|
I bombed more interviews than I can remember, mostly when I was a senior chemical engineering major in college looking for a my first job (more than a decade ago). We had numerous companies come to campus to interview. Despite having grades towards the bottom of my class, I got interviews for most, but zero offers. (Well, I did get one offer eventually, at the very end of the spring, after most of peers had already locked up jobs in the fall). In addition to my relatively weak grades, I attribute my failure to a lack of experiences, maturity, and confidence. The STAR interview method was big at the time (maybe it still is) and I had trouble with those. Possibly my peers were more prepared as they typically had relevant internship experience that they could draw on whereas I did not. Some of the questions that I can remember struggling with:
- Give an example of a time you had to change direction on a project due to budget constraints.
- How do you handle ambiguity?
- Give an example of a time you solved a problem using common sense. Eventually I was able to improve my interview performance by compiling every question I could remember or find in books on interviewing, and practicing my responses in the mirror over and over again until the answers came out naturally. I believe my grades were still a limiting factor, however. Several years later I was interviewing for an energy trading position in Baltimore. They setup a call with me for what I thought would be a fairly run of the mill phone screen. Instead, there were two hiring managers on the lines who proceeded to ask me a number of statistical/quant questions that I was unprepared for and had to stumble through while sitting in a park without so much as pen and paper to help me reason through them. At the end of the interview, I asked for their e-mails so I could follow up. After a short pause, they said no, that they would be in touch with me. Of course, I never heard from them. Months later, I bought a book on Wall Street interview questions/answers and the first 2 or 3 were the exact questions, word for word, that I had been asked. |