Selections Interview with Johanna Hellborg, Admissions Manager for the MBA Program, INSEAD

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Selections: Who is the ideal applicant? What qualities and characteristics do you look for? How do you gauge them?
Hellborg: It is difficult for us to talk about the ideal candidate because we are all about diversity. So we welcome a very different profile. The common pattern is that they are bright people. Even more specifically for our program, they are people who like intensity. This is a very intense program. They are international people. They are extremely interested in other cultures. That is one of the main things they will learn here at INSEAD: to do business with other cultures.

Selections: How is your program an intense program?
Hellborg: This is a 10-month program, but it is covering the full MBA, so it is very intense. They are fitting a lot of work into 10 months.

Selections: What role does the GMAT play in the admissions process? What does a GMAT score tell you about an applicant?
Hellborg: The GMAT score tells us about the academic capacity. Because of the intensity of our program, we want to make sure people can follow our program. We will look at the GMAT just to give us a hint of the academic capacity. It also helps us to know, since we only have international students, their capacity to understand, analyze, and synthesize in English, which would be shown by the Verbal score. The Quantitative score would show us their ability to succeed in the calculus and statistics courses that we have in the beginning of the curriculum. So the GMAT score tells us about the academic capacity. That is one side. Then we will look at rest of the application. That means you could have a very good GMAT and be rejected because you don’t have the managerial potential or international work experience. So in the first step, the GMAT really shows us that they will hopefully be able to follow the curriculum.

Selections: What role does the interview play?
Hellborg: Alumni do all of the interviews. Not everyone is interviewed, but everyone we accept has been interviewed. So there is a prescreening. About half of the pool is interviewed.

The interview plays quite an important role, but we look at all of the aspects of the application. The interview is part of that, but it is not the only essential one. The interviews mainly will check for us the fit between the personality of the applicant and INSEAD. Because the interviewers are alumni, they know what spirit and what kind of personality you need to have to be at INSEAD. So they will check for that fit. It is also an opportunity for the candidate to know more about the school because they will be talking to somebody who has been in the program.

All interviews are conducted off campus. They happen all around the world.

Selections: What other measures of potential do you use? How do you measure things such as leadership ability and value to an employer?
Hellborg: For leadership potential, we look at their professional life. Our applicants have, on average, five years of experience, but anywhere from three to seven years of experience. So we will look at that in their professional background. We look at what they are doing. Have they been promoted or assigned new responsibilities? We also ask for recommendations. So the referees will also let us know how they acted in management situations. We also look at their extracurricular activities.

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