23 questions across 7 categories: my standing bank for fit interviews, refined with every process
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A
My Story and Motivation
1Introduce yourself▶
Who I am
▸I'm Firas, an engineer by training: I studied mechanical engineering at AUB and hold an MBA from INSEAD.
▸I've spent the last 10 years in the GCC, and for almost 6 years now I've been in consulting, where I'm a senior manager.
▸My work has centered on three areas: strategy and implementation support, public-private partnerships and privatization, and most recently AI-driven transformation.
Strategy through to delivery
▸The majority of my time was spent on strategy and implementation, covering the full range:
–At the top, setting strategy for a government entity or national champion.
–In the middle, standing up the operating model.
–At the ground level, working at the initiative level with performance reviews.
Financial services: both sides of the table
▸I've served traditional financial services clients, such as development banks, where my work was on strategy definition.
▸I've also done financial services work with non-traditional clients, such as municipalities and ministries, where I worked on PPP transactions, structuring and executing PPP and investment deals.
The AI turn
▸I've delivered two projects with AI at the core: one regarding compliance public service redesign, and the second as part of a strategy project where I developed an AI-powered dashboard for performance management.
▸Because of these two projects, I pushed myself into the topic over the past six months.
▸I've been building agentic applications with my own hands, end to end, because I'm very curious about it.
▸AI is already becoming the present; we can no longer say it's the future.
2Why have you left Kearney?▶
The layoff and pivot
▸I was laid off from Kearney in 2025 after six months of low utilization with no pipeline in my focus areas—PPPs and investments, and development finance.
▸I also had a long leave for three months, so effectively I had zero utilization for the entire performance review cycle, making me low-hanging fruit for reductions.
▸Instead of waiting for the next role, I took ownership of my career and did contracting work over the past nine months—not full-time, but on my own terms.
The strategy and what I gained
▸My rationale was to maximize my earnings during this period, and more importantly, to choose the projects I wanted to work on—something that wasn't possible at Kearney.
The AI projects
▸I delivered two projects centered around AI. The first was a public service reform around AI, deploying AI in the process and workflow of the service.
▸The second was a typical strategy project with one AI use case deployment—a dashboard for periodic performance reviews that reads from client databases and synthesizes periodic executive reports with natural language, cutting work that would typically take weeks into a few hours, including validation.
3Why do you want to work for this firm?▶
Why Financial Services (The Core Reason)
▸I wanted financial services because I buy numbers, not fluff. I don't like selling fluffy ideas; I like selling something concrete: numbers, models, assumptions, things you can actually hold.
▸It's not just about doing well for clients. I want to learn and build real value, a value proposition for the future.
The Journey
▸I've been interested in financial services since I joined Kearney post-MBA.
▸But at that time, post-COVID, there weren't many FS projects. I landed in one platform doing investments and PPPs—which is adjacent to FS but not formally FS. It was under the government practice.
▸There, I developed strategies for PPPs across sectors and worked on multiple PPP transactions.
▸In late 2024, early 2025, I took a LOA.
▸When I came back, I made a deliberate decision: I need to fully pivot into financial services.
▸I aligned with the partners, Mukund and Naman, on a condition: I land one project first, support them on business development, close the deal, and then fully transition.
▸But that never happened because the market kept getting worse every day.
4What are your career objectives?▶
The arc
▸My career has run almost twelve years in two chapters: five years in heavy operations, then five-plus years in strategy consulting, industry agnostic.
▸The next five years are the third chapter: specialization. For me, that's the intersection of financial services and technology, because that's where the disruption is: neobanks, BNPL, AI deployment. The future of finance is not traditional.
The objective
▸I'm mid-level today, and mid-level is exactly where careers stagnate when people can't show outsized results. I don't intend to stagnate.
▸So my objective for the next five years is simple: deliver results big enough to unlock the senior transition, partnership in consulting or executive level in corporate.
The closer
▸What I'm looking for is the platform to make that happen. And if I don't find it in corporate, I'll build it myself.
5Why a boutique consulting company?Why leave a global platform for a small firm▶
Answer to be drafted.
B
Financial Services and BD Credentials
6What is your experience in financial services?Including: what percentage of your total work is it?▶
Answer to be drafted.
7What is your business development experience?▶
Answer to be drafted.
8Why should we hire you over someone with deeper sector experience?e.g. an FS specialist from a Big 4▶
Answer to be drafted.
C
Delivery and Project Deep-Dives
9Walk me through one engagement end to end, in depthThe Tech Fund: must survive 10 minutes of follow-ups▶
Answer to be drafted.
10Talking points on each of the bullets on my CV▶
Answer to be drafted.
11Tell me about a project that went wrong or off track. What did you do?▶
Answer to be drafted.
12How do you handle ambiguity or shifting priorities?A standard screen at young, fast-moving firms▶
Answer to be drafted.
D
Leadership and People
13Have you managed teams before? How big?▶
Answer to be drafted.
14What is your management style?▶
Answer to be drafted.
15How do you develop junior team members?Coaching examples, not org charts▶
Answer to be drafted.
16Tell me about a time you disagreed with a senior stakeholder or client. How did you manage it?▶
Answer to be drafted.
E
AI and Differentiation
17AI experience: what have you actually built and delivered?▶
Answer to be drafted.
18How would you bring AI into our client work?The guaranteed follow-up to 16▶
Answer to be drafted.
F
Firm Fit and Closing
19What do you know about us and our clients?Research the firm fresh for each process▶
Answer to be drafted.
20What would you contribute to building the firm, beyond client work?The firm-values and culture question▶
Answer to be drafted.
21My questions for themPartner-round version, not the recruiter list▶
Answer to be drafted.
G
Light Prep Only
22Location commitment and start dateOne-line answer, they may re-test▶
Answer to be drafted.
23A possible mini-caseFramework for one FS transformation topic, e.g. digital transformation of a mid-size bank▶