重磅干货－顶级咨询公司资深合伙人解析面试（下）

Question 4:

In behavioral assessment, what kind of questions wouldinterviewers ask? any special tips you would like to share in this part?

Behavioral assessment isaimed at assessing personal attributes by asking behavioral questions. Depending on what's most importantattributes for the company, you may expect questions like: "can you giveme an example of when you faced aconflict/needed to work as a team/had to lead a team/had to be creative/facedwith an ethical challenge…" The purpose of such questions are toassess if your personal attributes are alignedwith the company requirements, in terms of conflict resolution, team work, leadership, creativity, ethics etc. etc.

Part of training forassessors is to ask follow upquestions in specific details, so that the assessor is able to properlyevaluate if the candidate's examples were true stories or simply a made-up one.Follow up detailed questions can be something like: "why did it happen? when did it exactly happen? Who were involved?How long did it take? What was your thought process at that moment?"

So the single most importanttip is to prepare many of your littlestories, particularly around: working in teams, creativity, and ethics;stories that can demonstrate your leadership, teamwork, conflict resolution,out-of-box thinking, working ethics and professionalism, etc. 

Typical structure of suchstory can be: situation (context of what happened) -> complication (issues that required certain attributes to help resolve) -> solution (how you stepped up)and -> conclusion (how didthis story tell about your attribute.

Question 5: What are stress questions?(40 sec)

Stress questions do not comeout very frequently, but for some companies or positions that are highpressure, the interviewer might want to add some stress test to assess thecandidate's response under pressure. 

Most of the times, if youencounter some sudden changes duringthe interview, either in the form of the same interviewer changing the tone and attitude or a swap of aninterviewer with a significantly more intense approach,congratulations! You have been doing well in the previous interview and nowentering the final stage of a stress test.

Three typical examples ofstress interview questions:

1.        Direct (sometimes even confrontational) challenge ofassumptions or logical fallacies – "Excuse me, your assumption is simplywrong, in reality it never works in the way you mentioned …"; "SorryMr. so and so, your logic doesn’t make sense to me at all. Why do you think thisway?"

Maintain calm and poised …"Mr. Interviewers, thanks for the feedback! Let's review the logictogether. Can you explain a bit more about why the assumption never works? Or,if the assumption doesn’t hold, based on your experience, what will be a validassumption? Can you share a bit more about where you saw the logicalflaws?" – putting a littlepositive pressure back on the challenger, and framing it as a joint problem solving exercise

2.        Asking to exhaust the impossible – "so, you haveconsidered impact of population, affordability, weather, what else? …. Whatelse? What else? …" The interviewer may not know if there is any otheranswers but simply try to push the candidate to the extreme of his/her thinkingprocess.

Maintain confident andcollaborative … "I believe we have touched on most of the important onesso far. are there any other important dimensions that we should explorefurther?

3.        Pretending the candidate has failed the interview –"Sorry Mr. so and so, unfortunately for this year, we have only a limitednumber of slots but a group of really high caliber candidates and you may notbe at the top of the crowd. What will be your plan if you failed to pass theinterview?"

Be positive and resilient …"Thanks Mr. Interviewer! I am glad the company/position has attracted sucha great group of people. This just reconfirmed my choice of pursuing thisopportunity and I am very proud to be a part of this group. I understand thecandidates are all very strong, but I believe my unique strengths are …(reiterate your differentiators)." If asked further about the plan,"I would love to seek some specific feedbacks so that I can continuouslyimprove myself. Keeping contact, so that we may have future opportunities tocome together." 

Under such situations, thecandidate should know that it is a part of a normal interview process and infact if you have not done well in the earlier parts of the interview, you will probablynot have been asked such stress questions.

So, you are expected tomaintain calm and positively responsive, as the interviewer will be observingyour ability to think clearly and logically while maintaining your behavioralresponse under pressure.