Very unconventional case for first round interview for MBB, feel like I messed up. How to get a final round interview?

Hi Anonymous,

once the interview is over you cannot do much more than sending a thank-you note to the interviewer.

You can, however, understand the reason why the second case took you by surprise as preparation for the next interviews to try to improve on that - a way to do that could be to post the case in the Q&A to get feedback.

Best,

Francesco

Hi,

There is nothing you can do at this point.

However, these types of cases are actually pretty traditional, especially for McKinsey. The reason why people think that they are rare is that the casebooks (that are in general not a good source of cases) almost don't have them

Feel free to reach me if you need a prep on them.

To provide a bit of structure, there are several types of non-conventional cases:

1. Factors influencing the price (What are the factors influencing the price of oil? Factors influencing the price of real estate?)
2. Macroeconomic cases (How will you improve life expectancy in a particular city? How will you decrease the unemployment?)
3. Public sector non-profits (Increasing the revenues of a museum; increasing the revenues from tourism in a city)
4. Redesigning the processes (How will you develop a new anti-monopoly regulation?)
5. Non-profit investments (A billionaire is building a new school. What are the factors to look at?)
6. Ops and cost-cutting (How to reduce the traffic jams on a bridge? A garbage processing facility is out of capacity, what should they do?) - I personally consider them as a separate type of case that is pretty traditional in the offices performing a lot of ops projects.

Best

There is nothing you can do to change the assessment of the interview you have just completed. Only wait for the call of one of the interviewers with the feedback. What you can do though is prepare differently for the coming interviews.

Although there certain case types that are more common than others, every case has a unique situation to it and you should try to develop the skills to apporach each one with a taylored approach. By practicing to develop your case framework on the spot, specifically for the presented question, you can reduce the risk of running into another unconventional case that you have not practiced for before.

I know this sounds obvious, and you might have done that already, but I am surprised by how regular candidates use off-the-shelf frameworks in the interviews I conduct myself. These frameworks that you will find in all the common case interview prep books often only get you to 80% of the answer. If you're comfortable with this approach, there is simply no unconventional case anymore that could derail your interviews.

I hope this helps!

Unfortunately, no

Dear A,

There is nothing you can do here, until wait response from HR.

Best,
André

Hi,

do you mind sharing the case? Thankyou.