All questions tagged Final Round - Consulting Q&A - PrepLounge.com

Hi! The McKinsey final round is no different from the first round, i.e. you will have a case and a personal fit in each interview – out of the box questions are not being asked.

Best,
Daniel

Hello, and congrats!

In a nutshell, the structure should be the same one as the one you have seen so far in the 1st round. However, this is the theory, and in practice some things may change:

• 2nd round is much more "unstructured", driven by the fact that is conducted by much more senior people than the 1st round. Given their wide experience, they can go off the normal "script", which translates into creative FIT and Business cases.
• FIT is very important, and sometimes it´s given even more time than in the 1st round. In line with my 1st point, FIT can be a bit more "improvised" and with questions that are not the classical ones. However, it should go in line with the 3 main leadership principals tested:
  • Personal impact: Developing and implementing sound recommendations requires the involvement and support of many individuals. Skills interacting with people, sometimes in tough situations, are critical to driving distinctive client impact.
  • Entrepreneurial drive: We look for people with an entrepreneurial spirit: innovative by nature, always creating new approaches, products, services, and technologies.
  • Leadership Abilities: We seek people who strive to lead themselves, their teams, and their communities, and who can foster effective teamwork to drive results.

To prep for it, I would recommend you to work with experienced candidates -who have been at least once in a Round 2 interview- or with a coach, to tackle the off-the-guidelines questions.

Hope it helps!

Cheers,

Clara

Hello there,

Congratulations for getting through to the final round!

Typicaly there are more emphasis towards PEI compared to case in the final round.
For the case, the mechanism would typically change from interviewer-led to interviewee-led.
I would suggest keep practicing on your case to be comfortable in independently structuring and progressing on the case.

For PEI, there are at least 5 aspects that the partners would focus on during the interviews:

1. Leadership experiences, whether in project settings or office/campus initiatives
2. Culture fit, e.g. communication style, logical flow & structure, mobility, working norms
3. Correlation between your mid and long-term career objectives with the firm's growth trajectory
4. Details of your professional / internship experiences, e.g. types of projects you were involved, what is your role and specific tasks you were working on, your client / stakeholder interactions, deilverables, and impact / results
5. Alignment of your industrial and functional interest / expertise with the current need within the firm

Hope it helps and all the best for your incoming interviews!

Kind regards,
Nathan

Hi,

I have uploaded the samples of Bain and BCG written cases here, enjoy:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/zor4m49eyx5qxal/AABeUN6mtiGkWhEklRjszX2Oa?dl=0

Best,

Hi,

Interviewers can ask you the following creativity questions:

• Let's generate 10 ideas how to…

• Let's brainstorm…

• How will you get this data if you are at the real project…

• How will you check the following assumption…

• Do you have some ideas on how to… Any other ideas?... Tell me more...

• etc...

I recommend the following approach to creativity questions:

1. Ask an interview for a minute: "Can I take a minute to structure my thoughts?"
2. Think of several buckets of ideas. Remember to think as big as possible
3. Narrow down to each bucket and generate as many ideas as possible. If the idea is too high-level, you can come up with examples
4. Present the structure (buckets) and then your ideas
5. Generate more ideas within the buckets if required by the interviewer

You may be wondering how to develop creativity?

Although most of the companies would say that you don't need any specific business knowledge, in reality, it is hard to solve a case purely based on common sense. The lack of business knowledge becomes a very common problem, especially among people with non-business backgrounds

Business Acumen is all about building proper industry and functional knowledge. Here is how you can do that:

1. Practice more cases with the other candidates. Try to start with the most common industries - Retail, Consumer Goods, Airlines, Banking
2. Study the annual reports of the public companies in each industry. They have a good overview of the company and the industry.
3. Get the industry information from relevant books, magazines, etc. We'll recommend some good reading in the next lessons.
4. Study MBA cases. They have a good industry overview. You can purchase HBS cases here: https://hbr.org/store/case-studies
5. Follow this course further and you'll learn a lot about different industries

For each industry, you should understand:

• Revenue streams
• Cost structure
• Average margins
• Key Performance Indicators
• Industry trends

Best

Every interaction is extremely important. Hence, I would take the case presentation as important as any other preparation.

Note, they have notes on you from previous interviews, hence they are looking at possibly weaknesses that you showcased and strengths. So if you feel you had certain weaknesses, you could work to address them here.

Hi June,
you are going to simulate the final Steering Committee, i.e. the most important moment in a real Bain project.
Different skills will be assessed: 80-20 prioritization, top-down structuring, and impactful communication. I recommend staying in 15 minutes with the presentation (10-15 slides), to leave 30 minutes of Q&A, by structuring the document in this way:
- Executive summary (1 page): sum-up of the problem and of your resolution;
- Context (1-3p): presentation of the main challenges of the company and the problem you were in charge to address;
- Recommendations (5-12p): structured presentation of your approach, findings, and solutions to the problem;
- Next steps (1p): additional aspects valuable to be further assessed.

For any further details feel free to text me.

Best,
Antonello

Hello there,

Congratulations for getting through to the final round!

As experienced hires, typicaly there are 5 aspects that the partners would focus on during the interviews:

1. Details of your professional experiences, e.g. types of projects you were involved, what is your role and specific tasks you were working on, your client / stakeholder interactions, deilverables, and impact / results
2. Leadership experiences, whether in project settings or office initiatives
3. Alignment of your industrial and functional expertise with the current need within the firm
4. Culture fit, e.g. communication style, logical flow & structure, mobility, working norms
5. Correlation between your mid and long-term career objectives with the firm's growth trajectory

One of the key to excel interviews in consulting firms is consistency. Hence, it is always better to have smaller deviation in your performances across different interview sessions. For example, performing well enough in both interviews would be preferable compared to having a distinctive result at one but completely bombed the others. Of course, in the case of having a combination of average + excellent as well as excelling both interviews are an even better case, but it is not an absolute requirement.

