How to use commercial awareness in interviews
The 2 types of way to develop your commercial awareness to use in interviews in order to stand out
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How to use Commercial Awareness in your interviews
When I was prepping for my internship and grad scheme applications, I was always told that showing commercial awareness is crucial to passing interviews. But I always wondered ‘How do you use commercial awareness in interviews?’.
I know this is a question many of you probably wonder too and with application season now back in full flow, it means interviews will be coming up soon and the onus on developing your commercial awareness skills is ever important.
So how do you use commercial awareness in interviews? Well, there are 2 main ways to research and use commercial awareness in interviews.
Company-first approach
This approach is focused on researching news about the company and how it operates.
There are 4 key things you need to understand: what the company does (in particular your department), who their clients are, what markets they operate in and how they make their money (business model). You need to then go and do news research on each of these 4 areas to understand if there has been any relevant news which has impacted any of them.
Let’s go through an example: let’s say you’re applying to an investment bank. Using the 4 key areas above I would research to find out if they focus on M&A deals more than IPOs. I would then research what industries they focus their M&A deals on - do they specialise in conducting M&A transactions in certain industries e.g. FMCG or Financial Services. I would research how the market is doing for that industry in terms of deal flow - is the number of M&A deals increasing or decreasing? How is this impact the company’s revenue and deal flow?
Industry-first Approach
This approach focuses on identifying what are the key trends happening in that industry and then looking at how that impacts the company you are applying for. This works well for industries like consulting where they work with clients across and are more are more sensitive to wider global trends.
So let’s use an example of consulting. A current big global trend is AI and the potential use cases for it. You can relate it to the company by talking about how it will impact their clients (what will AI do to their industry), their business model (what offerings have they prepared for companies based on AI) or even better find out if the company has issued any information about how they plan to use AI (e.g Accenture CEO announcement of $3bn investment into AI over next 3 years).
There you go, now when it comes to commercial awareness you have the template to develop yours to ace your interviews!
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