Wonsulting Interview Prep Doc: How To Prep For The Hiring Manager

5 Most Common Interview Questions

How To Prepare For A Group Interview

How To Use STAR Method In Interviews

What this doc consists of: Interview Prep Tips from a Hiring Manager at LinkedIn

Reminder: Hiring managers are people; their goal is to try to fill a need on their team.

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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):

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 Common Interview Questions (Example: LinkedIn)
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?

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?

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

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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?

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?

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Do you know what SaaS stands for?

What are some of the things you dislike about your current role? (Read this article for
how to answer: https://www.myperfectresume.com/how-to/interview-tips/what-did-you-
like-least-about-your-last-job/)

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:

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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!

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.

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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.

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 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?

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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