The devil's in the details

I attended a first round job interview on Tuesday of this week with a management consulting company. This stage came after I had successfully passed the online testing round (consisting of an SHL numerical test and Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal). The interview was around 45 minutes long, and was competency-based. This post is to share my thoughts with you about interview techniques, following my experience at this interview.

Details, details, details. Unfortunately for me, this position is not a graduate role. They are only seeking to fill one or two positions, which already puts me at a disadvantage with my lack of experience. The HR person that I had my interview with had a list of questions to ask me that circled around the following main areas:

1. Analytical ability and problem solving/dealing with complex situations or data
2. Teamworking ability and skills/Leadership
3. Building relationships

I managed to successfully prepare to answer these questions by conjuring up all the relevant experiences I had in these areas. However, what I wasn’t prepared for was the amount of detail I would need. Let me give you an example of what I mean:

Base Question: Give an example of a time when you successfully built a relationship with a client/customer?
Detail Question: How exactly do you think you managed to build the relationship, what did you do?

This is something that MUST be thought about before going into an interview, that I had not experienced until now. I had already known about having examples of where I had demonstrated a skill but I had not prepared to explain exactly how I carried out a task or my methodologies. The answer the interviewer is looking for is whether you have built up your own methodology for building relationships. Has your experience allowed you to make observations on what is and is not successful for building relationships. Another example:

Base Question: Give an example of a time you had to work under pressure.
Detail Question: How exactly do you think you managed to handle working under pressure?

I found myself being hesitant on such questions. Not because I was lying, because I wasn’t, but it is just something that is rarely spoken of. We can all make friends and build relationships but do we ever vocalise what exactly had to be done in order to build these relationships and make these friends? Now you have to.

The conclusion of this is that you have to know the details of every example you give and you have to know how you get things done. Therefore, you have to analyse your own behaviour, and also general human behaviour. For example you can build relationships by:

1. Listening to the customer/colleague
2. Using your  (excellent) memory to remember their preferences/dislikes for next time you speak to them
3. Remembering what you say to them so you don’t repeat yourself too much

These are general things that humans do when making friends or building relationships with people. So for every experience you have like time management, team work, leadership, start thinking of how you worked well in the team and how you led the team and how you managed that time. Just another thing to think about!

The Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal

That’s what I did today. A Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal. It’s the first time I’d come across this one! There is a limited number of practice you can do on it but this is what I found:

About Watson-Glaser from GetFeedback
Watson-Glaser Sample Questions
Watson-Glaser Practice test from Hogan Lovells

Personal Experience:

Test items: 31

Time given: 60 minutes

Backgracking: Allowed

Difficulty: Hard

 

(Notes: It took me 30 minutes to do the test

and I used the remaining time to backtrack.)

There are five question areas:

    1. Inference
    2. Recognition of assumptions
    3. Deduction
    4. Intepretation
    5. Evaluation of arguments

I did a critical thinking AS-Level at college as well so I was already slightly familiarised with the types of problems presented. If you have trouble with these kinds of problems I suggest you read a book on Critical Thinking to help you familiarise yourself. At least go over the sections that are relevant and teach you the tips and tricks on how to ace the questions.

I have some of my own tips that help me with some of the questions. Here they are! (They may not make sense until you have looked at the Watson-Glaser sample questions, found in the link above).

Tip 1: Always make a mental note when you see any of the statements or questions use extremist words such as ‘always’, ‘everytime’, ‘never’ or ‘only’. This is critical information to answering the question. So if the statement suggests that “All rainy days are boring” and follows up with the answer-statment “Therefore, some rainy days are not boring” that can immediately be disregarded because ‘ALL’ rainy days are boring. That was a simple example but it really does help sometimes with the complex ones.

Tip 2: Think about it like this, if it seems to be true but is not definitely true (T) - i.e. the statement does not directly match with a statements in the text - then it is more likely to be probably true (PT). However, if the statement matches up with a phrase in the text then it is more likely to be definitely true (T).

Tip 3: Do practice and make sure you understand all the questions properly and what they want from you. Then, do practice tests and makes sure you understand the logic of any of the questions you answered incorrectly. It may help you in similar formatted questions.

Tip 4: BE AWAKE. This test requires a lot of concentration.

Overall I found the test difficult and I am not sure how well I did even though I backtracked through the test to double check my answers. There’s just no way of knowing until I get the result. I will update as soon as the results come through!