Consulting Q&A - Stelle Fragen rund um Deine Karriere in unserem Consulting Forum

Hi Ankit!

Simple rule: you should not assume anything! Just state that wages can be both fixed or variable, or a combination - depending on the contracts and labor laws. Just quickly clarify with the interviewer which situation prevails, and that's it.

In the long run, all costs are variable anyway.

Cheers, Sidi

Hi Anonymous,

I replied below to your questions:

1. So far that you have been invited, the case performance is the only thing that matters; this means that if you practice cases on the banking and insurance industries (likely to be present in the interviews) and develop a basic knowledge related to them you should be fine even if you don’t have an Economics/Finance background
2. You will likely get financial sector cases but not necessarily that only. I interviewed with OW FS and I got questions related to banking, insurance and market sizing, however I helped several other candidates for OW FS and they also got questions related to other sectors. For more information please feel free to PM, I have 15+ case questions they recently asked
3. Standard preparation similar to the one for MBB with a bit more focus on financial sector cases should be fine

Best,

Francesco

Hi,

The general rule is the following:

• If your structure consists of buckets and bullet points - 2 levels deep is enough
• If your structure is more an issue tree type (e.g. profitability) - you can go 3-4 levels deep

The main thing to remember - your bullet points should be very specific. E.g. instead of asking WHO are the competitors or how many competitors we have (both questions are irrelevant) you should ask for market shares and growth rates of the competitors

Best

Hi there,

If this resume is a fair representation of your actual experience, I would say that unfortunately your chance is slim. The chance for entering non-MBB firms may be slightly higher (quite a bit higher if they recruit at your school), but still on the low side. Several key issues I see here:

• Lack of key characteristics valued in consulting (e.g. quant skills). However, please note that this can be due to poor resume writing.
• Lack of professional experience in big name companies
• Non-target school with okay but not outstanding GPA. I assume you will be applying to the LA or SF offices, which are quite difficult to get in given the competition in your region (think Standard and the other UCs).
• Weak link to consulting in your past work experience

This is not to say that you have no chance at all. There are still certain things you can do to up your chance, such as:

• Improve your resume, dramatically: I do see in your resume several bullet points that have some potential (e.g. bullet point 2 under Live Good Inc). You may be able to dramatically improve the quality of your resume if you dig deeper into these experiences and tease out more stuff.
• Network extensively and get a referral: reach out to friends and alumni who work in consulting, chat with them and see if you can get a referral. Of course, this will require a ton of work, with no guaranteed outcome.

You are able to determine for yourself how likely you can achieve these two things. Again, if you were to submit your application through an online resume drop (with this resume as is), your chance is quite low.

I totally understand the rationale that you do not want to waste your time trying to reach something unreachable. Here are a few things for you to think about:

• Why exactly do you want to do consulting? Is it worth the effort?
• For the things you like about consulting, can you find them in another job/industry?
• If not consulting, what other alternatives do you have? How do they compare against consulting?
• What if you do not enter consulting right after college? Are you willing to work for a couple years at a different industry, and then switch into consulting?

Hope this helps. Feel free to message me if you would like to discuss further.

Hi,

Several sources can help:

1. Take all available case books and go through all the math problems there. Even the ones without a graph can be relevant since the universe of potential math problems is quite small
2. GMAT integrated reasoning questions
3. You can go to slideshare or PDFshare and check for MBB presentations. Practice deriving the conclusions from the graphs - it helps a lot

Best!

Hi there,

If you'd like to hear about EY experience in general, feel free to reach out. I am with EY Australia (EY Oceania).

Hi Anonymous,

Since answers currently range from 1 to 2.5 minutes as "acceptable" (assuming you are talking about designing your own case framework at the beginning of your case interview), I thought it's worth commenting and adding some pieces of context/additional information.

First of all, there is no hard threshold time-wise (unless explicitly communicated by your interviewer). 3 things need to be aligned:

• Complexity of case outline and amount of information you have at this stage
• Amount of time you use for setting up your approach/structure
• Quality/depth of approach/structure you come up with

So - if the case outline is rather short and not too complex, and you come up with a somewhat ok structure but don’t get too detailled yet, even 60 seconds is probably on the upper end of time range.

However, if the case outline is very comprehensive with loads of information, and if you can present a highly focused structure on 3 levels, then also 2 minutes could still be within the range from the interviewer's perspective (even though really upper limit, since 2 minutes also represent already a significant percentage of total net case interview time).

