I had a telephone interview for an analyst position at a middle-tier analytic consulting firm today. Think I screwed up a great opportunity. Here's how it went.
Right off the bat, I was told the following
> The interview will be a structured one - She has a specific set of questions to ask in that order.
> No clarifications will be provided. One can however ask for the question to be repeated if he/she didn't hear it properly the first time around.
> She won't comment on my response to the questions.
> The interview will be recorded.
And so it started. At the beginning, it was very conventional - "What do you do presently?" "What do like the most about that?" "Where do you see yourself 10 yrs down the road" etc.
Later, it got totally whacky. A few sample questions:
(1) Who would you rather have under you? A mediocre team player or an independent aggressive person who achieves twice as much as the mediocre person. I said I'd take the independent aggressive person.
(2) An employee of yours calls up in the morning and says she won't be able to come in today as her daughter is ill. What would you say to her? For this, I meekly answered that I would ask if there were any meetings that she had scheduled with the client today and would try to get someone else to back her up for that. As I look back at it now, I wonder if I should have perhaps enquired about her daughter's illness.
(3) Do you have a mission statement? - totally messed up this one.
(4) The only marginally technical question: What is the cost of losing an employee who was making 40K an year - screwed up this one too.
I was previously told to expect the interview to last around 45-60 minutes. I finished mine in exactly 20 minutes - largely because I was answering without taking the time to think about each question. Totally stupid.
Edit: Changed the post title. The previous one was nonsensical.
