Acing Your Bowtie Interview (preparation materials at the end of this post)
At Bowtie, we aim to provide the opportunity for each and every of our candidate to shine during the interview process.
We know that interview can be stressful, whether you are a fresh graduate or an experienced professional, and we write this article to give you some tips and directions on how to prepare for your interview with us.
1. Research, research and research
Before any interview, it’s important to know as much as possible about the company you are interviewing with.
As a company that values transparency, we made information about us available to all our candidates from the start.
In one of our first emails, we included links to our mission, vision and values, press releases, industry papers, and news coverage. Do read through those! These are good materials to start, and we do expect our candidates to take it from there and do further researches on our products and surf through our website.
Apart from the company, it is equally important to understand the interview process. We share our interview process upfront and just ask us any questions if you do not understand any part of that — it is totally okay!
Some candidates would recap what we shared with them to make sure that they are getting it right. I would recommend you to do the same too 😉
2. Frameworks for answering questions during interviews
Before going into some useful frameworks for answering questions, I’d like to highlight the importance of understanding the question.
When in doubt, paraphrase the questions or simply ask the interviewers to elaborate to make sure that you get the question. It is a desirable quality to always seek for clarity!
Tackling Behaviour-Based Interview
Instead of asking you how many ping pong can be fitted into an aircraft, we believe in the more systematic approach of behaviour-based interview.
Oftentimes, we see people with great skills and experiences struggle to share what they know, did and how they handled a situation in the past.
If you are not confident in your “storytelling” or have the tendency to become loss for words under pressure, the STAR method may help you.
The STAR method is a structured manner of responding to a behavioural interview question by discussing the specific situation, task, action, and result of the situation you are describing.
Situation: Describe the a specific event or situation that you were in or the task that you needed to accomplish. Be sure to give enough detail for the interviewer to understand.
Task: What goal were you working toward?
Action: Describe the actions you took to address the situation with an appropriate amount of detail and keep the focus on YOU. What specific steps did you take and what was your particular contribution? Be careful that you don’t describe what the team or group did when talking about a project, but what you actually did. Use the word “I,” not “we” when describing actions.
Result: Describe the outcome of your actions and don’t be shy about taking credit for your behavior. What happened? How did the event end? What did you accomplish? What did you learn?
Make sure your answer contains multiple positive results. Make sure that you follow all parts of the STAR method. Be as specific as possible at all times, without rambling or including too much information. See this guide for more about preparing for behaviour-based interview and the STAR method.
Preparing for a presentation interview
For senior candidates, we also ask them to do a presentation to share their ideas with the audience. A few things we observe:
a. Make sure that you understand the topic, the objective and your audience. This sounds basic but you will be surprised by how many people miss out on these!
b. Practice and time yourself — most of our presentation are set to 20 mins, but we see that most interviewees overrun. We understand that you have a lot to share, but it is also easy to lose your audience when you overload them with information. You can decide on what are the key points you want to bring up and leave some of the details to the QnA session (which we usually budget for 25–30 mins).
c. Always support your ideas with past experience or data or research — we are not looking for a lecture of marketing 101/ design thinking, but we want to see how you would apply/ adapt framework and use your “tools”. It would be good to leverage on the STAR method above when you approach the presentation topic.
While we are on this, there are a lot more tips available online, for instance, this article by glassdoor.
3. Practice your response but do not over-script that
When you Google you can find endless lists of common interview questions and/or behavioural based questions and it’s a good starting point for your preparation, especially if you are not good at thinking on your feet under pressure (like me!).
While it is good to have your materials (examples, directions, even past projects) ready, it is equally important to not over-script or try to hard to preempt all the possible follow-up questions — some times your interviewers may change the direction after your answer, having an overly scripted answer also make you sound less “genuine” or more robotic, and also make people wonder if you do not get the question or cannot stay on being concise and precise.
4. Creating the right setup — equipment check and dress appropriately
Nowadays, many interviews are conducted virtually — make sure that you have stable internet, electricity supply and a reliable laptop.
For on-site interview, arrives 5–15 minutes is always advisable.
Dress-code-wise, we always recommend smart causal for non-client facing role, and business-causal for external party facing role. Dress in a way that lift up your confidence, but not something that make you feel stiff, uneasy, or under-dressed.
5. Keep calm and breath
If you are like me, you may get nervous speaking to strangers (who are judging you). Reserch for ways to calm yourself down — may it be listening to music to pump yourself up, doing breath exercise, or just to read. There will inevitably be something that can help!
Our team at Bowtie are very friendly and we do want you to feel relaxed 😌We don’t bite!
6. Follow-up
Follow-up comes in different type, mainly to supplement information, to reiterate your interest, to check in on the progress, or to share your feedback — all this give us more information about you.
Your follow up can be as important as your interview, sometimes it may even “save” you. Follow-up action usually does not require a lot of effort and a good way to earn yourself some extra points!
Interviewing is not easy, and I hope the above can help!
Good luck and enjoy your interview!
Looking to join a purpose-driven company to build a meaningful career? Check out our career site today!
Interview preparation materials:
- Company website (would recommend you to take a look at our press releases/blog section too!)
- Series B press release https://www.bowtie.com.hk/blog/en/bowtie-series-b1-round/
- Series B Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-10-19/hong-kong-s-bowtie-life-secures-funding-to-fuel-growth-plans
- Series A press release: https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/19/bowtie-raises-30m/
- An article on “whether Bowtie can make it” by DigFin
- “Ecosystems and platforms: How insurers can turn vision into reality” by McKinsey & Co.
- Sia Partner ranked Bowtie’s digital Insurance Platform 2nd in the world: coverage by SCMP
Tech / Platform roles:
