HBS interviews: B-Schooled episode 41

[MUSIC] Welcome to Be Schooled, a podcast by Stacey Blackman Consulting. Bringing you tips, advice, and insight into all aspects of the MBA admissions process and business school experience. And now, here's your host, writer, author, and Harvard MBA, who's been an MBA admissions consultant for over a decade, Erica Olson. Hi there, everyone. So, depending on when you're listening to this, HBS interview invitations either are about to come out today at noon eastern time or already did. So, I figured this was the perfect episode to cover Harvard's very unique type of MBA interview. If you end up being one of the lucky ones who got an invitation, congratulations, sincerely. That is truly a feat to be celebrated in and of itself. But after your celebration and once you have your interview date secured, you should plan to get serious about preparing whenever you can find time during the few weeks leading up to the big day. Each round on top of the applicants that we've been working with at Stacey Blackman Consulting for months who get the coveted email invite from HBS. We also work with applicants who can contact us solely to do mock HBS interviews. I personally do dozens of these practice runs with MBA candidates every round. And if there was ever an MBA interview that I really do think it's worth it to get professional help with, it is the HBS interview. So, in this episode, it's going to become clear why I think that, but I'll also, of course, share all of the Stacey Blackman Consulting teams, collective thoughts, and advice so that you're as prepared as it's possible to be on your own as well. So, the biggest difference between HBS interviews and almost all other MBA programs interviews is that the HBS interview is going to be totally customized for you. There aren't going to be the typical questions that I covered with my colleague Beth in episodes 26 and 28. It's going to be very unlikely that you will walk them through your resume, for example, or have to respond to a typical MBA behavioral question that starts out with, "Tell me about a time when." Instead, your interviewer will know your application inside and out already. They will have made many notes on it and have pulled together a list of questions for you based on their detailed reading of your materials. And the person interviewing you isn't going to be an alum or it isn't going to be a second year student like at some programs. It will either be a member of the Corps or HBS admissions committee, or someone that the HBS adcom team has contracted with and likely has worked with for years and years. So, what I mean is there are specific individuals that HBS is partnered with to conduct interviews in specific regions, say like the Bay Area or parts of Asia, who they just trust implicitly and whose names we see year after year when our clients write their post interview reflections or thank you emails. And I mean, all schools do this too, but when you think about it, HBS really has no choice but to have strategic partners that they use as interviewers. I mean, each interviewer needs to read, review each interviewer's materials in depth and create a list of personalized questions for them. So, it's a really time intensive process. Now, in a normal year, when schools would conduct in-person interviews, HBS would usually also have, they'd have a main interviewer and then they'd also have an observer or a note taker, which, you know, sometimes is a little unnerving for people when there's a person in the room was just like scribbling comments the entire time. And you know, it didn't seem though like a second person was involved this past round. So, round one of this past application cycle when interviews were conducted over Skype, none of the applicants that I worked with had reported having an observer on Skype with them. That doesn't mean there wasn't, but, you know, just due to COVID, I think they might have had to change their format a little bit. But either way, whether there's an observer or not, it's definitely a little bit more intimidating knowing that it is an admissions committee member or kind of an ad-com member by proxy, if you will, who will be speaking with you. Interviews with local alums for other schools tend to be a little more laid back and you make it the sense that that alarm your match with is actually kind of rooting for you and excited for you. And with second year students, you know, those people would likely be closer to you in age and just have common interests and be able to remember when they were in your position. You might even find that you would have had like friends in common if you know certain current students in the program. That's actually happened with a lot of the applicants I worked with and has helped put them at ease. But again, HBS is going to be a little more formal than that. Before I go any further, I actually want to remind people, especially newer listeners, that are most popular episode that we've ever done of B-Schools was our second one, in which a past client of mine, Nick, described his interview experiences at both HBS and Stanford GSB. So he was one of the rare unicorns that got interviews at both. So episode number two is one of our longer ones. But I think it's the most popular one for a reason. So definitely give that one a listen if you haven't already and if you find yourself in the position of having a HBS interview invite. Okay, so let's get back to the fact that HBS interviews are going to be customized for each applicant who gets an invite. So how in the world should you go about preparing? The good news is that they really shouldn't be asking you about anything you don't know. The most obvious place to start in preparation is to reread your materials with fresh eyes. And if you're not working with an admissions consultant who can kind of like objectively go through your materials and come up with some likely