An Interview is often regarded as a great selection tool across various domains and functionalities. From small schools to huge multinational corporates, all conduct interviews to select candidates who are most suitable for the role and position they are offering.
Therefore, interviews are a very important step for the ones who are looking to get placed within any organization or institution. Professionals working in the fields of Business Management course could make the most out of their available opportunities.
Most common interview questions for beginners
Introduce Yourself – This is the very first and the most common question. The basic idea behind this question is to check the self-awareness of the candidates. However, most of the time candidates are not able to understand the context of the question and start narrating a story regarding their families, friends, life, and so on; often making the answer uninteresting and banal. Therefore, candidates must only talk about the highlights of their past. A good way to go about it would be to prepare an answer in advance.
Strength and weakness – Often candidates are asked to fill out pre-interview forms comprising a strengths and weaknesses column. Here, candidates make a mistake by using adjectives without adequate justification to back their inferences. Also, candidates often use attributes that are counter-intuitive; for example mentioning meticulous as a strength and impatience as a weakness.
Therefore, candidates need to be extremely vigilant of what they are putting out in front of the interviewers and preferably mention only those qualities which are justifiable. Moreover, weaknesses must always be accompanied by a positive plan of action, like how the candidates are trying to mitigate them through their efforts.
Tell us something about yourself that is not on your CV – This is another area where candidates are judged on their self-awareness. Most candidates would usually talk about their hobbies when facing this particular question. However, hobbies and interests are already there in the CV. So candidates should talk about their beliefs and values in this part of the learnings and interests they have more recently acquired. For example, a candidate who mentions reading as a hobby can talk about the ideologies that he developed after reading a new book.
Here, one can also talk about any new interests that one has developed very recently like someone might have never played water polo in their life but they have started following it recently. The key, however, lies in justifying how the new interests have developed and how the candidates are aspiring to take them forward.
These questions are important to get into a Business management course.
Most common interview questions for experienced individuals
In addition to the abstract questions that are being asked to beginners, experienced people are mostly asked very objective questions that can gauge their time as a working professional.
Tell us about a situation where you faced some difficulty and how did you overcome it – Experienced individuals are always valued for the approach to problem-solving they bring to the table. In business management, an experienced person is expected to follow certain steps to get to a solution.
So when a candidate is faced with such a question he/she must focus on the process and not the outcome. For example, if someone says that as a bank manager who faces difficulty in procuring customers for a housing loan, they must talk about the problem statement and how they reached there, was there any research involves in identifying the market potential and what was their action plan when they identified a group of customers to target, etc.
A workplace dilemma you faced – An individual in course of his professional career must have faced a lot of dilemmas, whether it was prioritizing a client over a strategy meeting or office time over family time. There is no standard response for these questions. Rather, the interviewers are more interested to see how the candidate is justifying his/her stance.
Again the bias on part of the interviewer and the company culture plays a massive role as people would usually look for someone who aligns with their way of doing things. Therefore, it would be a good idea for the candidate to do thorough research of the company, its vision, and mission, its employee culture, etc. so that they can give an answer which might not be correct but expected.
Conclusion
So, these are my two cents on some of the most prominent questions that young and veteran business management and business management course aspirants face inside the interview rooms. This list is by no means exhaustive, but I think it gives a fair idea behind the rationale of these questions. Needless to say, a lot also depends upon the competence of the candidates and the level and role for which they are applying. So candidates should plan and be prepared with it.
