Our Unique Case Interview Prep Approach

Episode #11, Fridays with Firmsconsulting

In the previous episode, entitled “The Right Way to Start Case Interview Preparation”, we discussed the 3 foundational skills you need before you should start tackling full cases. If you missed that episode, go and watch it right now as you need those insights to fully benefit from this video.

In this episode we explain the general case interview prep sequence you can follow after you have mastered the 3 foundational skills.

Of course, the case interview prep approach has to be tailored for each person. As you can see from our client stories the case interview preparation approach we use for our case interview coaching clients is highly tailored for each particular client. However, many of you asked us to provide a general approach one can follow during case interview preparation.

Episodes 10 and 11 of Fridays with Firmsconsulting address this request.

One thing you have to remember about case interview prep process is that it is quite easy to learn the wrong habits and waste a significant amount of time on activities that seem useful for your case interview prep but actually will not help you and will likely hurt you during case interviews. An example of such an activity is memorizing frameworks.

This is recommended by just about everyone and is wrong.

The truth is, most Firmsconsulting members are intrinsically capable of getting offers from MBB, IF they follow our guidance thoroughly. Just read the client stories. People who came from a far more challenging background than yours (e.g. with lower grades, from worse schools, with limited language ability for an office they targeted) got multiple offers because they thoroughly followed our guidance. You can do this too.

There is a tremendous amount of Firmsconsulting resources available to you, much of it is for free. All you need is to be disciplined, hard working and follow our advice.

Consulting case interviews, especially with elite firms, are challenging and designed to weed out unfocused thinkers, jerks (yes, they exist and apply to consulting in droves), people with weak business judgement, people without sufficient executive presence to be put in front of a client, people with questionable ethical standards (especially after all the scandals), to name a few.

Consulting firms are looking for partner material applicants. And you can be partner material if you are willing to put in the work.

For particularly serious candidates who are focused on getting offers from MBB and other major consulting firms we designed The Consulting Offer, Firmsconsulting’s flagship online case interview prep program where ex consulting partners train and coach TCO members to excel at case interviews.

We take real applicants and produce real results. You can watch a single applicant grow and improve over time and follow our approach with them.

It guides TCO members through each step of the case interview prep process in a methodical, intelligent and structured way and gradually trains them to solve increasingly more complex cases, while acquiring strong business judgement, developing an eloquent and professional communication style, learning proven strategies of networking to get invited for interviews, learning about the right mindset to have during case interviews and on and on.

So, the point is, you have no shortage of resources to sufficiently prepare. It is really up to you. Now lets dive into an overview of our unique case interview prep approach which we use for most of our clients after they sufficiently master the 3 foundational skills.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDJxnByS-V4&feature=youtu.be

This video deliberately does not talk about inference cases which are common to McKinsey final rounds with partners. That is best left for another video. Inference cases are cases which cannot be solved with any framework. TCO II is dedicated to this type of case.

If you have any questions or observations, please share it in the comments.

Best of luck with your case interview prep,

Kris

Note: By the time this episode was published our placement rate with MBB reached 73% and it is likely to stay around that level since we have just a few clients left to interview in 2015. It is higher than we planned for the year, which implies we need to take on clients from more challenging circumstances.

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Thank you so much for checking out this post and video. Let us know if you have questions or topics you would like us to address in future episodes of Fridays with Firmsconsutling. We will try to address as many of requests from Firmsconsulting community as possible.