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Prepare for the Personal Interview for CAT


The Personal interview is the final step of selection into the IIMs and other top B-schools. In spite months of preparation, no one can predict the kind questions you can encounter in your personal interview. The personal interview is done to check your inter-personal and communicative skills and also to know your vision and ambition as MBA aspirant. So here are some popular personal interview questions and commonly asked topics in the IIM personal interview.
The most important, unavoidable questions that you are going to face is “Tell me something about yourself”. This question is going to set the tone and pace of the interview.

The personal interviews are basically designed for two types of candidates – ones with work experience and ones with no work experience.

Candidates with work experience

The most commonly asked questions for candidates with work experience consists of topics pertaining to:

  • Job description and responsibilities
  • Work environment and you relationship with your managers and peers.
  • Accomplishments, stratagem you faced at work place.
  • Career progression plans- both short term and long term goals.
  • Corroborate instances of creativity, leadership, where you took the bull by the horns and fraternization.
  • Target industry/ company and current industry & its competitors

If you are working in a nutshell, make sure that you are thorough with your profile, your competitors and history of the company.

Candidates with little or no work experience

Since there are very few instances where you would have demonstrated your managerial skills, other wider ranges of topics could be asked.

  • Questions about your undergraduate subjects. Be extremely thorough with your UG discipline courses. IIMs interview panel would grill you on elementary statistics, number theory basics, some fundamentals of trigonometry, geometry.
  • The ineluctable question is – ‘Why MBA, Why not get some work experience?’
  • Questions on Current Affairs/ General Awareness: your perspectives, how to improve/modify the scenario.
  • Questions on hobbies/extracurricular activities, if you have stated any. Unless you have an avid knowledge about your hobbies DO NOT mention them. If you say watching movies is your hobby, you should be comfortable talking about movie genres, famous directors, movie styles, impact of cinema on social culture.

Practice Mock PIs : We at BYJU’S provide you with the best exposure to personal interviews for the CAT with wide ranges of topics and scenarios which would make sure you stand out during the event and ace it on the D-Day.