TOUGH QUESTIONS

1. Give me an example of a time when you took the time to share a co-worker's or supervisor's achievements with others?
2. Tell me about a time that you didn't work well with a supervisor. What was the outcome and how would you have changed the outcome?
3. Have you worked with someone you didn't like? If so, how did you handle it?
4. Tell me about a time that you helped someone.
5. Tell me about a time that you misjudged a person.
6. How do you get along with older (younger) co-workers?
7. Describe a decision you made that was a failure. What happened and why?
8. Tell me about a time that you worked conveying technical information to a nontechnical audience.
9. Tell me about a time that you worked with data, interpreting data, and presenting data.
10. Why do you think you will be successful at this job?
11. Tell me about a time that you participated in a team, what was your role?
12. Tell me about a time when you were faced with conflicting priorities. How did you determine the top priority?
13. Tell me about a time when you failed.
14. What would you do differently if you could start your working life over?
15. How do you balance life and work?
16. What is your preferred way to communication - instant message, phone, or email?
17. Do you check voicemail and email when on vacation?
18. What is your favorite book? How about your favorite movie?
19. What historical figure do you admire and why?
20. If you could choose anyone (alive or deceased) to have lunch with, who would it be?
21. If you could be any animal on a carousel what would you pick and why?
22. What did you do during this six month gap in employment?
23. What do you love?
24. What led you to this point in your life?
25. Do you consider yourself successful?
26. What inspires you in a job?
27. Start with your graduation from college and explanation the rationale behind each of your career moves.
28. Also explain the thinking process that went into making each if those decisions.
29. How many hours a day/week do you need to work to get the job done?
30. If you stayed with your current company, what would be your next move?
31. How do you measure success?
32. Describe your dream job.
33. Describe a job that would be your worst nightmare.
34. If you were the CEO of this company what would be the top two things that you would do?

ABOUT THE NEW JOB AND THE COMPANY

1. What interests you about this job? 
2. Why do you want this job? 
3. What applicable attributes / experience do you have? 
4. Are you overqualified for this job? 
5. What can you do for this company?
6. Why should we hire you?
7. Why are you the best person for the job? 
8. What do you know about this company? 
9. Why do you want to work here? - Best Answers
10. What can you contribute to this company? 
11. Are you willing to travel? 
12. Is there anything I haven't told you about the job or company that you would like to know? 

JOB INTERVIEW QUESTIONS ABOUT YOU

1. 
   
2. What is your greatest weakness?
3. What is your greatest strength?
4. Describe a typical work week.
5. Do you take work home with you?
6. How many hours do you normally work?
7. How would you describe the pace at which you work?
8. How do you handle stress and pressure?
9. What motivates you?
10. What are your salary expectations?
11. What do you find are the most difficult decisions to make?
12. Tell me about yourself.
13. What has been the greatest disappointment in your life?
14. What are you passionate about?
15. What are your pet peeves?
16. What do people most often criticize about you?
17. When was the last time you were angry? What happened?
18. If you could relive the last 10 years of your life, what would you do differently?
19. If the people who know you were asked why you should be hired, what would they say?
20. Do you prefer to work independently or on a team?
21. Give some examples of teamwork.
22. What type of work environment do you prefer?
23. How do you evaluate success?
24. If you know your boss is 100% wrong about something how would you handle it?
25. Describe a difficult work situation / project and how you overcame it.
26. Describe a time when your workload was heavy and how you handled it.
27. More job interview questions about your abilities.
28. More job interview questions about you.

WORK HISTORY

Name of company, position title and description, dates of employment.
What were your expectations for the job and to what extent were they met?
What were your starting and final levels of compensation?
What were your responsibilities?
What major challenges and problems did you face? How did you handle them?
What did you like or dislike about your previous job?
Which was most / least rewarding?
What was the biggest accomplishment / failure in this position?
Questions about your supervisors and co-workers.
What was it like working for your supervisor?
What do you expect from a supervisor?
Who was your best boss and who was the worst?
Why are you leaving your job?
What have you been doing since your last job?
Why were you fired?

QUESTION BY FUNCTION

Consulting

1.  What background do you have that would be helpful in consulting?
2.  Why consulting?
3.  How do you think the consulting industry is structured?
4.  What are some differences among the consulting firms that are important to you?
5.  What were the sales of your last employer? What was its profitability?
6.  Are you a generalist or specialist? Where do you see yourself specializing?
7.  Are you competitive?
8.  How are you going to make your decision if you get more than one offer?

