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Interviews

Acing the Fit Interview — Finessing Negative Stories

Acing the Fit Interview:

In the last article of this series, you will learn about complex questions designed to trip up even the best of candidates.

Negative Stories

Questions that enquire about a weakness or failure can be a point of discomfort. After all, who likes to talk about their blemishes? Nonetheless, this does offer you a unique opportunity to stand out by showcasing attractive traits such as authenticity, self-awareness, and a growth mindset — all of which are sought after in the highly collaborative and ever-evolving consulting workplace.

“What do you think is your greatest weakness?”

It is important to state outright that the worst possible response to this question is one that highlights a faux weakness, or a disguised strength. Candidates who proclaim that their greatest weakness is that they “work too hard” come across as pretentious, delusional, and possibly even arrogant as it insinuates that they have no weaknesses.

Instead, you want to:

  1. Be open and candid about your weakness
  2. Discuss its negative impacts by giving a personal example
  3. Emphasise the concrete steps you’re taking to improve, and
  4. Outline some improvements you have recently shown

Consider the following brief example:

“I think my biggest weakness right now is that I can sometimes be too intense and direct when communicating with my team. I tend to play Devil’s Advocate in internal team meetings to broaden our collective perspectives, but there have been times when I presented the opposing viewpoint too curtly.

For instance, a team member suggested that we should seek to establish more corporate partnerships than all competing consulting societies. In response, I simply asked “why?” to highlight that our objective of receiving top-tier mentorship could be achieved by quality instead of quantity, but this was instead perceived as unnecessarily aggressive and intimidating by that team member. Fortunately, there were no hard feelings after the miscommunication was surfaced and I apologized and clarified what I meant.

Now, I am particularly conscious of the way I communicate with my team mates to not cause unintended discord. At my most recent internship, I had several disagreements with my supervisor but tried particularly hard to ease up a little and take on a less intense demeanor.

Honestly, I’m still working on this till today. Do you have any other ideas on how I can improve on this?”

The final touch that I love to end on here is the last line seeking advice from the interviewer themselves. This implicitly highlights that you are always on the lookout for advice and guidance while eliciting a dialogue with the interviewer to build further rapport.

“Tell me about your biggest recent failure.”

As above, the worst possible response here is a faux failure that is actually a story of triumph such as failing to qualify for an intra-school soccer tournament in 2021 (the “failure”), only to win the national championship in 2022 through sheer hard work and grit (the triumph, which is the candidate’s real point of the story).

Interviewers want to hear about:

  1. An experience that you consider to be a failure
  2. Why you consider it to be a failure, and
  3. What you took away from that negative experience

Your story should again be real and personal, and your learning points should manifest concretely. For example:

“I have always hated people who are “all talk but no action”. My greatest failure was when I inadvertently became one of those people. A group of friends and I were really passionate about mental health and wanted to raise awareness in Singapore. Recognising that it was a very saturated space, we didn’t want to create yet another short-lived advocacy group on Instagram. Instead, we wanted to empower existing groups by bringing them together to facilitate knowledge sharing and capability building.

Unfortunately, the project died out as all of us were too preoccupied with settling into university, and this mental health hub idea wasn’t as novel as we thought. Even the project name we devised had already been taken! In retrospect, I was too caught up in my passion and rushed into things without properly considering internal factors (did we have the right team, right place, right timing, etc.?) and external factors (was the competitive landscape already crowded with organised groups?).

My biggest takeaway was that I need to do my due diligence before diving in headfirst. Moving forward, I always try to consider objectives and enablers before proceeding with any project. Right now, I’ve decided that my priority is really to learn and grow personally and professionally before embarking on something like this. I’m happy just being a personal advocate of therapy and mental wellness to my friends for the time being.”

This example focuses squarely on why I consider this experience to be a failure (because I failed to further a cause that is close to my heart), and what specifically I have taken away. Another point to note is the importance of justifying your post-failure trajectory. If I hadn’t done so, a natural follow-up question would be “why didn’t you try again?” By rationalizing your priorities, you can defend yourself from further unwanted questioning.

Through this 4-article series, you have received an overview of fit interviews from the overall strategy and approach to undertake, through motivation questions, effective storytelling, and how to respond to tricky negative questions.

All the best with your fit interview preparation!

Lucas Foo is a Philosophy and Linguistics Undergraduate at the University of Oxford. He enjoys drawing insights from ambiguity to create real and positive impact.

Image: Pixabay

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