FIT INTERVIEW EXAMPLE WITH FORMER MCKINSEY INTERVIEWER

hi i'm argeron los i'm the founder of case coach i'm a former interviewer with mckinsey in this video i will be interviewed by rob another making the alumnus we'll be going through a fit interview similar to what you'll experience at bain bcg or many other top employers rob will interrupt me from time to time to share his feedback let's get started thanks for coming down thank you how was your trip down here did you have a long way to travel or quite close no no i just leave a permanent all right perfect so look we're going to cover a case but before we get on to that i wanted to just talk a bit about your background your career aspirations as well could we start with you just telling me a bit more about yourself and giving me a quick overview of your background sounds good um do you want one mikey yeah absolutely yeah um so basically i'm uh i'm a computer engineer by training but at the moment i'm a first year mba student at columbia business school i have six years work experience first two years as an entrepreneur in technology uh and the last four years prior to business school uh in venture capital all of this in paris right um so really if you if you see the threat it's i'm someone with a strong interest in technology that's why i studied computer engineering but also a passion for business and that's what led me to start my own companies and then right be at business school and in venture capital so there are a few things which work particularly well in this opening first the candidate does a great job of not just describing what he's done but what kind of person he is he mentions that he's got an interest in business and also in technology and these comments provide a platform for much of the conversation that follows second he's thoughtful in selecting topics to mention he flags that he was an entrepreneur he talks about his journey into the nba and these provide talking points that give an opportunity for the interviewer to ask more to probe and to jump in and learn more about the candidate himself lastly it's concise you'll notice he's done all of this in less than 30 seconds while it's tempting to spend a long time describing your initial background it's better to give a quick view and then let it become a conversation interesting and i can see i think from your first company it looks like you started that while you were at university yeah how did you go about that it must have been quite a challenge yes absolutely that was uh uh that was interesting let's say i didn't go too many classes uh that year uh but i managed to to do well and and graduate with instinction um and uh i actually enrolled a few of my classmates to start up the initial tech team of uh of the startup and we managed to deliver uh a full e-commerce website within two months which you know at the time with the technologies available was uh was very short right interesting and then i see obviously you've continued in the technology sector could you tell me a bit more about your time in venture capital yeah so the story was um i started my own uh business and i realized that 22 year old that i had a lot to learn about running a business and uh initially i said okay well when we sold it i'm gonna go to a much more established tech firm so john viafon which was a silicon valley funded startup i was the only employee in europe that season executive so it was a great opportunity for me to learn from a more established firm and as i was doing that i was in touch with our venture capitalist and i realized that another way to really learn about business uh was to become a venture capitalist because you get to meet uh many entrepreneurs learn about many different business models um and i joined pig capital uh spent four years there uh and on top of working on investment like any other venture capital associate uh i ended up leading fundraising for our firm which was very challenging at the time because of the economic crisis right so this was after the dot-com bubble burst as it were absolutely and later on uh uh our friends had lost like 40 on average and i was like knocking on the doors of potential investment investors to get more money uh and and it worked uh so it was a great experience you'll notice in the section you just saw that the candidate did an excellent job of suggesting positive things about himself without seeming boastful or arrogant in any way he does this simply by stating the facts and stating them almost in passing he achieved the distinction in his course while he was running a business he managed to raise funds for his venture capital firm despite there being an economic crisis at the time but he states them in a fairly passing way and it works very effectively he also continues the arc of his career he mentions his growing interest in business how this led to vc and you'll notice in the next section how this leads to his career decisions now wonderful good and what is it that draws you to consulting at this stage in your career i mean you've had a lot of interesting experiences so far i'm curious where consulting plays around yeah absolutely well you know as you can tell i'm really interested in in businesses right and uh i started mine then went to another one to learn more about business and i've now spent six years on small businesses and i really want to learn how bigger business operate i've seen a lot of entrepreneur do really well when they're 10 20 30 employees i don't have the experience of seeing what happens when you have 10 000 thousand hundred thousand um so i think consulting would be uh the perfect place to learn about all this um and particularly uh i think in mckinsey in boston because uh you have a uh as far as i understand quite a strong portfolio of tech clients which you know is a sector that i'm really uh passionate about notice what the candidate has done here in actual fact his career transition might not seem entirely natural going from entrepreneurship and technology and venture capital to management consulting is not a classic career path however because of the setup of the interview earlier on where the candidates described his growing interest in business and how this motivates him and how he's seen this at a certain scale but wants to see it at a larger scale the transition actually comes across as very natural notice also how he's done his research he mentioned something specific about the firm and even the office that he's interviewing with this makes his response about his interest in the firm much more credible yeah absolutely we we do work in the space and and i think it would be a natural fit from that perspective good okay um i've got a couple of questions about specific experiences in your career and and maybe outside of it as well so obviously with the work that we do we often have to work with clients over whom we don't have formal control but with whom we have to make an impact and i'm wondering if there's a time in your career or from outside your career where you've managed to influence someone to persuade them to change their mindset or their behavior when you were not in a position of authority over them sure um