Health Care

1.  Why are you interested in the health care industry?
2.  Why are you pursuing an MBA vs. Master in Health Administration?
3.  What strengths do you have for the health care industry?
4.  Prioritize the most important issues facing health care management.
5.  Provide your recommendations to address these issues.
6.  What is the current administration’s goal towards health care?
7.  Why have some HMOs been successful and others have not? Elaborate.

Investment Banking

1.  What would you do if you weren’t going into investment banking?
2.  What was your quantitative GMAT score?
3.  Some technical finance/accounting questions:
4.    - How do you value a firm?
5.    - What is an interest rate swap?
6.    - What is DCF? How do you calculate the discount rate?
7.    - How do you determine if a stock is undervalued?
8.    - How would you price the stock for an IPO?
9.    - What is the yield on a zero coupon bond trading at par with 10 years to maturity?
10.    - What is working capital? Quick ratio? Free cash flow?
11.  Tell me what you know about [the firm].
12.  Tell me about the cultures of the different firms.
13.  How are you going to make your decision if you get more than one offer?
14.  What do you want to do and why- M&A, capital markets, or corporate finance?
15.  The bond market is going down; what is the stock market going to do?
16.  Where is the industry going? What is the market doing?
17.  What are the headlines in today’s Wall Street Journal?
18.  What do you read regularly on the industry?
19.  Why choose investment banking? Why pick this bank?
20.  Tell me what an investment banker does.
21.  Tell me the difference between commercial and investment banks.
22.  Why pick corporate finance as opposed to sales and trading?
23.  What are your outside activities? Why would you be willing to give them up for such a demanding job?
24.  What role do you play in group situations?
25.  What would you do if offered drugs as part of the deal? (or other ethically-oriented questions)
26.  Sell us on your quantitative skills.
27.  How smart are you? How do we know how smart you are?
28.  If we made you an offer today, would you take it?
29.  What did the Dow, S&P, or NASDAQ close at yesterday?
30.  What stocks do you follow and why? (Be prepared to discuss the stock’s performance.)

Marketing

1.  Give me the attributes of a good brand manager.
2.  Now take me through your background and demonstrate how you have each attribute.
3.  Rate Yale’s marketing program.
4.  How would you sell more [Tide]?
5.  Talk about an ad—what makes it effective? interesting? etc.
6.  What are some examples of bad advertising? Why?
7.  How do you sell your ideas?
8.  What are you looking for in a consumer products company?
9.  What do you think are the most important traits in a marketing person?
10.  Describe your leadership style.
11.  Provide an example of your problem solving approach.

Sales and Trading

1.  What other firms have you talked to?
2.  What makes you think you can sell?
3.  Would you like to do sales or trading? Why?
4.  Tell me what you think a trader (salesperson) does.
5.  Why choose selling debt vs. selling equity?
6.  Why didn’t you choose corporate finance?
7.  What do you think having an MBA does for you in this field?
8.  What particular markets or instruments are you interested in? Why?
9.  Will your personality make you a good trader? Why?
10.  How will you motivate yourself to make the calls you hate to make?
11.  What are your grades? (Yes, they know about the Yale SOM grading process.)

Strategic Planning and Corporate Finance

1.  What do you hope to gain by working for our firm?
2.  Where do you see yourself five years from now?
3.  How do you see your career progressing in our firm?
4.  What do you know about our industry?
5.  How would you describe our competitive position?
6.  Our ____ division is thinking of introducing a (such and such) new product. How would you go about determining if this is a good idea?
7.  We are having trouble managing our ____ division. What do you think are the key performance metrics? How would you improve them?
8.  How would you value our _____ for a potential sale, spin-off, or liquidation?
9.  How does M&A activity in banking affect our industry?

Venture Capital

1.  What is venture capital?
2.  What strengths do you have for venture capital?
3.  Tell me when you have worked with all management levels--from CEO to analyst.
4.  Describe your analytical and interpersonal skills.
5.  What operations exposure have you had?
6.  What managerial exposure have you had?
7.  What do you look for in a venture?
8.  Do you think more effort should be put into human capital or raising funds and investing them?