Your guide to acing an MBA interview

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The average MBA interview lasts about 45 minutes. In those 45 minutes, you’ll need to convince the school that they were correct in showing interest in you and that you’ll be able to contribute something meaningful to the cohort that they’re designing for the next year. While the essays tend to be the part of the MBA application process that causes the most trouble for applicants, the interview tends to cause the most confusion as applicants struggle to know how to prepare.

Over the years, we’ve developed some proven techniques to help applicants breeze through the interview for their top choice MBA program. Follow our Five Ps to guide you in acing your MBA interviews.

PREPARE

There’s no way around it. In order to have the answers you need on hand, you’ll need to prepare. Know your resume back and forth—this means you’ll also need to prepare anecdotes about times you’ve experienced failure, faced ethical dilemmas or received negative feedback. In addition, have a set of questions that you’d like to ask the interviewer. If you can work them into the interview, great. If not, then the interviewer will likely ask you at the end of the interview if there’s anything else you’d like to know about the program. You can ask your questions then.

PRACTICE

The anecdotes that you choose to prepare for the interview might sound great in your head or look good on paper, but you won’t know how they’re going to perform during the interview until you practice saying them aloud. You shouldn’t memorize your anecdotes or your responses to likely questions in the interview process—you’ll sound stilted and a little fake. However, you should have the basic storyline down pat and be able to recite the anecdotes fluently.

PROFESSIONALISM

During the interview, you should be confident, calm and personable. One of the biggest mistakes that applicants make in their MBA interviews is getting too conversational: using body language that is too casual and going off on tangents in an attempt to connect with the interviewer. There’s a difference between personal and personable, and you want to err on the side of caution in an interview. If you’re not sure if you should say something, don’t. Better to be a little too formal than a little too casual. Additionally, if the interviewer seems to be returning to the same issue repeatedly, stay calm, answer the question honestly and concisely, and then take the opportunity to begin moving the interview in another direction.

PROACTIVE

As stated above, have some questions ready yourself. Also, you have the power to guide the interview in the direction you choose so you can make sure to cover the aspects of your background that you most want to convey to the interviewer. The transitions you use don’t need to be clever, they just need to flow with the conversation. If there’s something you can’t work into the body of the interview, be sure to bring it up at the end.

PRODUCTIVE

Above all else, the things you talk about in the interview should be meaningful. Leadership, management and contribution should all be themes that are covered in your responses to the interviewer’s questions. Depending on your background, you may want to make sure to discuss things like working in cross-national or cross-functional teams or entrepreneurship. What do you think is essential for the interviewer to know about you?

Although the real things you need in order to ace the MBA interview might be much less glamorous than you have heard, going into the interview room ready to deliver can give you a calm confidence that will be obvious to those around you. You’ll transform something that is a nerve wracking experience for others into an intense but enjoyable experience where you learned more about the program and the school saw how you will be an asset to their program.