ways that the HBS interview should go, you need to find a friend that you can practice with who will read everything you submitted and compile a list of questions about anything that wasn't totally clear that the interviewer might want to dig deeper on with regard to all of your major life decisions and career moves to date. So, you know, while many people would describe the HBS interview as intense, it's not intense because they're trying to trick you. So just keep that in mind. You know, back in my day there was a serenite live skit about TV journalist Barbara Walters asking people like really out their questions and one of them was, "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?" And if it came this running joke and apparently she really did ask actress Catherine Hepburn that, but I can assure you, like HBS is going to be pulling stuff like that out on you, okay? So it's not, it's not going to be strange questions. It's just a bit intense because they're going to push you to kind of stake your position on something and then defend that position. There's going to be follow up questions. There might be a little bit more pushback or digging than you might have experienced in other interviews. They want to see how your mind works, how you make decisions. And they're essentially trying to figure out what you would be like in a class debate. So are you going to be the type of student who would pipe up during a case discussion and say that the protagonist should lay off 20% of his staff, but then not be able to give any proof as to why such a move would make sense versus cutting costs in another way. Or are you going to have a well laid out argument that perhaps encompasses something you learned from your career as well as other things that you knew about the protagonist's industry or strategic options? So I mean, they're not going to have you read a case during the interview in the pretend like you're in class, but they still need to find a way to really get the sense, a good sense for the type of student you'd be. And so they do this by zeroing in decisions that you've made in your life today, kind of digging deep into why you made and how you thought through those decisions. And they also do this by looking for signs of intellectual curiosity across all phases of your life, like anything in your materials is fair game. This might be the place where I should mention that aside from the fact that HBS interviews are unique and that they're usually pretty customized for each applicant. Like I said before, I would say another major difference is that HBS interviews often try to get at your opinion on something. And there's almost always some sort of forward thinking aspect of the discussion. So to think about another way, you know, other MBA programs are usually going to ask you to talk about experiences you've already had and achievements you've already made. And there definitely will be some of that with HBS. But there's also likely going to be like a thought provoking discussion about some topic that forces you to share an opinion and kind of back it up. So let's talk about some of the types of questions that they could ask that could start getting them the insight on you that they're looking for. And I should make it clear here if it wasn't clear earlier that the types of questions are going to ask are going to be determined by the information you and your recommendation letters like supplied them with in your materials. Meaning if you spent a good chunk of writing your essay about why you made a drastic career switch a year or two ago, they might not feel the need to rehash all of that decision if you haven't really left many stones, you know, for them to turn over with that one. But they may ask why you originally joined that company you worked at in the first place if you hadn't made that clear. They may ask Which you learned from the experience and what you've kind of taken with it with you from that that company to the next. They might ask you to compare and contrast the cultures of the two companies you worked for. So in asking questions like these, they're trying to see if you honestly even thought about this stuff that much, like have you thought about why you spent your time, the way you did at college, at work, and in the extracurriculars, like if you thought about it in a deeper way, or did you just kind of go about doing these things like checking off boxes. On that note, let's say that you wrote your essay about all the various work you've done and leadership positions you've held with a certain nonprofit. But nowhere in your essay did you ever reveal why you chose that particular nonprofit out of like all the nonprofits you could have devoted your time and energy to. So that would be a question that they'd likely ask you on top of asking you for your opinion of like something else that the nonprofit should be doing to raise awareness for its cause, or if you think there's another angle they haven't explored yet for fundraising. So think of it like they're trying to fill in blanks. They're trying to fill in like the wise of your life, but beyond that, they're wanting to see how you think about the world around you. Have you ever paused to think about why your company is a market leader, or why that headline-making product that you worked on ended up failing? Have you considered who or what might be the biggest threat to the startup that you founded? HBS is really, I guess, just looking for students who don't have blinders on and aren't just like laser-focused on their day-to-day lives, but rather have thought extensively about how businesses and organizations and leaders work, about why some succeed, and why some fail, and how some can survive and changing times like these times. They're looking for people who are curious about the world, passionate about something, and who others would be drawn to, and would want to learn from and be able