Did Your MBA Interview Go Well?

What’s the best way to find out if that business school interview went well? MBA interview performance is tricky to gauge for the best of us, but Angela Guido is here with decades of experience as an interviewer and MBA coach to answer the question once and for all! Watch this week’s video to find out.

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Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript:

Hello, everyone. I hope you've recently had an MBA interview, or if you haven't, you're going to have one really soon. So today I'm going to answer a question that is either on your mind or will be on your mind very soon. And that is how do I know if an interview went well? I'm Angela Guido, the founder of Career Protocol. Welcome back to MBA Monday.

Can You Gauge Your Interview Performance?

Today I'm talking about interview performance, and how to know when you just crushed it. How do you know if you came out of that interview smelling like roses or if you should really be down in the dumps? The answer to that question is very, very simple. You can't. You cannot tell if you did well or not. You are not a good gauge of your own interview performance. I have played with this so many times over the years as an interview coach during my own MBA. As a coach of people applying to BCG, coaching them through the interview process. And now, having worked with hundreds of MBA applicants on their MBA interviews, I am here to tell you that you are not a qualified judge of your own interview performance. I’ve seen it happen countless times. A client comes out of the interview thinking they completely crushed it, and then they don't get into that business school. Or on the flip side, they come out saying “That interview totally rocked me, I'm destroyed, there's no way I'm going to get into that school.”, and then they do get in. The truth is, you can't gauge how well you did in the conversation and nor should you try. In fact, this is the whole reason that I'm making this video. It's not because I think you need to work to figure out how well you did in the interview, because once the interview is over, it's out of your hands. It's in the hands of the admissions committee who, don't forget, will bring back into the decision all the other aspects of your application. It's not like a job interview where if you get to the job interview stage, it's pretty much the interview that makes or breaks your candidacy. With the MBA, the interview is just one more piece of the puzzle. So they're going to bring back your resume, your essays, your recommendations, and the interview to form a complete picture and make a complete decision, stacking you up against all the other applicants that they like. So it's still just one piece of the puzzle, which is why not only can you feel like you bombed an interview, you can actually bomb it, you could actually do a really mediocre job of the interview and still get in to an MBA, program because it's only a part of the puzzle.

The Key To Success Is To Take the Pressure Off

So the whole reason I'm making this video is not to help you predict whether or not you did a good job, it's rather to encourage you to take your attention off of measuring your performance while you're in the interview so that you can actually just relax and be yourself. So if you watched our MBA interview mini-series, I have a ton of advice for you on how to adopt the right mindset, how to prepare for your answers so that you can improvise and be yourself, and then how to even build confidence during and leading up to the interview conversation. Those things are all really important to do, because when you're in the interview room, you want to be ready to just shine and be yourself. Just enjoy the conversation. Have a two-way dialogue, talk about your experiences, and engage in an interested and interesting way with the interviewer. If your calculator is running the whole time and you're asking yourself “Uh oh, how did that go? I don't know if that question was right. Shoot, I forgot to say that one thing. She's judging me. That face, that face! It means that she didn't like my answer!”. You know what I'm talking about. If you're doing that during the interview conversation, your performance is not going to be as strong as it can possibly be. You might even tank entirely if you get too stuck in your head in evaluating yourself or presuming that you know how someone else is evaluating yourself. But best-case scenario, you're going to leave points on the table because you're not fully present, you're not fully engaged in the conversation. So this whole long-winded video was just to say, don't worry. Don't worry how it's going. Don't worry how the interview is going. Don't give yourself feedback. Don't try to guess if you crushed it or not. Just go in, enjoy the conversation, do your best, and then wait for the response. That's the best that you can do. And if you're following our channel, we have lots of advice on how to bounce back if you're not successful in getting in, and then what to do while you're waiting. That's our very next video in fact. So do your best in the interview and then go to bed and move on with your life. The news will come soon enough, and when it does, you're going to have a whole other world of problems. You're either going to have to triage and find new schools to apply to, or potentially even more traumatically, you're going to have to choose among multiple great options. Believe it or not, that's the hardest part of this process, is if you get into more than one school, choosing the one that's really the perfect fit for you. Really hard to do. I hope you have that problem. I'm wishing you the best of luck. Don't sweat the interviews. Prepare, relax, be yourself and go forth and conquer. But don't worry about whether or not you're conquering. Just go out and do it. I'm rooting for you. See you next time.

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Angela Guido

Angela Guido

Student of Human Nature| Founder and
Chief Education Officer of Career Protocol

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