UPDATED NOV 2021

WONSULTING
INTERVIEW
PREP
How To Prep For An
Interview With The
Hiring Manager
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 REMINDER: HIRING MANAGERS ARE PEOPLE.
THEIR GOAL IS TO TRY TO FILL A NEED ON THEIR TEAM.

WHAT IS THE HIRING

MANAGER LOOKING FOR?

1) Someone who understands the role

2) Someone who can perform the role
3) Someone who is excited to be in the role
4) Someone who will fit in with the rest of the team
5) Someone who won't make them look like a bad manager

NOTE

You need to be able to convince the hiring manager that you are the
best candidate for all these 5 conditions based on your answers.In 30
minutes, my guess is you may only get asked about 10 to 12
questions. Brevity in your answers is key. It is always OK to keep
your answer short and to the point and then ask "Did I address the
question to your satisfaction?" or "I can add more details if you like".
The point here is, in 30 minutes, if you spend 7 minutes answering a
single question, the hiring manager will only be able to ask you 4
questions. This will not be enough to help them judge if you are the
right person for the role.

As a hiring manager, I've rejected people at this stage if they ramble

or don't answer the question that I asked. I'm not alone. You need to
be able to answer any question in 1 to 2 minutes max.
HOMEWORK

Make sure you write down/practice your answers to the common

interview questions that you may get asked. Practice speaking your
answers out loud. These need to flow fluidly off your tongue and
should be to the point. Here's a few (Important to note, the answers
that you come up with may be relevant to other questions that you
get asked too, so this is a really important exercise to go through):

COMMON INTERVIEW
QUESTIONS

Tell me about yourself.

Why do you want to work for (Company)?

How does (Company) make money?

Why do you want this role?

What makes you the best person for this role?

Where do you see this role taking your career? (Where do you
want to be in 3 years? What is your long term career plan and
how does this fit into it?)

Can you tell me about a time that you led a project? What were
the results?
COMMON INTERVIEW
QUESTIONS (CONT.)

What were some of the challenges you faced on that project?

How did you communicate the progress of the project to your

stakeholders?

What would you say your greatest strengths are?

If I were to speak to your current manager, what would s/he

say is a development opportunity for you?

Can you tell me about a personal development opportunity that

you've worked on?

Can you tell me about a time you were under a high pressure
situation?

Have you ever missed a deadline?

How do you establish trust with a stakeholder?

Tell me your understanding of this role?

What do you think the day to day responsibilities of this role

look like?

You have a great position at X, why do you want to leave

there?
COMMON INTERVIEW
QUESTIONS (CONT.)

If we offered you this role today, what would prevent you from
accepting it?

Describe a time when you had to communicate a difficult or

unpleasant idea to someone and how you handled this
situation. What were the results?

Describe a situation where you feel you have not

communicated well. How did you correct the situation? What
was the outcome?

Give me an example of a time when you felt you led by

example. What did you do and how did others react?

Tell me about the last time something significant didn’t go

according to plan that you/your team was responsible for.
What was your role? What was the outcome?

Tell me about a project/task you were accountable for where

you had to enlist the help of others to achieve the desired
results?
How did you get them involved? What happened as a result?

If I were to ask you to describe the Excel function vlookup, how

would you explain it to me?

How do you continue to learn and expand your knowledge now

that you have left formal education?
COMMON INTERVIEW
QUESTIONS (CONT.)

On a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate your SQL skills? (This

could be any skill that is listed on the job description)

Recall a time when your manager or supervisor was unavailable

when a problem arose. What was the nature of the problem? How
did you handle that situation? What happened as a result?

What was your most significant accomplishment in your previous

role? How did you achieve this? What was the impact?

Can you tell me about a complex problem you have had to solve
recently? How did you go about solving it?

What skills have you acquired in your current/past positions that

make you the right candidate for this job?

What analytical / Excel modeling / Salesforce.com / Tableau

experience do you have?

Tell me about a time that you had a deal with a challenging business
partner. Explain the situation and what you did?

What are some of the things you dislike about your current role?
(Read this article for how to answer)

If you were to describe Sales in a sentence or two, how would you

describe it?

There are many metrics we can use to measure the success of our
Sales Process Analyst team members, what would you think is a
good metric?
COMMON INTERVIEW
ANSWERS

Tell me about a time you worked with a difficult team member.

