by Rick Nason, PhD, CFA
Partner, RSD Solutions Inc.
Working with MBA students is always busy this time of year. Students are in the final round of interviews and they are always anxious and looking for any advice they can get that will give them an edge. To that end, I often see a fairly large number of students in my university office looking for interview tips.
Interviews have changed a bit since I was in the middle of looking for a job after graduation. In my day an interview was assessing your skills and trying to ascertain if you were a likable person or not. When I was interviewing, it was always a line manager that did the initial interviews, and they were often inconsistent in how they went about things. Now it is human resource professionals who supposedly have much more systematic and objective interviewing techniques. The goal now is to assess behavioural traits. Competence and the ability to do a good job are on the list – but quite far down the list.
In my day interview questions were along the lines of what do you know, and what have you done. Now that ask questions like “If you were a tree, what type of tree would you be?” I understand why they ask that type of question, but ultimately it has become such a common question (or style of question), that in my opinion it is just plain stupid. I am not a tree, I have no immediate plans to become a tree, and if I was a tree I am quite confident that no one would want to pay me a salary.
That may be considered cynical however. So just to show that I can be open minded, I will ask the question of risk professionals; “If risk management were a tree, what type of a tree would it be?” That’s just stupid, but a hell of a lot of fun to discuss at the water-cooler!
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