Customer Reviews

How to Interview Like a Top MBA: Job-Winning Strategies From Headhunters, Fortune 100 Recruiters, and Career Counselors

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book gets off to a good start in its introduction, with a compelling list of "Ten Common Interview Mistakes," followed by a road map of all of the topics the book covers. The subjects are comprehensive and cohesively organized.

The rest of the book falls into two main sections, covering interviewing best practices and 100 tough interview questions. The best practices will be useful to those who haven't read other interviewing books. However, their most important lessons can be gleaned merely by reading the table of contents. (Example: "Shape the Interview with Responses to Open-Ended and Turnaround Questions.")

The "tough questions" section is what holds the potential to distinguish this book from the masses of unremarkable job-search literature. Its advice for answers is sound, but formulaic: "I have qualities A and B, as exhibited by when I did C. I know D about your company, which shows how A and B will be important for the job, so I am ideally suited for it." Even questions about the interviewee's shortcomings follow this basic formula, with a prefix: "I was in difficult situation X, and it didn't turn out well because of Y. I learned from the situation and now..." Several answers are disappointingly trite. The worst was an example lauding soccer as an extracurricular because of "the way I have to focus on attaining goals." Also, many questions are more applicable to recent graduates than experienced hires.

The book is worth a quick read, and the repetition of the Q&A section serves as a good do-it-yourself interviewing drill, but it's certainly not exceptional.

I recently graduated and landed 3 offers out of 4 positions I interviewed for, and did so with less-than-great qualifications (2 of jobs were reaches for me). I had a subpar GPA but had no idea of how to properly interview before I read this book. The book focuses on teaching the reader how to portray him/herself as a qualified candidate. Interviewers really only care to see if a candidate understands what the job requires, and is willing and qualified to perfrom the duties asked. The explanation of how to answer the dreaded, "Tell me about yourself," really demonstrates all of that, and learning how to answer that question will give you a much better chance of getting the job you're up for. The book also does an excellent job of illustrating what differentiates good answers from great answers; and also explains how to address weaknesses on your resume. It's an inexpensive investment, and if you follow what the author suggests, you'll certainly do much better in your interviews. Two suggestions I have would be to structure your answers, and to PRACTICE. Interviewing isn't that difficult once you know what to do and practice a little bit. If you recently graduated, I would go so far as to say this book is a necessity.

How To Interview Like a Top MBA, by Shel Leanne, is extremely well written and provides great insight into how to interview excellently for a job. The topics covered in the main text are very timely, with chapters about situations in which you may be trying to get a more advanced position, as well as ways to approach a job interview if you have been out of work for a while or if you are transitioning to a new field. The book also has a very valuable sample 100 Questions and Answers section. This book was thoughtful and insightful, and the advice from headhunters and recruiters add great dimensions.

Ok first off I just so you can have a little background on me, I will say I have taken classes on this subject before being a college graduate. With that said, I must say this is the best book I have read on the subject and I have read several. The only other book I would recommend is "What color is your parachute (insert current year)"

WCIYP? Is different, it is more of a book about seeking/doing what you like/are meant to do/be. It has some general interview tips (and good ones) but it is more of a job seekers guide.

This book is focused on the job interview which is what I wanted. So you got the great resume and job interviews lined up. How can you ace the most important part of the process? PREPARE that is how. This book is excellent on preparing you for the typical questions you will get from standard interviews. I went on two interviews and got two job offers.

I won't credit the book for 100% for the job offers, but I will say it helped me prepare for my interviews and understand the reasons behind the questions I was being asked. This information was helpful and I recommend this book to every job seeker with an interview lined up. It definitely helped me and I got some questions in the book during my interviews.

Hope this helps.

I am so pleased I purchased this book and I definitely recommend it. I consider this book to be a must-have for anyone serious about preparing for rigorous interviews. It addressed all of the key things I had big questions about-from how to dress in an interview to how to follow up after an interview. The section about informational interviewing was especially good at providing perspectives that I had never considered, and I feel that How to Interview Like a Top MBA has made me much more prepared for going into job interviews-both formal and informational-and doing excellently.

Shelly Leanne does an excellent job in providing important insights in How To Interview Like a Top MBA. The book will be useful for those in business as well as other fields. It seems as if it would have been hard in the market of interview preparation books to write something novel, but this book accomplishes that wonderfully. I greatly enjoyed the range of topics covered - from how to do research about a job and industry before you try to interview for a job, to how to deal with tough questions. The sample Q&A section is very useful. I highly recommend this book.

I just finished this book, and find it to be poorly written, and carelessly laid out. At the end of each section there are comments by people who are "in the industry". These comments are repetitive to the subject covered in the pages prior, and it seems that either the authors writing was tailored to fit the "industry experts", or vice versa. The sample answers to the sample interview questions seem too cut and paste, and often site examples that are not applicable to most applicants.

Not an awful book, but definitely not up to my standards.

Am already an MBA,so I don't really need to "interview like one", but was gathering info as a precursor to a new job search. The info in this book is average in that some is very good, and some is very bad, hence the middle road grade. The first half of the book I found basically good. The author should have stopped there. However they elected to go on and give answers to the top 100 "tough" questions asked in interviews.

Will save you having to plod through those 100 or so pages. The questions are not "tough", but rather basic.
Your responses to any of them should match this criteria:
Tell them things that show you are a good fit for the job.
Be positive not negative.
Show that you have knowledge about the company, its culture, and its needs and how you could be an asset to them.
Done.

Unfortunately, we get hammered with the same message over and over for a hundred pages worth, telling no more than what I just did in a paragraph. To make it worse, most of the answers given, are repeated versions, of a previous question, cut and pasted into the next question with only a word or two revised. For example, What makes you a good fit for this company, and what makes you a good fit for this position have essentially identical answers with only "company", and "position" changed. Its not only boring, but it is lazy writing. Do you really want to wade through that? Personally I found Barron's books on interviewing better overall, you might want to check those out.

I found this book to be an excellent reading to prepare for an interview. All the chapters are important and to the point. I prepared for two interviews with this book and the interviewers were impressed with me. The recommendation of knowing as much as you can about the industry, company and job is priceless. I went as far as to prepare a marketing report on one interview. Good book, buy it, it is definetely worth the money.

Used this extensively when preparing for interviews during first year of MBA-landed multiple offers, not just because of this book but it surely helped. I have found it useful even for changing jobs (not just useful for recent graduates as one reviewer said). Came back to Amazon to purchase yet another copy as I have given away two previous copies I owned. Best best, flip through it in a store like Barnes and Noble and if you like it, come buy online...