Career & Application at The Boston Consulting Group

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 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

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 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