How To Test A Branch Use Data And Compare It With Benchmark
Now that we decide to test branch First floor, how do we do that? We prove or disprove our hypothesis by collecting DATA. That data is then compared with benchmarks to shed more meaning. Two main types of benchmarks are: historical and competitive. For example, lets say by some magic, the client has a metal detection machine which can measure the metal concentration of any space.To test the first-floor branch, the consultant would come to the first floor, measure the metal concentration and compare it with the data before the car key is lost, a.k.a: historical benchmark.
What Are The Best Ways To Prepare For Interviews With Management Consulting Firms
Congratulations!
If youre on this page, youre probably considering a career in management consulting or are already in the middle of the interview process.
Were here to help.
Were a team of more than 20 former McKinsey, Bain, and BCG consultants and recruiters and we put together this guide to help you prepare for getting your consulting offer.
After reading this, we hope congratulations is also what youll hear when you leave your final interviews.
Free Case Interview Prep Lessons
Welcome to the Management Consulted Free Case Interview Prep Course! This course will give you insight into what you need to know to ace the case interview, and it will give you a solid foundation on which to build the rest of your preparation.
Click on a video to the right to jump right in, and scroll down after you complete a lesson to move on to the next one. Enjoy this free case interview prep course write us with questions, and work with us via 1:1 coaching to maximize your chances of success.
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Management Consulting Terms & Concepts
These are the most common consulting terms you may encounter not just in case interviews but also in consulting tasks.
Lever:Best practice:Granular:MECE:
There are three parameters the consulting world uses in the categorization of businesses.
Industry:Function:Location:
Normally two consultants ask each other What do you work on?, they need to give 3 pieces of information in all of those three parameters, such as I worked on a Cement project, focusing on Finance, in Southeast Asia. In fact, all of the McKinsey support networks are organized in this way. During my projects, I would need to speak to some Cement experts, some Finance experts, and some local experts as well.This chapter is relatively long, yet it is still way shorter than 4 years at business college. I hope this will act as a great prerequisite to your case interview study. Make sure that you have mastered all of these content before really tackling the Case Interview.
Module 1 The Wso Consulting Case Interview Guide
Acing the case interview portion is a critical part of giving yourself the best odds You WILL be given at least one tough case and your interviewers expect confident and detailed responses. This 188 page PDF is easily the most comprehensive guide on the market We’ve got every base covered, so you’ll be prepared no matter what your interviewers throw at you or what type of firm you are interviewing at.
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Get Expert Case Interview Help
Work with our expert MBB coaches to get personalized case interview coaching. All sessions are 1hr long, conducted via video chat, and tailored to your needs and timeline. Weve helped thousands land offers in 170 firms be the next.
I am very excited to share with you that I got the job offer from Bain Toronto! My session was very insightful and it really helped me steer my preparation in the right direction. A big thank you from my side to the Management Consulted team for your great coaching.Ravi, Richard Ivey School of Business
Being Structured Throughout The Case
The high stress and large amount of information in case interviews make it easy for even the brightest candidates to derail from the objective or present in an unstructured manner.Ill be sharing with you my 3 most impactful tips to keeping the structure in case interview:1. The map habit3. Sticking to the big problem
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Management Consulting Jobs Are In High Demand
Management consulting jobs are among the most sought-after positions in on-campus recruiting, whether youre applying as an undergraduate or from a business school.
Consulting firm recruits also include law school students, Ph.D. program candidates and people whove already started their professional careers in other industries.
Why?
Management consulting firms are filled with smart, driven people working to solve hard business problems.
This work is a great launching pad for your career.
Top consultancies offer competitive salaries and also invest significantly in employee development. A job at a management consulting firm will expose you to multiple different industries and types of business problems.
Theres a lot to like about a career in consulting!
Practice Answering Questions Out Loud
Your answers to behavioural and case questions are important, but your interviewers will also be evaluating how you COMMUNICATE your answers. It’s important to speak in a structured way and to avoid drifting off topic or spending too much time on each question.
We recommend that you practice by interviewing yourself out loud. Play the role of both the candidate and the interviewer, asking the questions and answering them, just like you would in an interview.
This may sound strange, but it will help you master the rhythm of case interviews. It will also help you to memorise the key details of your answers for behavioural questions, without any crutches .
Do your best to replicate the conditions of a real case interview as much as you can. It might help to look in a mirror while you’re giving your answers. You may even find it helpful to practice in the same clothes you intend to wear to your interview.
As you go through this process, if you’d like a broader list of questions to practice with, you can check out our consulting interview questions article.
