foreign thank you for coming to interview with us today let's just go ahead and get started with a quick introduction could you tell me a little bit about yourself yeah absolutely first of all thank you so much for having me it's an honor to be here so I've been about myself I'm originally from Morocco where I lived pretty much my whole life I then came to Boston and studied industrial engineering at Northeastern University while I was in college I did a few different internships I did technical ones at a local power plant and at Amazon
Robotics and I also did one in Consulting at the Boston Consulting Group and was also the president of the Consulting Club at my University so really I'm someone who enjoys both the business side of things but I also do have a passion for technology so down the line my goal is to start my own education technology company in my home country Morocco so I can make education more affordable through the use of tech and outside of like school and work I also do magic tricks on college campuses oh wow that sounds like a very impressive
background so why exactly are you interested in interviewing with our consulting firm yeah my reasons for joining your consulting firm are twofold number one I think the exposure to the strategy work is very appealing to me and then second the opportunities for externship is also one that I'm highly looking at so on the strategy side I know that your consulting firm is one of the few that gives you exposure to c-suite Executives and to strategy type projects early on in your career which is something that I won't find at other companies then the second reason
is the opportunity to do externships so as I mentioned I am interested in the education sector down the line and I know that your company offers the opportunity to work for six months at a public sector type company or a non-profit out in Africa focused on education so I think those are some of the things that high appeal to me in your company okay awesome that's good to know so now we'll dive into a little bit more behavioral questions so could you tell me about a time where you solved a difficult problem that's a good
question um I think the moment that I can think of is when I was working at the electrical power plant we were trying to launch a new department and my task was to essentially Source A supplier typically we work with a supplier of generators from France but this time around their capacity and also their pricing did not match our budget and what we were looking for so what I ended up doing is I ended up creating a large list of all the different suppliers that are out there and then I Found A supplier in South
Korea that I negotiated with and also was able to bring them in and Implement all of the new generator technology so that was able to save us a total cost of 10 from the total project and it was a huge success at the end of it awesome thank you for sharing that so next could you tell me about like one or two of your key strengths so I would say the biggest two would probably be my ability to persuade people and then the second would be leadership I would say those are the biggest two okay
so could you dive a little bit more into that first one your ability to persuade persuade maybe tell me about a time you were able to convince someone to change their mind yeah so what I can think of is when I was working at Amazon one of the big projects that we're trying to launch is the First new robotic facility but it came at a time when covet had just hit and I was unable to essentially Source a lot of the material that we typically get from our Japanese supplier so the vice president of supply
chain at the time his executive decision was to push the launch and push it out for a few months instead what I decided to do is try to see if there's a way to still keep the launch at the same time and I looked at some of our existing facilities already and try to Source some of the unused material from there so that we don't delay the launch so initially the vpu of supply chain wanted to delay the launch but through the analysis through explaining to him that we could Source it from the other facilities
I was able to convince him to not delay the launch and instead change the strategy to still be able to get the facility right out on time okay great so now we'll dive into that second strength you had mentioned and could you tell me about a time that you demonstrated strong leadership skills yeah um the the one that I can think of is when I was working at the Boston Consulting Group there I was leading a big real estate occupancy project where I wanted to essentially showcase what the attendance of each office looked like what
I had to do was then automate the process for a lot of the partners so that they have like a dashboard that they can like manipulate and change and look at the data so I had to work with a large team of 15 different developers software engineers and data Engineers so I worked with them to essentially gather the data clean the data and process it and put it and visualize it through Tableau so that was a great opportunity where I was essentially working with different teams putting game plans putting timelines for them and as I
mentioned at the end of it it was a very strong project and the partners were very happy with the dashboard and it was a good like managerial experience for me at the time as well awesome that sounds like a very worthwhile experience so now that we've talked a little bit about your strengths maybe you could tell me about a weakness that you face in the workforce yeah I'd say the biggest one is probably my ability to prioritize when there's a lot of conflicting and Computing priorities the big one in that case would be when say
there's three or four different projects and all of them are high urgency or high priority sometimes as someone who's still very Junior in their career I still don't have that business sense on which one I should tackle first but I've been trying to improve on it and work on it so what I do now is I typically just chat with my manager and try to understand where the business focus should be sometimes even just directly ask on how I should prioritize some of the work so I have been improving on that a little bit and
I think with some seniority I would hopefully be able to get there and understand what I should start with first okay definitely makes sense so those are all the questions that I had for you today before we end do you have any questions for me yeah I think I have two big questions um I think the first one is as you know there's a lot of big push for like the remote Workforce right now and as a consulting company there's a lot of work working directly with clients who are coming in in person to visit
the clients do you think that the Consulting business model would necessarily change now that we are in a remote environment I think that's a big one and then the second question that I had for you is what are kind of the big goals of your consulting company by say 2025 what are the big Milestones that you guys are hoping to achieve and is they International expansion one of those big Milestones that you're looking at [Music] great so I think Sia did an amazing job with that interview there are four main things that I think he
did really well first he was very poised and confident throughout the entire interview we were going back and forth and I was asking him a lot of questions but he came back very prepared for each question second he used the star method very well I could really understand the situation task action and result and he introduced each story in a way that made me understand what he was saying third he was very concise in each of his stories and lastly he ended with some very thoughtful questions that made it seem like he really cared about
the company and the position overall Zia did a great job and I would accelerate him to the next round [Music]
