question and do it in a
way that's confident and also gentle is very important.
So you may want to say "I'm really great at leading people, at growing
projects, and also at managing data; but at the end of the day, the thing that I'm
really bringing to the table is a real sense of excellent project management.
I'm able to use all of my strengths to lead in direct projects to really
favorable conclusions. If you're able to do something like that in an interview,
it's gentle but confident - you're able to really convey your points of excellence
in a memorable way. So here are the three things that we've covered today:
strengths, weaknesses, and the ultimate question - why they should hire you. If you
walk into the interview unprepared for these, you're going to really have
difficulty going through and convincing them that you are the type of candidate
that they want to hire. Make sure that if you have questions about what we've
talked about today or anything about fit interviews come visit us at managementconsulted.com,
where we have lots of resources to support you in your journey
to be an excellent interviewer.