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Clarify The Client’s Current Situation
To begin with, if you want to help your client solve its problem or take a decision, you need to have an overview of your clients activities:
- The product the client is selling: if the case prompt says your client sells watches, you should ask what type of watches? Wrist watches? Wall clocks? Because if you assume that your client is in the wrist watch market instead of the wall clock market, you can discuss later in the case interview a marketing strategy that is irrelevant
- Its business model: you should know how does the client make money and which parts of the value chain the client operates in . This gives you a good sense of what the client can control or not
- The geography they operate in: you should know the location youre dealing with because this directly relates to several aspects of the business such as the macro economic environment. For instance the Porshe market is probably bigger in Germany than in a developing country
Together, Product + Business Model + Geography, give you a good overview of your clients activities and puts you in a comfortable spot to conduct effective and tailored analyses during the rest of the case interview.
Dont Let One Missed Question Cost You $250000 Get The Course That Will Prepare You Better Than Anything Else
The WSO Consulting Case Interview Prep Course 2.0 takes you way beyond anything else. While othvvers claim to give you everything you need, the truth is they only cover a handful of the most common questions and have basic case samples from one type of firm. Even worse, theyre usually written by one guy whos been out of consulting for years
Hardly what wed call comprehensive
And theres an even BIGGER problem with this approach:
Its totally outdated.
Recruiting in management consulting is constantly changing. What worked even last year is no longer effective. Your interviewers are smart and theyre constantly changing their questions and tactics for one reason: to put you under stress and see what youre made of.
Thats why the WSO course is crowdsourced from thousands of currently practicing consulting professionals people who live and breathe this industry day in and day out who can tell you whats changing firsthand and will keep you up-to-date on everything you need to ace the interview process and land that job.
And what you really need is this:
You Need to Know Everything
Other guides boast that they have the most common questions. We have hundreds of actual cases and thousands of actual questions in our database. WSO covers 2,037 questions across 209 consulting firms. Over 40 hours of consulting specific video Sourced from thousands of data points all so you can cover every base, prepare for any scenario and walk into the room with total confidence
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Do Mock Interviews With Ex
If you know a consultant who has experience running interviews at a top consulting firm, that’s fantastic. Practice with them as much as you can!
But for most of us, it’s tough to find the right connections to make this happen. And it might also be difficult to practice multiple hours with that person unless you know them really well.
Here’s the good news. We’ve already made the connections for you. Weve created a coaching service where you can practice 1-on-1 with ex-interviewers from leading consulting firms like McKinsey, BCG, Bain, etc. Learn more and start scheduling sessions today.
Accounting And Financial Terms The Language Of Business
Accounting & Financial Terms are often called the language of business, which is used to communicate the firms financial and economic information to external parties such as shareholders and creditors.There are three basic financial statements: Balance Sheet, Income Statement, and Cash Flow Statement.Balance SheetA snapshot of the current stage of the companys property, debt, and ownership at one given point in time, showing:
Assets:Liabilities:EquityOperation:Financial:Investing:
Upon completion this section, you should be able to read and interpret financial statements for business diagnosis and decision-making. More importantly, you possess the conceptual base to start solving case interviews on your own. Do not forget that, as with any other language, becoming proficient with accounting and financial terms require constant practice.
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What Is The Case Interview Coachs Track Record
This should go without saying but you want to do some research on the case interview coaches track record of producing offers for their clients.
Sure, its one thing to coach someone and to do a good job, but ultimately your goal is to get an offer.
You want to make sure that the person or company you are looking at has a strong track record of producing offers for their clients.
If they do not, then you need to ask yourself
Is it worth taking the risk to invest money in somebody when they dont have a strong track of producing results?
This is such an important factor when looking to get consulting interview coaching.
The average consultant makes $5 million over their career, so investing a few thousand dollars in a consulting interview coach has great payback, but only if you spend your money with the right coach.
What To Do When Receiving Data
Suppose the interviewer agrees to give you data. Now what?Time to shine! If you do these following 3 steps, even just once, in the interviewers mind, you already pass:1. Acknowledge the data and show appreciation2. Describe the data, especially its notable features3. State the implications of the dataLets dive into each separately.
the most important insights Quickly and mentallyrelate to the issue treeaction-oriented mindset.
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Do Mock Interviews With Friends Family And Peers
First, you can practice case interviews with friends, colleagues, or family.
You could also apply to join our free peer-to-peer mock interview platform, where you can do mock interviews with other candidates to top consultancies.
These are great ways to catch communication mistakes, but at some point you’ll probably notice that the feedback you are getting isn’t helping that much anymore.
Once you reach that stage, we recommend practicing with ex-interviewers from top consultancies.
Case Interview Prep Part : Structure
Once Davis clarified the problem, he asked for a moment to prepare her response. In the structure phase of the case interview, theres silence for several moments.
