The most critical step that transforms your education and experience in management school into a deeply enriching and rewarding one is a job. The first job is extremely critical in shaping your career and you may not want to leave any stone unturned for the same. 

While there will always be curveballs thrown at you in the job interview, preparing for the common ones is a great step towards your dream job. 

We have enlisted 10 interview questions that PGDM student or management students get asked during job interviews. However, the answers to these are not as straight-forward and one must prepare well for it before appearing for an interview. 

Question 1: Please help us to understand you better. 

This is not an easy question to answer. A person has multiple dimensions, skills, and interests and explaining about self can carry you away from the context. You must focus on three key aspects while answering this question: –

1. What’s the job role?
2. What have you learnt in your PGDM or MBA course that makes you well poised to succeed in the role? 
3. How do you subtly connect the two questions above and talk about your characteristics that are invaluable in such a role?

If you can prepare a crisp answer around the above questions, you may be right in context and the interviewer will relate better to your answer. 

Question 2: Why do you want to work with us? Why are you interested in taking up this role?

The interviewers are often looking for someone who truly wants the job and is passionate about it. If you are passionate too, you must connect it with how you have been working towards it during the two-year stint at the PGDM course or management studies course. 

For example: If you are applying for the role of a financial analyst and you have spent the last two years at the N.L. Dalmia Institute of Management Studies and Research (NLDIMSR), you may want to talk about the time you have spent at India’s largest Bloomberg Lab consisting of 24 Bloomberg terminals in the campus. You might also want to add a note on what you learnt and how it has helped you to analyse the capital markets and news flows. Such tangible evidence of your interest may enhance your chances of getting the job. 

Question 3: What are your strengths and weaknesses?

This is a trick question. You may often lose the context with respect to the job and hence your opportunity. You may have many strengths but try and relate to the role being offered. For example: – You may want to say that you are very creative if you are interviewing for the role of a head of a creative unit or manager of a popular FMCG brand. You may also want to showcase your creative bent of mind by talking about your participation in creative festivals, copywriting, or ad contests, and so on. 

As for the weaknesses, you might want to mould it to look like a strength from the company’s perspective. It helps to relate it with a college experience. For example: – For the same question above, you might want to say that while you have been appreciated for creativity, your mentors and guides have asked you to optimize for time while working on creative projects and you have been working towards improving it. So, you can say that striving for perfection is a weakness, but you are practicing on getting it done within the contours of the stipulated time that is available for the project. 

Question 4: What are the five key character traits that most people would say you possess?

Here, you must not wander far from the truth while keeping in mind that your answer can impact your chances of getting the job. Understand what traits of you work well for the job in hand and stick to it. For example: – If you are being interviewed for a sales manager’s role, you might want to display with examples and attributes such as persistence, and never-say-die attitude. 

Question 5: What do you do in your free time?

An interview is about making ‘You’ likeable to the interviewer. That’s your best chance of getting a job. If you know who your interviewer would be, try to gauge similar areas of interest. If not, try to understand what kind of hobbies are well-suited for your job. For example: If you are being interviewed for an HR managers role, hobbies such as meeting new people and helping them to solve problems could be apt. 

Question 6: Where do you see yourself one-year and five-years down the line?

The interviewer is trying to understand your short-term and long-term aspirations. It is prudent to play smart here. You might want to envision the progression of the role that has been offered to you and model your answer around it. Such an answer can enhance your chances of getting the job. For example – If you are being interviewed for the Sales Managers role, handling a territory after year one and handling regional or national level sales five years hence could be good answers. 

Question 7: What is so unique about you that we should select you for this job?

Now, this is an answer that the interviewer will pay most attention to. Can you try and envision what every person interviewing for this role would answer? Can you eliminate all of them if possible and create a unique answer in the context of the job. You must highlight your achievement while not sounding too pompous. For example: If you are interviewing for the role of an equity research analyst, saying that you have been investing since an early age or that your entire family keeps discussing the market each day or weekend is something that can set you apart. It will show that you have the passion for the subject and have been inducted into it at an early age. Such answers can set you apart from most candidates and enhance your chances of getting selected. 

Question 8: If you are to survive on a deserted island all alone for a month and carry 10 things with you, what would they be?

Stumped? You may wonder how such a question is related to the job role? It isn’t directly but it can enable the interviewer to decipher your ability to think on your feet and navigate a tough situation.  You must prepare for such questions that are especially asked by global companies. Spend a few hours on the internet to read such questions and find the answers to them. If you have read a book named ‘Zero to One’ by Peter Thiel, he asks candidates that he interviews the question “What revolutionary truth do you know that no one else agrees with?” Such difficult questions give a lot of insight into the mind of the candidate. Unfortunately, you cannot prepare well for all such questions but keeping your calm and taking your time to articulate a good answer can help create a great impression in the mind of the interviewer. 

Some such interesting questions are: – 

• If you were an animal, which one would you be and why?
• If you had all the money in the world and needn’t have to work for it, how would your day look like?

Question 9: What is your motivation in life? What gets you going?

Here again, try and relate to something that can work for the job at hand. For example: If you are being interviewed for a marketing communications manager role, you may want to showcase your passion for writing by talking about your blogs, posts published on LinkedIn, contributions to newsletters or editorials in the college and so on. It will assure the interviewer that you are truly motivated to create good content. It enhances your chances of getting selected. 

Question 10: What would you like to ask us?

This is an important question and asked most often. You may want to ask the doubts or ambiguities that came to your mind when you researched about the company and the role. You may also want to ask about your career prospects and about the company’s growth and expansion plans. Such questions will reflect your interest in the job, staying the course with the company, and contributing to their long-term success. Hence, it will positively influence the interviewer and enhance your prospects. 

You may prepare very well but there will be a few curveballs. You cannot prepare for them, and the interviewer knows it too. What matters is your demeanour when you answer such questions. A calm yet confident approach to the question will showcase your ability to tackle unknowns and it is an invaluable asset that the company seeks in its prospective employees. 

Hope the above helps you to sparkle in your job interviews and get the offer letter you so richly deserve. 

At NLDMISR, we prepare you for the job and how to tackle such questions as part of our management studies curriculum. 

Best wishes!!