Communications Best Practices in Case Interviews
The basics of communication in business should come into your interview. The vast majority of candidates get nervous and forget best practices. You want to reduce the cognitive load on your interviewer by thinking about the little things as you move through your case question.
Introduce the List (at multiple points)
Don’t refer to number in list
Avoid Former & Latter
Conclude with the List
Let me tell/show you more…
Introduce the List - Every time you have a list: Insights, Users, Pain Points and Solutions, introduce your list. It makes you sound more put together and executive without sounding overly frameworky.
But, Don’t refer to number in List - When you make the list, don’t make future references, even just 90 to 120 seconds later, to just the number the interviewer will not necessarily remember. If they are taking lots of notes maybe, but don’t bet on that.
Avoid Former vs Latter References - Yep, you sound smart because you know how to use Former vs Latter in a sentence. BUT the average person (and thus interviewer) can’t remember which is which and so they are spending the next few sentences trying to remember which comes first, former or latter. And so they miss they next 30 to 200 seconds of your case. So you might feel good about yourself but you lost them. Keep it simple, name your concepts and refer back to those names that make sense and don’t require the interviewer to do memory gymnastics to figure out what you meant.
Conclude with the List - If you made a list, use the bookend oratory technique and remind them what the items on the list were before moving forward.
You should be doing this in business anyway. Just keep it up in an interview. If you don’t do it at work, start practicing it today.
