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The Most Overlooked Way of Improving Case Performance
No comments · Posted by James in Case Interview
Interview others.
One way to start is to interview experienced interviewers. When students start preparing for case interviews, they often ask upperclassmen who have gone through the interview process to give them cases. This is great: you want experienced people to deliver the case in a realistic case and to give you tips. However, take this dialogue one step further: and to switch roles. They might be confused initially, but just go with it. Watching a live interview from someone you know personally (aka not the perfectly delivered interview at the BCG recruiting session) is a great way to learn. You can pick up subtleties that are really easily overlooked when you are the interviewee, such as when to pause, when to ask questions, etc. You can also ask these experienced interviewees to explain their thought process during more difficult parts of the case to get a realistic understanding of how to tackle these challenges.
Additionally, offer to interview your peers when OCR season begins. This allows you to learn about beginner mistakes, which again are hard to notice when you’re in the hot seat yourself. If they do remarkably well at a point you completely tripped on, think about what they did in terms of good structure and thought process that allowed them to smoothly move over that point.
Interviewing others gets you into the mindset of the interviewer, and can help you become more self-critical during your preparations.
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The Art of The Behavioral/Fit Interview (Questions & Answers)
2 Comments · Posted by Robert in Case Interview
Here are questions you will most definitely receive in the behavioral interview. This breaks down each question into what exactly is the interviewer looking for and the key points you should hit to make sure the interviewer can see you are a good fit. Here are some general rules:
- Answers should be concise! Ideal answers are around 1:30 to 2 min.
- Even fit questions require structure. More on this within each question below.
1. Tell me about yourself
Most interviews will open with this question. You need to make use of this opportunity to tell your story. What the interviewer is really asking with this question is:
- Why are you here today? (Why are you interviewing with our firm specifically?)
- What are your goals? (What is it that you can gain by joining our firm?)
- Why consulting now?
If you have never worked in consulting before or worked in a very unrelated industry (ie. banking, software development, etc.) this is the place to explain why you are suddenly trying to switch into consulting.
2. Why do you want to do consulting?
There is a 99.99% probability you will get this question. The interviewer wants to know not only whether you can handle consulting but whether you will truly love doing it. There are several things you want to emphasize:
You love the nature of the work
- Diverse exposure to industries, diverse experiences in functions
- Like big challenges, enjoy the problem solving process
- Fits with your long term goals
Just mentioning these generic points is not enough since everyone simply can and will do that. You need to draw from your own experiences to demonstrate these points through stories that will stick in the interviewer’s head. Refer to a project that required you to break down an ambiguous problem. Talk about how you enjoyed the process and that you think that consulting can provide more of such experiences.
3. Why this firm?
The more specific you can be, the better. You might want to break it down into 2 or 3 key points. For example:
- Type of work (firm is strong in your area of interest, it has your preferred location, etc.)
- People (you liked the people you’ve met, they are not only smart but also fun, etc.)
- Philosophy and culture (travel policy, hierarchical structure)
4. Tell about a time when you failed
Many people have a hard time with this one because they believe revealing a failure might contradict some of the strengths they’ve mentioned or make them look bad. This is absolutely not true if you do it right. You should pick a failure that you recovered from.
How to pick a good failure
- Pick a failure that is unrelated to the job requirement. Hobbies provide a great pool of examples (sports, music, debate, programming projects, etc.) You can talk comfortably about these failures rather casually since they are not deal breakers for the job.
- Pick a failure that shows you applied what you learned from the failure in achieving success the second time around. This demonstrates you have a positive attitude towards failure. You believe many successes are not possible without first failing and learning from the failure, and you have real life examples that demonstrate how a failure was instrumental in the success of future project.
How to tell the story
- Set up the situation. What was the project at hand? What were you trying to achieve?
- Describe the failure. Paint a picture of what you failed to do.
- Explain what you learned from the failure. Make sure these are valuable learnings that you were able to apply in the future.
- Explain how you recovered from the failure. A recovery does not necessary have to occur in the same project. Many entrepreneurs completely crash and burn in a startup and recover in a different and new startup. You can bring up an example of how you applied the learnings from your failure in achieving success in another endeavor.
5. Tell me about a big challenge you have taken on. (Hardest problem you’ve ever had to solve)
How to tell the story
- Layout the context of the situation. State the challenge up front in once concise sentence. What was the project and why was it so challenging? Why did you take on this challenge? Were you required to or did you proactively seek it?
- Demonstrate what you did and how you tackled the challenge. Be detailed. Explain how you made this task less of a challenge by breaking it into smaller more manageable pieces.
- Showcase the results. Quantify the results with NUMBERS. Don’t just say the task eventually went well. Say something like, “… resulting in a 20% improvement”, “… had a turnout of over 600 attendees”, “… raised over $10,000″, etc.
Key points you want to convey
- You take initiative
- You take on big challenge, big reward problems
- You can put structure around ambiguity
- You are results oriented. Show the facts!