to learn from in class. So in that note, OK, so here's an example. Let's say that you're really passionate about a certain emerging technology, and you wrote part of your essay about it, and you stated that your post-MBA career goal was to work for a company that's in this technology space. So you can bet they're going to have questions for you around the potential benefits of this technology, the potential downfalls of the technology, things that might go wrong, other areas in which it could be applied, who the market leaders currently are, so on and so forth. You know, all the things that you would actually probably talk about in a case discussion about a company are the kinds of questions that are fair game. Or let's say you've worked in an industry that has some fairly well-known issues that are associated with it. So, for example, I've consulted many applicants who were involved in various aspects of the education sector, and they've received questions where they kind of had to debate things about how they, you know, where they stand on charter schools, or funding for public versus private schools. Or, you know, they had to give an opinion on if ed tech firms were really making education more accessible to disadvantaged youth. OK, so perhaps now you understand what I was talking about when I said that they'll expect you to have opinions and to be able to defend those opinions and to be able to be forward-looking about the ways various companies or industries or products or technologies might exist or change or have to adapt in the future. So, back to how you can prepare for this type of interview. So, once you've reviewed your materials again and have practiced speaking to why you made the various decisions you've made in your life and career and kind of have all those bases covered, then start thinking about the realm of other topics you could be asked about. You know, they're not going to throw some random question that you about some industry or company has nothing to do with any of your materials. So, you can at least start narrowing things down that way. You know, start honing down the realm of topics to pretty much your current industry, your future industry. If you stated kind of that you want to pivot, you know, in your future career goals. And then really any other topic that you may have raised in your essays, that could be, you know, from your career or something, you know, more personal, no matter what it is, you're going to want to kind of know the players in that field or industry or in that topic. You'll want to think about why companies in that area have succeeded or failed, what it's going to take to be competitive going forward. I just remembered I actually had a lot of clients in round one who were asked about how COVID affected their companies or their industries or a nonprofit that they volunteered for. So, you know, that's clearly one to prepare for. And you know, think about if there's any major news coming out of your company or industry lately, especially if it's controversial, be prepared to have a position on it. Example of that, a few of the applicants I worked with in the past were employed by a large, very no well-known tech firm that was in the hot seat over its use of customer data. And there were several articles on it at the time. So, they kind of prepared to address that. If asked, I had one past client who was in HR at another big tech firm that had articles out around the time about, like, basically, it was a brutal company culture and they were working in people of the bone and whatever, so of course, they're being in HR. You know, that wasn't anything she wrote about, but just the fact she was at that company in HR, they absolutely did ask her what she thought about those articles. Like, what could a company do better? Or, you know, kind of like a defense of the company. So, I know that you might be listening to this and be like, oh, like, I know it seems like a lot. And I'm not saying that you need to scour news headlines or do, like, deep research into your industry or a certain technology or something. But what I am saying to be blunt is that the kind of candidate HBS is looking for will likely already be able to easily talk about all that stuff and share opinions on any question or topic that's thrown their way if it's something in the realm of what they covered in their materials. But, you know, you got to this point in this process, which is extraordinary and so competitive because on paper, they are thinking that you might have what it takes to be an asset to their class. So, like, feel good about that and have confidence in yourself. And don't let this, you know, kind of overwhelm you or freak you out. And most importantly, and I really do mean this and I know it's cliche, but be yourself. And I've said this in many other episodes, but beyond being really, really, really turned off by arrogance and cockiness, the HBS admissions committee is not looking for any certain personality type or stereotype of what they think is like the ideal HBS student. They really just want you to be yourself. That means some shy people are going to get in and some really excitable fast and loud talkers are going to get in and some more reserved personalities are going to get in and some really straightforward, no nonsense people are going to get in. And the one way to make the interview easier on yourself is to not try and act like somebody else on top of it, or on top of everything else, right? So just truly be yourself. All right, there's a few last things I want to cover. One is that if you have any sort of fun or unusual fact or like trivia or something like that in your materials, a lot of people have this kind of in the final line on their resume under the personal section or something, be prepared to be asked about it. Usually as an icebreaker, sometimes as a final question, I personally noticed out of just the candidates that