i mean i guess a good example was uh when i was raising funds when you were knocking on the doors absolutely um so i said you know we we had raised about 100 million uh euros and and the performance was pretty bad so i was i was looking for and that was not necessarily our fault we the timing of our fundraising was really bad so uh we had to uh like every other investors uh take a pretty important losses uh but anyway uh i identified uh a potential investor um that my boss didn't really think we could uh we could um convince we didn't have any relationship with that company and that person and well i managed to uh first you know get a foot through the door and uh then through a very long process uh uh convince them uh to give us uh 40 million euros uh to invest uh which you know for the firm was a big deal because uh at the time where it was really difficult to raise fund it was amazing to be able to get 40 more million to manage and over eight years you know that that was really significant and how did you go about managing to get to a position where you could do that because it sounds like you were coming into this quite cold there weren't someone that the firm had a relationship with how did you go about that yeah i mean the first thing was to uh uh you know i've identified a target to research uh and i i talked about it with the managing partner my boss and he said don't don't spend your time on these people um you know i've worked with them in the past it's not going to work out and i realized there was some history there and but i was convinced there was something to do because every year they were looking for a new fund manager and i thought we were well equipped to do that job and so i went back and said do you mind if i work on this on the side and you say sure you know if it doesn't affect the rest of your work i'm happy for you to do this right so the first challenge was to get an appointment with the person um and after that uh to manage to go into that person how did you get the appointment out of interest well you know i was trying to call the assistant she didn't really want to book us uh so i finally called after hours basically managed to get through to the person directly he was really a bit annoyed that i was calling and he said well if you want to appoint me to speak with my assistant so there i could go back to the assistant and say hey you know he asked me to go to you to get the appointment so please book it okay once you had your foot in the door as it were what were the major things you found effective in being able to convince this particular investor to get more involved well the first thing was to uh familiarize ourselves to each other it was uh when we started the meeting uh the first meeting he was a bit upset it was like where are we meeting you know i don't know you guys et cetera um but i managed to kind of uh bring with me uh uh some example of investment that we have we had done uh with other investors that he knew so you know we were in the same deals sometimes right um so that was one i spoke before with people who knew him so i tried to understand how i was like you know et cetera and he was a very data driven person a very is an accountant by training uh so i i brought quite a few numbers to show our our work you know after that first uh conversation i was very young so i brought the the the president of the firm to the meeting uh to have a bit of gray hair and uh and you know that i think gave uh uh in a sense that okay we're a credible player uh we know people that he knows and trust uh you know at least we should be talking right uh so i think that was the point where okay we were being considered and he said okay fine you know when we open up uh this for bid uh i'll invite you guys to to make a proposal interesting and then by the sounds of it it ended up working out they got involved well yeah absolutely so i took a lot of of work obviously i kept sending them uh press clippings of our investments and gaining their trust and i i uh managed to arrange like a an in-person meeting with him like at the last minute between christmas and new year so i i got to meet him when he was alone at the office and he he's talked a lot about what were their needs what they were struggling with what they were worried about and i basically spent you know two months preparing a very detailed proposal addressing every possible uh concerns uh really showing that we had the strengths that he was looking for you know it ended up being like a 60 pages uh documents proposal that you know made sure that for from his perspective any question that he would be asked because he chose us uh he had the answer right um and i i know that you know the other firms that competed with us you know they sent a three-page letter uh interesting without the same type of facts so basically after that he invited us to meet the ceo of the bank uh that's where for the first time my boss the ceo uh came and and after that meeting we we got the deal good stuff well i guess persistence pays off yes in that case it does not always not always good this is a strong influence story and there are a couple of things the candidate does particularly well first notice how he opens the story he doesn't have a very long preamble instead in a short space of time he describes the headline of where he's going that he managed to convince an investor his boss thought was a lost course this is a good characteristic in this part of the interview and it tells the interviewer where you're going you immediately signpost the arc of the story and you can make it a conversation from there also notice when we get into the details how effective his communication of the influence techniques is first there are a range of influence techniques he's describing he influences the stakeholder partly by finding common points of interest partly by providing details backup and data partly also perhaps by the setting he's managed to interact with this individual in but notice too how he describes what he knows about this individual he's done his research and he uses data and backup because he's understood that this individual is someone who themselves is very analytical and data driven this is a very effective technique if you can root your influence techniques in something you know about that specific individual it will come across as much more compelling okay then uh another experience based question as well so embroidery could you describe a time where you set an ambitious goal and describe how you went about achieving it sure um well i guess we can come back to uh the the company i started when i was a student yeah it'd be great to hear more about that um the story was that i met those two entrepreneurs that had no technical background um and of course i was a computer engineer student and i was running uh i was the president of the student consultancy uh in my school which is the biggest in france so i knew about you know web development and and all that those things and they were in an interesting situation because they had investors uh to fund a new concept which is a group buying website right uh at the time was new um so basically the more