How to ace fit interviews

So you have spent hours and hours crafting job applications and finally landed a job interview. Now is the time to prepare.

In this article, I share the process I followed to prepare for eight consulting fit interviews, including the types of questions to prepare and how to practice to feel comfortable and confident when the day comes.

The process is tailored to consulting, but you could use it to prepare for a fit interview in any field, as the tips are transferable.

The article is split into two broader parts.

One covers the 3 question categories and how to prepare them. The second covers how to practice the questions to make sure you don't forget half of your thought-through responses when the interview stress hits.

Let's begin.

3 question categories to prepare

In my mind, there are three types of fit interview questions:

personal questions
company and job-related questions
story questions

Breaking them into these categories helped me apply specific methods for each and made the preparation easier as I wasn't tackling one amorphous and never-ending blop of questions.

To keep track of interview questions, my answers and prep progress, I stored them in Notion. Here's a template I used, including all Qs I prepared and a progress tracker. If you want to make use of the template, make sure to duplicate this page into your own Notion.

Now let's dive into a more detailed explanation of what each question type entails:

1) Personal questions

Personal questions are the types of questions where you need to elaborate on your background, motivation, any transitions you have made previously, your strengths (and sometimes your weaknesses), your plans, values and so on.

When preparing these questions, I suggest using a top-down approach, which is a preferred communication style in consulting. This means that you begin your answer by giving the overall structure or conclusion of your answer before diving into details.

For example, when asked about your CV, it would be a mistake (in my opinion) to take the recruiter through your whole life, listing down your experiences one by one. A more effective way would be to say: My resume has three broader sections: education, professional experience and extracurricular activities. In terms of education blabla (...).

This helps the recruiter orient themselves in your answer and understand where you're going.

Another thing to keep in mind when preparing your answers is to keep them concise and to the point. I usually tried to keep each answer to about a minute, going up to 1,5 minutes.

This approach limits you to only the relevant information and giving just enough but not too much detail. This allows the interviewer to interject to get more context on answers they are interested in but will also ensure you are not losing their attention during a 10-minute monologue.

2) Company and job-related questions

Next, we have company and job-related questions. These are questions along the lines of why this company, how do your values align with their etc.

3 points here.

First, in terms of structure and length, company-related questions should follow a similar format to the personal questions.

Second, you need to do some research to back your answers up. I mean, for obvious reasons, right: you don't want to show up talking just fluff - you need to have your facts straight.

Here are the top 4 things I would do to understand the company well:

Checking out their website, values, about page, etc.
Understanding their industries/products/divisions of focus
Reading through most recent posts - especially those authored by your interviewed or related to your interviewer's expertise area
And last but not least, chatting with people who work there. They will give you intel you won't be able to find online. If you're unsure how to find them and get in contact, check out this article (starting at point 4).

And third, once you have all this information, you need to intelligently weave it into your answers while making the answers sound credible.

I find that when preparing company-related questions, we tend to make grandiose statements that are unlikely to be true. Instead, I would focus on something more tangible and affecting your day-to-day work.

For example, you could say that:

You have spoken to Judy and John from the office, who told you about the company culture, where everyone is very supportive and there is a sense of working towards achieving a common goal
Their focus, as a consulting firm, is on the Life Science industry and since you have a background in LS, you would be of value and are really keen to work on the types of projects they work on (which Judy and John told you about) because it would complement your experience in xyz ways.

3) Story questions

Story questions usually start with something like: tell me about a time when... and are intended to dig deeper into your experience to illustrate a specific skill. Technically, they are a subsection of personal questions but require different preparation; hence, they are in a separate section.

To prepare those types of questions, you need to learn how to use the STAR method, which stands for Situation, Task, Actions and Results. I'm not going to go into too much detail on how to use the framework, but if you do a quick Google search, you will find plenty of materials. For example, here's a great video from UCL Careers on how to use it.

What I do want to talk about, though, are the types of STAR questions to prepare.

As always, I suggest grounding your preparation in the original job description, which will go a long way in covering the questions you will likely be asked.

For each skill listed in the description, it is good to have two types of stories ready: a success story and a challenge story.

The success story is more intuitive to prepare and would cover situations where your skills led to favourable outcomes. For example, when your good communication skills helped you win a business pitch competition and raise funds for your business.

Sometimes, though, interviewers will want to hear a challenge story instead, to understand how you deal with adversities and whether you are able to draw conclusions and learn from them. For example, they could ask about a time when you failed as a team.

Clearly, success and challenge stories are very different so I think that preparing for both is well worth the effort.

Using the job description as a guide and preparing both success and challenge stories for each listed skill will cover the majority of STAR scenarios you could be asked about. For the others, you will probably feel so comfortable using the STAR method that you will be able to apply the technique on the fly.

How to practice

Once you finish outlining answers to your questions, you will likely end up with quite a few pieces of information to remember. That's why preparing the questions is only half the battle. You now need to practice your answers.

This goes somewhat against common advice in consulting that you shouldn't prepare too much for the fit interview because you risk coming across as too rehearsed and inauthentic.

My answer to that is that this is impossible unless you memorise your answers verbatim, which would take a lot of time and is unlikely to happen.

Instead, I suggest you remember the broad structure of each answer and the points you so carefully prepared. So once you have outlined answers to each question, transform them into bullet points and memorise them. This is easy with the top-down questions because each point you plan to make is a bullet point.

As you practice and transform the bullet points into complete sentences, you will see that your answers still sound natural.

You could go a step further and take the time to record yourself when practising to see how you come across during the interview. I found that super helpful in understanding where I might need to make my answers more crisp - especially as a non-native speaker.

Conclusion

To wrap up, we covered the three types of questions and how to prepare and practice them.

Taking this approach and taking time to internalise the broader answer structure has helped me a lot during the interviews. I stayed calm, knew I maximized my chances and could handle unexpected curveballs with the practised techniques.

I hope it does the same for you.