INTERVIEW QUESTIONS. Finding purple squirrels

Transcription

1 INTERVIEW QUESTIONS Finding purple squirrels

2 OVERVIEW This deck contains a handful of sample interview questions you can ask during your engagement. To learn more about getting ready, interview tone, style, timing and steps to take after an engagement, please review our Ambassador Guide

3 GENERAL SAMPLE QUESTIONS (1/3) What do you think is the most disruptive trend in the [ _ ] industry today, and why? How long do you think it will take for this trend to become ubiquitous? What variables would you take into account when trying to develop ways to accelerate this adoption? Outline a specific strategy you would implement? What is the most important long term effect this trend will have on people's lives? Tell me about a time you were working on a team project and you took the initiative to improve a weakness or inefficiency? How did you approach the situation and sell your recommendation(s)? What information or tools helped you in your effort? What were the short term and long term consequences? How did your team's perception of you change as a result of your efforts?

4 GENERAL SAMPLE QUESTIONS (2/3) Imagine you're the manager of a Chipotle* in your home town. Your average customer spends $7 per transaction, but the national store-wide average is $8.50. Map out the step-by-step strategy you would take to get your customers to spend more. What information would you leverage to develop your strategy? Do you see any upsell opportunities or other ways to raise the average cost-per-customer How would you convince the branch-owner that this is in the best interest of the branch? How would you convince Chipotle's CFO you should consult for other low-performing branches? Imagine you are meeting an important client from [insert company] and your goal is to get them to [insert reason: upgrade service, invest more in product X or service Y]. Walk me through what you would do to prepare for this critical meeting? What data and other information would you review before the meeting? What do you think your strongest value proposition would be in this situation? What are some concerns the client might raise and how would you address them? What metrics would you use to measure the success of your meeting?

5 GENERAL SAMPLE QUESTIONS (3/3) How do you think [insert product or service] can be leveraged to add value to the [insert industry]? What do you think Apple's worst product is? Imagine I'm a prospective client in this vertical, sell me on your product/service. How would you rate your pitch? What could you have done to improve it? What data would you have liked to have? Now imagine that you're the product manager. What specific changes would you make to that product and why? How would you market these new changes to consumers? Outline the case you would make to convince the leadership that these changes are necessary? How would measure the success of your product revamp?

6 ROLE-SPECIFIC SAMPLE QUESTIONS (1/3) Operations You just inherited a struggling family business, a bike shop in Portland, Oregon*. You just injected another $100,000 into the business to restore its former glory, what are the key success factors you will consider and how will you measure ROI? What information would you need to track and optimize ROI accurately? What changes would you make to the business to help ensure success? How might your operational strategy change after the initial cash injection runs out? Finance [Company]receives X dollars of revenue per client in the US. However, in Canada [Company] has only been getting 0.5X revenue per client for the last 18 months. How would you conduct a financial analysis to determine the cause for this revenue differential? What are some of the potential underlying issues at play here? What steps would you take to identify potential solutions? How would you measure whether or not your solution(s) were successful? What system could you establish that would help identify similar revenue discrepancies?

7 ROLE-SPECIFIC SAMPLE QUESTIONS (2/3) Human Resources You've been tasked with designing a onboarding program for new employees at [your company]. What factors would help you determine what to include in that training and the other employees to involve? Based on your knowledge of [company]'s values and culture, what are the key points you'd want to convey when onboarding new employees? Would you advocate more generalized training or more narrowly focused inter-departmental training? What are the upsides and downsides of your choice? What are some ways you could try to overcome some of the drawbacks of this approach? Tech You have a [project] due in 3-weeks and it is your responsibility to identify the highest priority feature requests and bugs to focus on. How would you go about designing a framework to decide what features and bugs to prioritize? What are some alternative prioritization strategies you could consider? What would you like to understand first before finalizing on a prioritization strategy? If the timeline was extended, how would you adjust your prioritization strategy accordingly?

8 ROLE-SPECIFIC SAMPLE QUESTIONS (3/3) Legal What is the most important issue around professional responsibility that [your company] faces today? What information would you need to collect in order to gauge current safeguards and make recommendations on how to make improvements? What are some steps companies like [company] could take today to improve their adherence to professional responsibility? What metrics and other criteria would you use to measure the success of your recommendations after they were implemented?