you buy more people buy the the lower the price of the product i see um and uh they uh the investors were like okay we're happy to find you on the condition that you can have a running website within two months or six weeks or something like that right uh so basically they they came to me that they had contracted and those are firm but there was no progress whatsoever and that was my mission uh while you were studying technically at least and yeah yeah and we work night and day i brought all my friends from uh from school we we worked on on cardboard boxes and what i did is that i i sketched the website what it should look like every page put them on the wall in the in the room of the apartment where we're working and everybody had a caller me and my other friends who were all developing the website and the idea was we would scratch uh our inscriptory one of the page with our color when we when we coded that page and it was ready to go and that created a bit of a sense of of competition uh and and also you know gave everybody a vision of the whole thing and of the progress um and we made it absolutely made it we were the first uh to market with a you know one page in the main french newspaper uh you know we were on national tv that evening you know uh uh you know so it was it was a real like fun experience with my friends which was really great uh and uh yeah and we raised the money and and we sold the business uh nine months later with 35 people fantastic what were the major things you learned from that experience i mean it sounds like a lot of fun and certainly you managed to get a lot of momentum yeah so i think what's interesting is if you look at what we were doing we sold it but really the business didn't make money right but we have we had a few uh categories of products that worked uh we were selling tech products for some reason that worked really well right uh low margin but worked really well uh we were selling uh coupons that worked really well as well um and but ninety percent of our categories didn't work we're selling genes and loan moners and whatnot right uh and you know i think nobody really realized that there were a few things we were sitting on that had huge potential you know the coupon business became groupon yes uh you know like there were a number of websites that like newegg and others that then started selling uh pure tech products and we i think we what i learned is that you really need when you run a business you really need to observe at the micro level what are the things positive that are happening and try to build them up and discard what's not working and i think we didn't do that enough yeah no that's interesting i guess even if you look at the average and it's not so promising within that there's often categories of interest huge huge spikes one way or the other this is a shorter discussion with the previous experience story but notice how effective it is in communicating drive persistence and proactiveness in the candidate this is for a couple of reasons on the one hand it's the actions he describes how he really wanted to make this happen despite having a course to do alongside it how he then went and found his friends and got them involved how he made a system to try and complete the website in a short space of time on the other hand though it's also about the tone and style you can really see how he's excited when he recalls these facts and what he's done how he was quite inspired at the time and very motivated and so it's both the content of what he's talking about and the way he's talking about it that makes this come across as a story that's very effective looking at this fit interview overall it's a very strong one i'd say this is a very strong hire based on this performance walking through the overall assessment sheet i really score this candidate in the following way when it comes to rapport building it's definitely above the bar he makes this conversation all throughout he shows confidence and shows poise this works well and puts him in good stead for the interview his performance track record is certainly also above the bar too here he mentions a couple of strong characteristics about himself from his entrepreneurship experience to his academic experience you can see the candidate's a high performer third when it comes to his motivation i'd say the candidate's really distinctive in the top 10 percent of candidates he's done a fantastic job in telling us a bit about what motivates him what interests him and describing the arc of his career right the way through from his studies until where he is now in a way that makes that make sense then finally when it comes to transferable abilities i'd say it's a distinctive performance too again in the top 10 of candidates and in particular he displays fantastic evidence of drive and well-developed influence skills beyond the general scoring there are a few comments to take away from this fifth interview first don't feel the need to talk for too long you'll notice that the candidate is extremely concise he gives short summaries either of his background or of his experience stories which he then turns into a discussion this is a good way to go better to proceed in that direction than to launch into a three-minute story about yourself and maybe lose your interview second notice how each of the sections connect quite neatly together there's a very clear arc in this candidate's story he describes everything from his academic career until now in a way where you can see consistent interests while you don't have to do this it makes your overall motivation much more compelling if you can do it lastly notice how he structured his experience stories the candidate uses quite a simple structure that we've listed in the materials as well he starts with a brief situation he then describes a complication what made this situation difficult or tricky to deal with at the time then he describes actions and invests almost all his time in describing those actions what he did and why he did it and then lastly he described some tangible and specific impact this simple structure with the focus very much on the actions and what you did is a good approach to follow thank you for watching till the end if you found the video helpful don't forget to give it a thumbs up to watch more fit interviews like this join our interview prep course on casecoach.com in the meantime if you'd like to get more free videos and prep material just follow the link below to 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Channel: CaseCoach

Views: 144,832

Rating: 4.9407406 out of 5

Keywords: consulting, fit interview, case study, mckinsey interview, bcg interview, bain interview, management consulting, CV, PEI interview, casecoach, consultancy, mckinsey, bain, bcg, mbb, consulting interview, associate, vocaprep, preplounge, victor cheng, management consuling prep, rocketblocks, questions, answers, tips, preparation, presentation, introduce, interview questions, interview tips, consulting interview questions, prep, fit interview consulting, talk through your cv

Id: _vTVLXylHg0

Length: 19min 39sec (1179 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 26 2019