I worked with in Round One that they didn't seem to be doing this. And I had a theory that maybe with just the switch over to Skype for everyone, they were having to manage their time a little bit differently in the interview. But normally within person interviews where they're kind of like walking the person back out, that's when they would bring up something that's kind of funny or interesting from their resume or materials. So for example, one of my clients had a line about being a Lego master builder in the personal section of a resume. And so on the way out, they had asked her what her most challenging Lego build ever was. Somebody else had on the resume that they were contestant on a popular singing competition a few years back. And so they were asked about that and what the judges were like with the song they sang, just stuff like that. And of course, if you've specifically indicated in your materials that you're a film ball for a really into a certain type of art or a certain genre of music, you should absolutely be prepared to give a recommendation if you're an interviewer asked for it and then kind of say why, like defend your recommendation. Another thing you should be prepared for at the end of the interview is for them to ask, if there's anything else that you wish they would have asked you. This one is obviously a little bit hard to prepare because you don't know the way you can't plan like the way the conversation will have gone to that point and can't really anticipate that. But you definitely don't wanna be like, nope, I'm good. You know, so you wanna have something to say. And so the way to prepare for that is to have a few, relatively short responses that you can pull from depending on what had happened up until that point. Have them in the back of your mind. You don't want to launch into some new like 10 minute speech about something you've never touched upon before, but you still wanna have something, substantial to say. And then finally, just a few words about the HBS post interview reflection, which is like an informal essay that you need to submit within 24 hours of your interview. They afterwards, they don't like these responses to feel too structured or prepared or formal. So you really should not try to write any of that out in advance, see how your interview goes. And if it goes well, then you should not feel the need to go on and on to them in the reflection. Like, don't let some dragging and page-long response to them overpower that great last impression that they have of you from your discussion. OK, so if it went well, you'll want to thank them for their time. You'll want to be sure that you actually answer the reflection question, which for the last few years has been, how well did we get to know you? And then again, if it went well, you can summarize the discussion at a few details so they know you wrote it afterwards. Tom, what you enjoyed about the process or how excited you are about the opportunity. And that's it. But if you feel like you stumbled over some responses, again, don't freak out about that. I've worked with many applicants who didn't feel like they did their best or who were kicking themselves because they thought of great things that they could have or should have said like 15 minutes after the interview ended and those people were still admitted. So if you wish that you had a do-over on a few responses, that's OK. Like, definitely use the reflection to clarify something you said or add in another example or add in another detail that you didn't think of on the fly. But again, I would still caution you not to go overboard with it. HBS has always valued succinct communication. So if you are writing your reflection and it's longer than a page, I would highly, highly recommend that you find a way to cut it down and just be more succinct. So I want to wrap up by saying that when I do HBS interview preparation with applicants, a lot of them tell me, afterward, after they've had their real interview, that it wasn't as intense or hardcore as they had expected. And it's kind of almost like I get this sense, they're accusing me of freaking them out for nothing or something like that. But when that happens, when somebody says that to me, that they felt like it was a conversation or, oh, I was so scared and you made me so scared, you made me so thought it was going to be so intense. And then they didn't feel that way. I'm actually very honored. And I feel like I've done my job because that means they were prepared. They were able to have an engaging conversation. They were at the top of their game. And they might not have been. If they hadn't been, it's so thoroughly prepared to run through the types of questions that HBS usually asks. And so I hope, my hope in doing this episode is that this is the way you feel coming out of your HBS interview as well, that it was actually just a really enjoyable conversation with a really smart person. So I'm going to end with a quote today that goes back to what I was saying about just being confident and what got you to this point and not trying to act like whatever you think the ideal HBS candidate is. This quote comes from the late great Wizard of Oz star, Judy Garland, who said, always be a first-rate version of yourself instead of a second-rate version of someone else. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of B-Schooled from Stacey Blackman Consulting. If there's ever something you'd like us to cover, please email us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. We'd also encourage you to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode. And finally, if you're planning to apply to Business School at some point, make sure you've signed up for our weekly Stacey Blackman Consulting newsletter and download our free personal branding guide. Both can be found on staceyBlackman.com under the Hot Topics menu. Thanks, and until next time, be well. (upbeat music)