As with clarifying the question, this can feel awkward.
But asking for this time will show the interviewer that youre carefully structuring your problem-solving approach.
It will also ensure that you are not quickly addressing a couple of aspects of the business problem but ignoring others, potentially ones that are critical to solving the clients problem.
Somequick brainstorming is useful here, but also take a step back to maker sure you consider all aspects of the clients business, its customer demand, and the competition.
Organize your questions into a comprehensive approach to address all key aspects of the problem.
Mastering the structure phase of the interview is not as easy as the opening, but its critical to ensure you have the structured problem-solving approach that will lead you to the right answer to the case.
Focus on this aspect of case interview preparation until you can structure almost every case right.
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Develop Personal Interview Scripts
Every tip Ive mentioned in the previous 7 chapters are for recurring situations in case interviews, and they can be dealt with using formulaic responses.What that means for you the candidate is that you can make personal scripts and learn them by heart until they all become your second nature. That will save you a lot of brainpower to use on the issue tree. This approach has proven successful with all of my coachees, and its also a major part of our Case Interview End-to-End Secrets Program. You will find my own personal script I used back in the day, and I will also personally give feedback to scripts of members of the program.So open your document tool and start writing now. Once youve finished the scripts, learn them by heart one at a time. When you feel comfortable with every one of them, you can move up to a higher level and practice with whole cases.
Case Opening Example Script
Now its time to see how you can put all those steps into action!
Thank you for the clarification. Is there anything else I should be aware of?< wait for answers> Thanks for all the insights. Its great that we all agree on the key details.For the overall approach to this case, to completely wipe out the problem for a long-lasting impact, we will need to find out the root causes of this problem. To do that I will try to break the problem down into bite-size pieces with issue trees, in order to quickly isolate the root causes inside the branches, then drill down accordingly to gather information until we can draw actionable solutions.So before I go on to establish my first issue tree, does that approach sound reasonable to you?< assumes the interviewer agrees with your approach> Its great to see that were on the same page regarding the key details as well as the overall approach to the case. I do need some time to gather my thoughts, so may I have a short timeout?
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Three: Practice 3 5 Cases Independently
Once you have learned the right strategies, the next step in case interview prep is to practice.
When practicing case interviews, it is usually better to practice with a case interview partner than to practice by yourself. Casing with a partner better simulates the real case interview experience.
However, when you are just starting to practice, I recommend doing the first 3 5 cases by yourself.
There are three reasons for this:
- You can get the hang of the case interview structure and format much more quickly working by yourself rather than having to wait to schedule a time with a partner
- There are many aspects of case interviews that you can practice without a partner, such as structuring a framework and solving quantitative problems. You can get much more practice working through these parts by yourself
- You may have difficulty finding a case interview partner if you are a complete beginner. Without having done any cases, you likely wont know how to properly give a case or provide good feedback
There are several sources to get cases that you can practice individually:
- The books and online course I previously recommended all have practice cases
You can also use this full list of case interview examples and practice cases from 12+ different consulting firms.
After doing the first 3 5 cases independently, move onto practicing cases with a case interview partner.
Case Interview Starter Guide For Non
All consulting firms claim that all educational backgrounds have equal chances. But no matter what, case interview reflects real-life business problems and you will, therefore, come across business concepts.Not everybody has the time to go to a full Business Undergraduate program all over. So through this compact Chapter 2, I will provide you, the non-business people, every business concept you need in case interviews.
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See How Consulting Veterans Have Done It With The Wso Video Library
You’ll discover how professional consultants have answered the very same questions you’ll be asked with 40+ hours of consulting-specific videos Watch detailed Q& A’s and sample cases so you can see exactly what works and what doesn’t…
Our customers have landed positions at all of the top Consulting firms, including:
DON’T LET ONE MISSED QUESTION COST YOU $250,000 …GET THE COURSE THAT WILL PREPARE YOUBETTER THAN ANYTHING ELSE.
The WSO Consulting Case Interview Prep Course 2.0 takes you way beyond anything else. While others claim to give you everything you need, the truth is they only cover a handful of the most common questions and have basic case samples from one type of firm. Even worse, they’re usually written by one guy who’s been out of consulting for years
Hardly what we’d call “comprehensive”…
And there’s an even BIGGER problem with this approach:
It’s totally outdated.
Recruiting in management consulting is constantly changing. What worked even last year is no longer effective. Your interviewers are smart and they’re constantly changing their questions and tactics for one reason: to put you under stress and see what you’re made of.
That’s why the WSO course is crowdsourced from thousands of currently practicing consulting professionals people who live and breathe this industry – day in and day out who can tell you what’s changing firsthand and will keep you up-to-date on everything you need to ace the interview process and land that job.
