I Failed Many Consulting Interviews and This is What I Learned
Three Top Tips to pass your Case study during a Management Consulting Interview
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Before starting my MBA at Warwick Business School in September 2020, I spent almost 6 years in Management Consulting in London. Over this time, I worked at three different Consulting Companies (Big 4, Boutique Consultancy, something in between) which means I went through A LOT of interviews (quite a few rejections as well).
As you have probably heard millions of times before, the case interview is the most important part of the recruitment process. You can ace the behavioural part but if you mess up the case you have no chance to get to the next stage/get an offer.
Cases interviews differ depending on the department in the organisation/role you are being considered but overall they test your problem-solving skills, your ability to make a hypothesis and test them and your numeracy ability.
To show your ability to make a hypothesis and break down complex problems, it is important you structure the case at the beginning and make a plan as to how you are going to get to the answer.
Many books on Consulting Interviews will suggest you use some pre-packaged frameworks. They will tell you that you can structure any cases using their frameworks. Let me tell you why this is crap:
- Over the years the cases used by Consulting Firms have become more and more creative (you can hear some very weird cases being presented to candidates). These cases do not fit into the classic frameworks and you will look silly if you try to.
- Interviewers are aware of these pre-packaged frameworks. They were once candidates and they probably have read the same books you have. As such, they will recognise you are using a framework and you will lose points.
A much better approach is showing you are capable of analytical and creative thinking that you can use to solve the specific question at hand. Further, to help you structure your thinking you should define some very high-level principles to help your thinking process.
There are three high-level principles I recommend using:
Be sure you are answering the right question
It is very easy to misunderstand the problem you have been asked to solve. Further, even if you have understood the problem, you may lose track of it in your thought process and get off a tangent.
To avoid that, make sure to double-check the objective of the case with the interviewer at the beginning, and always go back to the initial question to make sure you are on track/you are not including in your structure something that is not relevant for solving the problem.
What? So what? Then what?
I was hoping to avoid using a Consulting buzzword but the benefit of including it outweighs the resulting loss of dignity.
What: make sure you have a precise idea of what is that you are including in your structure. Vague and unclear statements should be left out from your structure. This is because you will have to use each element you include in your framework during the interview. If you are not sure of what you have included, this will become very evident and things will get bad.
So what: you need to know why you believe that the specific element you have included in your structure is relevant/critical to solving the case. Avoid using stuff you don’t really need and focus on what is important.
Then what: as mentioned above you need to use each element of your structure during the interview. Make sure you know in advance how you are going to use the specific component to solve the case.
The different pieces of your structure together will get you to the answer
This is self-explanatory. It is important to make sure that once you go through the different pieces of your structure you will have the answer to the question. If you won’t, it is because you may have missed an important driver of your problem and now is a good time to realise it.
This will hopefully help you land the job of your dream! If you have any questions or comment feel free to contact me!
