Guide to Consulting Recruiting - Part 2

This is an ongoing guide that my friend who recruited consulting at Ross and landed a great gig is writing for GMAT Club. He doesn't want to do this publicly but he will appreciate compensation via PayPal. Just kidding. I hope you all have fun reading it and if you enjoy the post, show him some love through your comments.

Part 2: How to prepare for consulting interviews

Hope you all enjoyed reading part 1 of the consulting job prep thread we posted. In our next article, I want to cover a bit more about the consulting interviews themselves and how I went about preparing for them.

Typically, prospective consultants start thinking about interview preparation in Phase 2 of the entire process (check article 1 for what Phase 2 means). Folks prepare for around 2-3 months before actual interviews, starting mid/end October, going all the way up to internship interviews in early January. This timeline should be similar for most schools, with a couple of weeks variance here or there.

Let me break down the type of interviews consulting firms typically have and talk about how you can prepare for each of them:

1. Behavioral/Fit interview

This type of interview is like the appetizer or desert of consulting interviews. Some firms have 1 such interview in their round 1 or some firms do this in their round 2 interviews, while some do it in both. All firms definitely have either a 30min or 45 min 1-1 behavioral/fit interview.

This type of interview is where firms are looking to learn about you and your resume. They mostly start with the usual “tell me about your yourself/walk me through your resume” or some interviewers want to get creative (also read as cocky) with “tell me why you are here to what’s different about you”. Next set of questions typically focus around aspects of your resume with questions such as “Tell me about a time you showed leadership, when you failed at something, when you were a part of a dysfunctional team, when you analyzed a large data set”. Many firms will inquire further once you provide an answer to them and dig deeper to understand your situation better. Firms also ask questions like, why consulting, why our firm and what career interests you have long term. Most of the interviews I have had have been very conversational, where interviewers also tell me about similar experiences they had in their firm or connect upon a common interest such as camping or a sport.

So how do you prep for this?

- Step 1: Develop a great story about you, about your background, top highlights about your career, reasons for your interests/ career decisions, why you chose to enroll in an MBA program and why you want to do consulting – This is the Kickstarter for the interview. You can spike interest of the interviewer by this and create a base for conversation or follow-up questions the interviewer can ask you after this. Really develop this well! And test it out with peers/2nd years/career office. You will also get the chance to test and evolve this pitch as you do coffee chats with consulting firms. You can gauge feedback for yourself and consider it as you update your “elevator pitch” over the next few months.

- Step 2: Get a list of typical behavioral questions – your career office, 2nd years would have a bunch of excel list of questions floating around and I think they are the perfect starting place for you.

- Step 3: Think of 8-10 strong stories/happenings in your career/life so far. These could be during a project at work, or a personal achievement of yours and across multiple years of your career. Think situations that are elaborate and could potentially be used as stories for different types of questions. Same stories can be used for different questions with a little tweak!

- Step 4: Match the stories with the question bank you have developed. Start elaborating on the stories. Detail the stories in H-CARL (Headline, Context, Action, Result, Learning), or STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, Result). This step is important - WRITE DOWN YOUR STORIES IN DETAIL. Do not give high level bullets and leave it to your on-the-spot confidence. Your delivery and details will never be as awesome as a story defined well in the preparation stage.

- Step 5: Mock, mock and mock! Practice with 2nd years who did consulting interviews – they are your best resource of first-hand guidance of what to expect. Take the feedback, work on it, update your stories and go again. To be super confident and prepared, I would encourage you to do 8-12 mock interviews over 4-6 weeks before the actual interview to lock down your content and delivery.

2. The CASE interview

The main course or entrée of the consulting interview. This will be 50-80% of your evaluation by firms and thereby a must do well requirement for potential offers.

What is a case interview?

A case is a 30-45 minute session where the interviewer will pose a business problem to you and you have to solve that problem in a structured way to reach a recommendation. Most cases should look like this:

Start, 5-8 mins: Prompt, clarifying questions and framework development
Main Case, 10-15 mins: Analyze data, charts and develop insights
Main Case, 10-15 mins: Brainstorming, structuring and do some math
End, 3-5 mins: Summarize and recommendations

From my experiences, I believe firms are looking for these skills/qualities in candidates during the case interview

- Clear and articulate communication – so important!
- Business sense/acumen, not necessarily business or industry knowledge
- Confidence, throughout the interview, even when you feel stuck in the case
- Structure – in your framework/approach and brainstorming

The interviewer, who is always a Manager or above, wants to answer two key question from your interview: Would I want this person on my team? + Can I put this person in front on my client? Hit those two marks, and you most likely will proceed to final rounds / get offers.

How should one prepare for this?

- Step 1: Understand how solving a case looks like. Your school’s consulting club may hold sessions around this. Your career office would have some videos on “ideal case interviews”. There are some books out there too. I recommend ‘Case Interviews for Beginners’ by Stephen Pidgeon – very simple and basic book to get you started on visualizing how an interview may look like.

- Step 2: Understand the split-up components of a case:

 Prompt / Problem Statement
 Clarifying Questions
 Framework / Approach
 Brainstorming
 Math
 Chart Analysis
 Closing / Recommendation

This is just one way to split the components of a case up, I encourage you to find your own as well. This will help you practice every component of a case as you go through your preparation period. I suggest starting with the first three together, sometimes called as ‘Case Starts’. You can start practicing these using case books your consulting club provides. There are case books released every year by all schools and those are a collection of good cases to practice. Another amazing resources our school helped us with access to was RocketBlocks. I would suggest you can practice this step with your peers in your batch and learn from different perspectives on framework development. I would encourage you to read the full case after you solve the case start to start familiarizing yourself with how cases structure charts, math and brainstorming in them.