Just be yourself and present yourself as a real person, describe your experiences as detailed as possible during the sessions and let the flow take over.

On the level / role, it is perfectly acceptable to inquire this if the topic is not brought upon by the partners themselves beforehand. This can be asked in the Q&A session.

Hope it helps and all the best for your incoming interviews!

Kind regards,

Nathan

Hi,
I advise making a sort of slide (replicable during your presentation on a whiteboard) with a structured executive summary on the context, the problem, and a top-down recommendation.

Best,
Antonello

Hi,
the statement about equilibrium is not 100% clear (n. of opticians is necessary and sufficient to serve all the demand?)

Best,
Antonello

Hi,
I would not worry about repeating the same question: if interviewers have the chance to talk each other about you they will not touch for sure your final question.

Questions about interviewer experience are always great, showing your curiosity in her motivation and expertise. If you have the chance to know before the name of the interviewer (you can ask it to HR the day before or discovering it in the waiting room), look at her LinkedIn profile to develope some tailored questions (e.g. about the MBA, the industry or practice specialization, etc.)

I also recommend you not to make questions about the firm that you can easily find online or through friends/other candidates (e.g. clients of the office, projects, typical workday, international opportunities, client exposure, your role, numbers of the office, ...).


Best,
Antonello

Hi,
usually, they are faster. I recommend calling HR. Do not worry about bothering them: they are there to help you.

Best,
Antonello

Dear Ankit,

I've gathered some info on OW and what I can say is they are much less structured when compared to McK and others.

For example:

1) Sometimes they don't even ask for structure;

2) I've heard from friends that went to final rounds who got a lot of "strange" estimation cases (PM me if you want to learn a few of them)

3) The style of case depends a lot more on the interviewer rather than the firm (in other words, depending on the interviewer you will get a more interviewer-led or candidate-led)

4) The cases tend to be shorter (this could depend from country to country) - the entire case is more 40-45 minute, with a good 7-10min FIT and at least 5-10min Q&A so the case usually is from 25-35 minutes (again, this can change from office to office)

Hope this helps

Hi,
questions about interviewer experience are always great, showing your curiosity in her motivation and expertise. If you have the chance to know before the name of the interviewer (you can ask it to HR the day before or discovering it in the waiting room), look at her LinkedIn profile to develope some tailored questions (e.g. about the MBA, the industry or practice specialization, etc.)

I also recommend you not to make questions about the firm that you can easily find online or through friends/other candidates (e.g. clients of the office, projects, typical workday, international opportunities, client exposure, your role, numbers of the office, ...).

Best,
Antonello

Hi,
it not necessarily blocks you from getting the offer. The only other thing you could have done is to take 30 seconds and make a summary of the case: it can help to think about aspects stated before but important only in the last stage of the case resolution.

Best,
Antonello

Hi,

Don't worry. The directors are usually busy and it's hard to get them on call at the same time to dicuss the candidates. Just keep the fingers crossed

Best!

Hi Tabitha,

I will give my input based on my experience giving final rounds at a tier 2 firm as well as my own experience moving to MBB.

First of all it's important to take official feedbacks with a grain of salt.

(1) For legal and marketing reasons firms are very careful regarding the feedback they provide. I've been part of final round discussions with partners were we discussed interviewee's attire, the fact they have spouses or not, age, ... for obvious reasons we won't say that we didnt hire someone because you wore the wrong sweater.

(2) Depending on the season/office/position you apply the demand for new hires will be different and that will impact the threshold for giving an offer. A common myth is to think MBB will always hire regardless of their needs. I've discuss with a MBB partner that putted very blunt "at this period in the year we have reach our target quota, anyone can still apply but they will only be hired if they are a superstart, otherwise waiting until January is better."

Now, this is not to say that you should disregard your feedback. You have mention a specific point that you could focus on.

If I was in your shoes I would do the following:

1) Status quo. What other firms are you currently in process, what firms could you potential still apply and what is the timeline to do so

2) Honest assessment. Get an unbiased opinion on where you currently stand today. This means, PEI, case, Q&A, ...you only know how much work do you need to do if you know where you stand

3) Develop a "work plan" for the remaining of your time taking into account the feedback you received

Happy to discuss this on a call if you would like

There are so many variables that go into this, that it is hard to predict.

However, I firmly believe that if you cracked the rest of the case and you nailed it at the personal part, meaning the partner loved you and feels totally comfortable in putting you infront of a client tomorrow, she/he might have even forgot about your mistake after the interview.

We are humans, we all make mistakes, partners make mistakes too, all the time. What really matters is acknowleding that mistake, and taking the necessary actions to limit its negative effects on you, your firm and clients. If you were able to portray that you can do some of those after your interview, which if I understand correctly you did by acknowledging your mistake and taking the necessary steps, it might have even looked more positive on you.

Good luck with the wait, it is usually the most painful part.

Cheers

Hi,

- It's exactly the same, but you'll have three interviews instead of one (usual procedure) and the interviewer would be an Associate Partner / Partner / Senior Partner instead of an Engagement Manager / Associate Partner. The difficulty is the same

- Calm down because even if the interviewer is more senior, it doesn't mean the interview is going to be harder. It could also happen that an interviewer plays the "bad guy" part, but, again, it's only a stress test

Finger crossed and good luck!

Hi Anonymous,

this is definitely not usual. Since HR mentioned your will discuss your background, I would still properly prepare for that – until you receive an offer all the interactions can be used for your evaluation, whether formally part of the process or not.

Best,

Francesco