Hi there,
With the interview on 14 September and a campus process, I would stop preparing this like an MBB case interview. From what candidates describe, the ZS format differs in 2 ways that change what is worth practising in 4 days.
A few things I would do this week:
• Practise solving a case alone, on paper, against a 30 minute clock, then explaining it out loud to someone. The format candidates report gives independent solve time before the discussion, so what is being tested is whether a structure you built by yourself survives being defended. That is a different muscle from the interactive cases most preparation material trains.
• Build commercial context in pharmaceuticals and healthcare. Sales force sizing, territory allocation, launch forecasting, patient funnels. I would spend 2 evenings understanding how a drug actually reaches a patient rather than running 10 more generic profitability cases.
• Rehearse the recorded behavioural questions against a timer. Short thinking time and a hard recording limit punish candidates who set the scene first. Open with the action you took, then the reasoning, then a measurable outcome.
• Keep mental maths and data interpretation warm daily. Percentage changes, ratios, reading a table quickly. Speed here is the cheapest score to protect in a compressed process.
Campus drives compress several rounds into 1 or 2 days, so what usually decides the outcome is consistency across all of them rather than a strong case round. Most candidates spend everything on the case and arrive at the fit interview with nothing specific to say about why this firm and why this sector.
