It was a mixture of a resumé- and application-based interview with fairly standard questions:
- Tell us about yourself.
- Why do you want to study here?
- What makes you a good candidate?
- Can you tell us about a time where you had to deliver bad news?
The only diversion from the typical script came in a longer question where I was asked what I would do, what steps I would take, where would I look in the bowels of the company, if consulting for a business who’s turnover had increased since last year, but profits had decreased. This was a sufficiently open-ended question that allowed me to think out-loud and show my way of thinking, and was also handled like a conversation in which I could ask follow-up questions about the business to the interviewer. There weren’t any huge surprises in the interview (I had been told in advance that there would be some sort of Google-type question towards the end, so had prepared myself for a much zanier question than that which I ultimately received). The fact that relatively few competency-based questions relating to my business experience (or lack thereof) suggests to me that IE is an institution that favours creative thinking and candidate diversity over business experience and raw academic expertise – this is one of the reasons why I applied there.
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