6. What is your biggest weakness?
Pick a weakness you have made improvement on. A lot of guides tell you to pick a weakness that is not related to the job and they give some STUPID examples of “I tend to forget things”, “I have a hard time remembering names”, “”. If these sounds stupid to you, that’s because they are! You won’t be able to fool your interviewer with these. More reasonable and less silly weaknesses would be things like taking on more than you can handle or being too self-reliant.
How are you working on getting better at this area? Structure your process of improving as a work plan. Show them your thought process when you encounter these situations in the future.
Again, STRUCTURE, STRUCTURE, STRUCTURE! I cannot emphasize this enough. This is such a general communication skill that will help you not only the interview, but on the job, and in all life situations. If you currently don’t have structure in the way you communicate, this is a good opportunity to develop the skill.
behavioral interview · behavioral interview questions · consulting interview · fit interview · fit interview questions · interview questions
At first glance, market sizing questions are often the most intimidating questions that people come across during the interview process. After all, most interviewees have come across the types of business problems in the news or in class, but no one really thinks about wacky questions like ‘how many pancakes were eaten in New York last week?’ Even on the more ‘normal’ side – market sizing questions within normal case questions – interviewees often freeze up at the thought of tackling this ambiguous estimation question.
The 3 Steps
You have probably heard that there is ‘no right answer’ to these questions, and that’s probably right. But there’s definitely a right way to approach these problems, which is with structure.
1) Take a minute and structure your answer
After interviewing a lot of juniors going through the case interview process for the first time, I realized something peculiar: almost everyone took a minute to structure the problem before a ‘normal’ case, but almost no one took the time to structure the problem when a case question came up (either one within a normal case question or a standalone question).
This minute is critical in helping you break down the variables and refine the process, the next steps in helping you get the final answer.
2) Break down the variables
It may be helpful to review the purpose of the market sizing question, which is to see whether or not you can break down and explain a seemingly complex concept in a simple way. You know your end goal (the case question), so you want to work backwards and use a straightforward approach to break down the relevant variables, which will be a mix of assumptions/commonly known assumptions and variables that you have to calculate from these assumptions.
Pancake Example
Blue is a number you assume/know, green is a number you calculate
Goal: You want to figure out the number of pancakes eaten in New York last week
Number of pancakes eaten last week = Number of pancakes eaten per day x Days per week (7)
Number of pancakes eaten per day = Number of people who eat pancakes x Pancakes per person (3)
Number of people who eat pancakes = Number of people who eat breakfast x % of people who eat pancakes (0.20)
Number of people who eat breakfast = % of people who eat breakfast (0.80) x # of people in New York (10 million)
As you see, working backwards in a methodical way can lead you to a set of straightforward calculations. Throughout the process, you will be using a mix of variables you estimate/know and variables that you calculate from the step before. Obviously you want to present the structure in the ‘forward’ manner, as shown below.
Sample dialogue:
So our goal is to figure out to the total number of pancakes eaten last week, and here’s how I’m going to break it down: first we’ll start with the population of New York, then we’ll figure out the number of people who eat pancakes, and then after considering how many they eat a day and the 7 days per week, we’ll be able to get the final answer. How does that sound?
3) Refine the process
In part 2, you have the basic foundation to get you through the market sizing question. To really stand out, you want to refine the process by segmenting variables. This step both allows you to get more accurate estimations as well as to show off your creativity. This step is more of an art than science, since it depends a lot on the category of your case question.
Pancake Example
Number of pancakes eaten last week = Number of pancakes eaten per day x Days per week (7)
Refined-> Have a separate calculation for weekdays and weekends (brunch heavy days)
Number of people who eat pancakes = Number of people who eat breakfast x % of people who eat pancakes (0.20)
Refined-> Have separate calculations for different types of people, such as kids, adults (eat the least amount of pancakes by %), and elderly (eat the most by %).
Why do I think structure is so important? During one of my Bain interviews, I laid out my structure, did one of the initial calculations, and then my interviewer stopped me and said I was done. He saw what he needed – a structured approach, and the ability to do basic calculations. Obviously, we can’t help you with the latter 
case interview frameworks · consulting interview frameworks · crack the case · market size estimation · Market Sizing · market sizing question
Oftentimes, people lump all consulting interviews into the “case interview.” Although all consulting firms use the case method to some extent, each company has a distinctive style of conducting their interviews.
A few examples…
McKinsey
Command and control. Your structure up from doesn’t have to be that elaborate – after all, the case interviewer is going to be asking you all the questions. Be prepared for a lot of “Anything else?” McKinsey loves to see a ton of brainstorming and creativity.
(A side note: I heard McKinsey loves buzzwords. I didn’t hear this until after my interview and still got an offer, but it may be worth it to investigate this a bit more).
Bain
Bain generally has shorter interviews. You can almost always expect a market sizing question (or two!) in your first round. A lot of interviews are based off of the interviewer’s experiences, rather than a set interview materials.
BCG
You can always expect diagrams and slides to work off of. This means that there is always roughly a ‘right’ answer. This could be great or frustrating, depending on your personal preferences.
These are just a few brief tips on the Big 3. Spending a good 15 minutes or so to find out the style of each company you interview will really boost the productivity of your preparation. Good luck!
bain · bcg · Case Interview · case method · interview style · Market Sizing · mckinsey