Having said that, a few more comments:

• If you plan to use more than ~75–90 seconds of time, please make sure you keep the interviewer informed what you are doing every now and then - don’t let him sit in silence for 2 minutes getting bored watching you
• Sometimes interviewers tend to specify an exact amount of time (e.g. “sure, go ahead, you have 1 minute) - in this case you should do your best to stick to this time frame - at least keeping an eye on time and after time is over you can still try to get more time (and at the same time signalling that you did not successfully ignore the time constraint) saying something like “We are already at the 1 minute mark right now - could I just have a few more seconds to finish the structure?”. So now it’s up to the interviewer to decide, and you played it safe.
• The longer you take for defining your structure/approach, the more likely it gets that the interviewer becomes impatient and might even interrupt you saying “ok let’s see what you have by now and let’s complete it on the fly together”. The only antidote to that is keeping your interviewer entertained by informing him where you are roughly in your thinking and structure, to break this otherwise relatively long period of silence.
• In addition, make sure that you always start top-down, i.e. finishing a certain level of your structure before coming to the next one. Simple reason for that: if your interviewer suddenly interrupts you, you always have a (kind of) MECE structure to start with - and adding more details on the fly is easier than coming up with additional topics to be MECE on the same level.

Hope that helps!

Robert

Yes, definitely there is an evaluation checklist. Each firm might have a different variation of the checklist but the broad themes covered are (1) Problem structuring/framing (2) Driving the discussion (insights) (3) Math skills (4) Business judgment (5) Client skills (6) Team skills

The interviewer is required to rate interviewee on all the themes and then provide an overall rating, the final rating or pass/fail is based on consultation with all the interviewers.

Regards
Ash

Hi Andrea,

in general you cannot be considered for more than one office at the same time, although in some application you can select multiple offices (in which case you will be in the process for one office only anyway). As a consequence, if you apply for the Milan office you will either:

1. Be invited for interviews; after that you will receive an offer for that office or get rejected
2. Get rejected without invitation

After a rejection there is normally a waiting period (in MBB the standard is 24 months) before you can apply to the same or other offices (some people try to hack the system using different emails but that doesn’t always work).

I would recommend anyway to apply via a referral, whatever office you choose – this allows to increase the likelihood to be invited and at the same time understand the real recruiting needs; you can find more on referrals at the following link:

https://www.preplounge.com/en/consulting-forum/hey-everyonehope-all-is-well-3176

In case you need support for OW Milan please feel free to PM me, I helped several people for that office and have 15+ real case questions they asked there.

Best,

Francesco

Hi Ezzat,

the answer may depend on the office you are targeting, but in general BCG video interview questions tend to be focused on:

• Tell me about yourself
• Why BCG
• General question on the current economic environment

Besides that, I would prepare on the standard fit questions; some of the most common ones include:

• Why consulting
• Give me an example when you led/had to work in a team
• Tell me about a time when you had to convince someone not agreeing with you
• What has been your major achievement so far
• Why should we hire you

Best,

Francesco

Hi Anonymous,

in terms of your main question, first-round cases tend to be quite similar (I helped several candidates for the same office which got the same question over and over), while partner interviews may have more variability, since partner may simply ask a general brainstorming question.

It can definitely be useful to know the previous cases in an office to target your preparation on certain sectors – obviously if you receive a question you know you should be able to show you are “naturally” solving the case and not come to the solution to quickly or the interviewer will notice it. You should also have a general preparation for every type of case anyway, as there are no guarantees you will receive the same case by the same interviewer, even if that happened in the past.

Best,

Francesco

Hi,

-Is it like multiple days workshop along with other analysts? - yes
-what kind of training (technical/leadership,etc.) - just the problem-solving basics and client work. Management trainings are great since they are more about life goals
-I heard there's annual "abroad" training? Are these only for consulting roles? - not every year but with every new role (analyst, associate, etc). There are also annual trainings for the members of the particular practice (e.g. Digital).

Overall it's a tiny part of your consulting life, so there is no real value in discussing them.

Best

Let's try to estimate this for the city of London

I start with formulating the approach in the form of an equation

Step 1: Raincoat market size ($) = City population(#) * (% of pop. that feels the need for a raincoat) * (Avg number of raincoats owned) *(1/Life of a raincoat in years) * (Avg. price of raincoat in $)

Step 2: Input my assumptions

London city population - ~10M
% of pop. that feels the need for a raincoat - Since London has high rainfall, I will assume a large % of the population would buy raincoats (~80%)
Avg number of raincoats owned - I would assume ~2 considering high rainfall in London
Life of raincoat - ~4 years
Avg. price of a raincoat - ~$50

Step 3 - Calculate using my assumptions
Market size ($) = $200M

Step 4 - Do a sanity check
Dividing $200M by the population of London (10M) gives $20 which means each person in London spends on average $20/year on raincoat purchase. This does not seem far fetched.

Conclude - Considering my assumptions, the market size for raincoats in the city of London should be in the vicinity of ~$200M