- Step 3: Rip the Band-Aid – and do your first full case. Do this preferably with an MBA senior who successfully recruited for consulting roles. Create a case tracker and write down all the feedback you got on improvements to be made. That’s it – keep going! Aim to do 2-3 cases every week with MBA seniors or the career office. Update your tracker regularly and every weekend go back to the cases you did and read them in the casebooks. Practice individual areas where you feel you need improvements on like chart reading or math (RocketBlocks is pretty amazing for this).
- Step 4: After completing 7-10 cases (2-3 weeks of casing), ask a peer if you can give a case to them. I learnt so much from giving the cases I had done earlier to my classmates. Seeing varied approaches and thought processes opened my perspectives a lot. Try to give 1-2 cases a week to peers and you can start taking cases from them as well. Remember, use the weekend for self-prep, working on areas of improvement you noted in your tracker. All these mock cases are useless if you are not taking a step back once in a while to improve on areas you aren’t up the curve yet.

- Step 5: Engage consultants in the firms you are networking with to case with you. Many firms have internally designed cases which they give prospective interviewee’s as practice. It starts giving you a flavor for firm-specific styles to customize your prep as an interview approaches.

- That’s it! Don’t lose sight of casing during Christmas break because interviews hit fast as soon as you’re back in the new year. Keep practicing with peers and firms you have interviews with. Take a break when you need to, everyone does! Everyone’s “Magic Case Number” is different, but I have seen most people prepping between 20-30 cases before interview season.

Type of case interviews?

Keeping the essence of a case interview in mind, these are also delivered in different ways by firms. Some firms so virtual round 1 case interviews (video or call only), some firms have a written case in round 2, whereas some firms have group cases in their final rounds too. Ask the recruiters how their interviews look like, as they change every year. But irrespective of the medium and format of the case interview, firms are testing the same things as mentioned above. The preparation also is very much the same but tweaked in the end as you prepare for a specific format of the case interview.

a. Interviewee vs Interviewer led
- Most firms (Bain, BCG, Kearney etc.) use the ‘Interviewee led’ case format, where You as the interviewee are expected to drive the discussion to solve the problem stated to you. You should ask questions pertinent to the case, develop a framework/approach on how you plan to tackle it, develop insights and hypothesis on where you think the problem may like or what the solution may be and finalize a recommendation for the client. You can of course chat and engage with the interviewer and get guidance throughout the case, but the expectation is that you will drive the problem-solving approach in the interview.
- Firms such as McKinsey, Deloitte, EY etc. are known to have ‘Interviewer led’ cases. This just means that the direction the case will take and pertinent sub-question within the broader case will be prompted to you by the interviewer. You will get some guidance to move ahead in the case, but the rest is exactly like an interviewee led case – the brainstorming, analysis, insights etc.
- In reality, I’ve seen most cases being a mix of both formats.

b. Virtual
- Many firms, in an effort to reduce travel and stay costs for interviewers (branded to students as a carbon efficiency initiative (lol)), are conducting round 1 interviews through video or voice calls. This can get a bit challenging and increase the emphasis on clear, concise communication during the interview. You can’t show your working papers to the interviewer, you can exude body language confidence and can’t connect in the same way you could have in an in-person interview. But the essence of the case solving approach remains the same, - communication, structured framework, business sense and confidence. Definitely practice a few of these with your peers if you have such an interview format coming along.

c. Written
- Some firms in their final rounds also do written cases. Typical pattern would be, you are given a large presentation with many slides including the problem statement, data, charts etc. You have one hour to read, analyze and develop a presentation with your recommendation. This is to be made on chart paper in the room. Then for 20 mins you present to 1-2 interviewers and do Q&A based on your presentation. Firms are looking to mimic real-life client presentations and see how you swift through large data sets, make sense of them and structure a presentation. They also want to test you on how you hold through pressure of follow up questions on your presentations, as clients do ask in real-life. The main difference in preparation here is you need to plan how you are going to utilize that 1 hour you have – cause that time management can make or break your interview. Talk to seniors who did such interviews last year to gain more insights if you have a firm who is doing such a format.

d. Group
- Deloitte and EY (as of 2019), in their final round interviews also do a thing called a group case. I never really understood what they got out of it but let me tell you how they go. You are in a group of 4-6 people, who are giving the same prompt and data slides set. You are to read those, discuss the problem with each other, divide some analysis work, prepare a presentation together and present to a team of partners, followed by Q&A. It was similar to the written case I mentioned above but you’re doing this with random people you met on the day of your final round interview in the consulting firm’s office. I THINK they look at your inter-personal skills, how you communicate, give feedback, contribute ideas etc. It always gets annoying as an interviewee as every member of the group wants to outperform and shine as compared to the rest and the whole interview seems like a battle for mandatory facetime participation.

3. Mixed/Combos
Now, the truth is – most firm interviews are a slight combination of behavioral and case interview. Firms can do between 5-20 mins of behavioral questioning before starting a case. This makes the behavioral interview component all the more important and these first few minutes can get your interviewer excited about the case because he was impressed with you or dampen the interviewer’s energy since you weren’t articulate, or your stories weren’t solid.

Closing Personal Opinion: I think even case interviews are FIT interviews only. Even if you weren’t able to solve the case in the manner defined and goofed up on some math but you were engaged with the interviewer, you showed impressive problem-solving skills, had creative ideas in brainstorming sessions and maintained composure and confidence throughout the interview – you will most likely proceed / get an offer. Your personality and communication skills have to shine through in both sets of interviews and I personally believe those softer aspects are weighed more than whether you were able to get through and solve the case as it was intended to.

Hope this helped give an overview as you start your preparation! Good Luck!