One Interview tip for fresh graduates towards Big Four
Before I left Big 4, I was a Senior Manager in the Advisory Practice. During the tenure, I interviewed quite a lot candidates. I want to share a tip that I felt important and is constantly ignored or mistakenly understood among a lot of fresh graduates. Before I got to the point, I want to make the readers aware that this is about the interview round with manager and above in the hiring process after the HR screening.
This is how it runs. In the initial rounds, HR filters the resumes and makes phone calls to screen candidates. The resume screening largely relies on the key words and technical skills prespecified by the hiring managers, a.k.a., hiring partners. The phone screening is mainly about the candidates’ basic communication skills. Once passed, the resumes will be shared with partners and directors. They are the ones who understand the team needs and the business the best. They screened the resumes mainly by looking for relevant experience, technical strength, and training potentials. They would select those that they believe could be potential good fits of the team. HR then schedule interviews for these selected candidates with managers and directors for the next round. The tip that I discussed in this post applies to this round of interview.
If you reached this stage of the interviewing process, congratulations! You are already considered a potential good fit based on the information you provided in your resume. The only way to screw up is to show that you are not the person described in the resume. In other words, you need to demonstrate that you fully understand every single point listed on your resume — you are the person presented in the resume. With that being said, the tip that I would like to share is “Know your resume”. If you said you did a project, you must be able to articulate every single step with details of how you accomplished it, what you learned, what are the challenges and how you resolved, and lastly what are the impacts.
There was a candidate who exceled in this. For every question that I asked about his project, he not only explained the theories in plain English but also talked about the implementation, the impact, and the learnings. Although his projects were really simple, I really like the way he summarizes his work and shares his thoughts.
To the contrary, some candidates like to list a number of fancy cutting-edge key words in the resume. But when I asked about those new technologies or algorithms, they can barely explain it. This is definitely a big kill. As a matter of fact, the interviewer does not expect you to fully understand every single detail. For example, you listed “Gradient Boosting” in your resume. The interviewer is not expecting you to explain the algorithm with granular details. Some high-level understanding would be sufficient. Even if you memorized something from Wikipedia, that is better than saying “oh, I don’t know, I just used the python package.” It gives people an impression that you use tools without a thorough understanding of the mechanism behind it.
In summary, be prepared to talk about every single detail in your resume. Don’t put anything in your resume if you don’t FULLY understand. Lastly, best luck if you are job hunting right now :-)