Student:

S: A time that I worked with a difficult team member was during my

Business 146 Entrepreneurship class. In this class, I had 5 team
members, and we had to work on a project where we developed our
own idea and presented it in class. Everyone was given a part of the
project to focus on; however, there was one difficult team member who
would complain regarding their responsibilities and part of the project.

T: How was I going to work with these difficult team members to make
sure we did well on the project?

A: What I did was meet with the team members 1 on 1 to discuss why
they weren’t fulfilling their part of the project. I found out that the team
member wasn’t passionate about the part of the project they were
working on; rather, they wanted to work on analyzing the financial
statements for scaling our idea. Thus, I collaborated with the team
members to give them redefined priorities based on analyzing finance
and forecasting our potential revenues.

R: What resulted from this was the team member was able to complete
their portion of the project and exceed expectations; we presented the
idea to the class and received an A in the class!

E
R TH
E FO OD
H ER ETH
E E R M
S A
ST
COMMON INTERVIEW
ANSWERS

Tell me about a time you worked with a difficult team member.

Early Career:

S: A time that I worked with a difficult team member was when I was
an Operations Analyst at Google, I was working on two new
implementations: One for an entirely new background check process
(Evident) and an updated background check process (Pinkerton 2.0).
We rolled out Evident to our sales teams; however, one team member
had conflicting views on rolling out Pinkerton 2.0 due to the timeframe,
implementation of evident, and bugs.

T: How was I going to work with the conflicting team member to make
a decision on what we should do?

A: What I did was work with the team member on what their concerns
were regarding the implementation. I got the feedback regarding the
pros and cons of Pinkerton 2.0 from the team members and understood
their perspective; they felt the project could not be completed on time
since we didn’t have enough analysts working on the implementations.
We then started to focus on creating a process flow to receive feedback
from our teams in a timely manner to present to senior management.

R: What resulted from this was we compromised/came to a consensus

and instead of delaying the Pinkerton 2.0, we were able to launch in a
week's span; we received 100% positive feedback from the Evident
rollout from our managers.
E
R TH
E FO OD
H ER ETH
E E R M
S A
ST
COMMON INTERVIEW
ANSWERS

Tell me about a time you worked with a difficult team member.

Professional

S: A time that I worked with a difficult team member was when I was
managing a team at Cisco. At Cisco, I was managing 5 employees for
our sales teams where we had KPIs of reaching $100k revenues for
each account executive. However, there was one account executive that
was struggling and wasn’t listening to the advice of their peers.

T: How was I going to work with the struggling account executive to

get them back on track?

A: What I did was meet with the account executive 1-on-1 to discuss
what struggles they were going through to reach their goals; we
realized that the process they were following was fairly different from
the other successful employees, so we adapted the strategies and had
them shadow other account executives for a week. The struggling
employee was then able to learn more about how to make their cold-
calls more successful.

R: What resulted from this was we were able to get the account
executive to exceed expectations by 30%, and they were motivated to
help future account executives be successful in their roles.

E
R TH
E FO OD
H ER ETH
E E R M
S A
ST
QUESTIONS TO ASK AT
THE END

When asked, "Do you have any questions for me?"

Never ask about salary, location, if you can work from home, or
benefits - all of these are great questions once you have an offer in
writing. You want to show you are really interested in the role in an
extremely positive light. You will want to ask 2 or a max of 3
questions from this list (a lot of these are very similar, so choose
wisely - don't ask the same type of question two times in a row).

Thinking about people who have held this role in the past, that
exceeded your expectations, what were some of the reasons they
were successful?

What personal qualities do the teammates you value most possess?

I want to stress that I really want THIS role, but I'm curious where
some people that excelled in this role in the past are now?

What is the typical promotion path for someone that is a high

performer in this role?

What attributes do you think a successful candidate for this role will
possess?

What do you love about your role?

QUESTIONS TO ASK AT
THE END

I think I have a good understanding of this role, but can you describe
a typical day at work for the successful candidate in this role.

What is the culture like at LinkedIn? (use with caution, there are
more impressive questions to ask on this list)

What is your next career move or what are you working towards?

You've been at LinkedIn x years (research their profile), what is it

about LinkedIn that you enjoy so much?

What are some of the challenges you think I may have in this role?
(use with caution as this is a negative question)

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