Consulting interview questions how many

For example, you can ask whether you should consider manual and electric wheelchairs separately or whether different types of healthcare facilities would constitute different segments. When explaining your answer, be sure to touch on each of these segments and to explain the thought process behind each one.

These questions typically involve being presented with data and asked to identify key insights related to business growth or market size. Being able to determine the value of a business is an extremely important part of being a consultant and value proposition questions are designed to test your understanding of this concept. Their main customers are locals from the Bay area. What are some factors that those customers look for in a restaurant? Although consulting interviews often involve several different types of questions, the key to doing well is always the same: practice.

Most of all, try to relax and enjoy the interview process. Working in management consulting is a wonderful opportunity to learn about various types of businesses and to help companies reach their goals. Next article. Standard advice about interviewing at companies decrees that you should always do your research in advance, and come armed with a few pertinent questions on the firm's business model, goals, and the like. It also decrees that you should save questions pertaining to compensation, perks and benefits for at least a second round interview.

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By: Phil Stott. Published: Nov 21, Topics: Consulting Interviewing Job Search. Some examples: "Please describe your most important leadership experience and the impact that you had as a leader. What are the strengths and weaknesses they would share? What did you learn about yourself and how did you change as a result? What do you know about us compared to your firm? In a PEI, your interviewer will let you tell your best story, but they will also ask you questions. Pointed, assertive, tough questions.

If your story was pure golden-coated bullshit, those questions will not be so great for you, though…. But past performance PLUS a well-thought out rationale when the situation happened is indicative of future performance because it shows you pull the feat off again and again. While the case interview is a great test of your problem-solving skills, the world is full of intelligent people who are lazy and get nothing done.

Are you organized? Are you efficient? Can you focus on what really matters given your own objective? In consulting, goals are challenging AND they change all the time.

Your interviewer wants to see how you work in steady situations and in situations that have changed. Both are essential to get stuff done in a consulting project. Also, say how it was set-up and by whom. If the question is on entrepreneurial drive, the goal must be set-up by yourself, not someone else. Entrepreneurship in consulting has nothing to do with start-ups, and everything to do with setting new goals and making them happen.

This is where you show the expectations you had upfront. Describe it in a step-by-step way to show structure! Then, most importantly, say how you dealt with the unexpected along the way. Also, mention if the goal was achieved or not and why do you think that was. In general, blending in your rationale in each step of the way is a good practice as your interviewer is more interested in why you did things than what exactly happened in that specific situation. This is true for every PEI question.

Brief Description: This question gets people confused because of the generic name McKinsey uses to describe it: Personal Impact. Personal Impact is all about influencing other people, which is why I put this question in the same bucket as Persuasion and Conflict Resolution. This may sound a bit counterintuitive, but to persuade or influence someone and to solve a conflict you need the same skillset. Your interviewers will want to know about a time you did that and how you did it.

Needless to say, this is essential to drive change in organizations. Ideally you were well aware of your approach to do that and in the end the other person was glad you convinced them otherwise. This is basic context so the interviewer understands the conflict or disagreement and why it happened.

This story is about people. Describe what they thought and why you think they thought it. You want to be very specific in their rationale and show you can think from their point of view. As always, include the why you did it.

You want to show a balanced persuasion approach that is thoughtful but not manipulative. Brief Description: The Leadership and Teamwork questions are similar in the sense that both are about how you work with others.

In both situations, consulting firms will expect you to take the lead if needed. And so it is only natural that top consulting firms will want to make sure you have that ability before they hire you. This includes dividing the work, setting up incentives, processes, accountability, etc. This will give them basic context of what was going on and what you were trying to achieve and why.

Emphasize roles , including your role in the group. This will give the interviewer social context: who was who and who were you in that group of people. Include your rationale along the way. Your interviewer will approach it with a PEI-like mindset. Purpose: Interviewers ask this question for a similar to the Weakness question which we put into the Regular Fit Interview Questions section.

Because everyone makes mistakes! The difference between a great professional and a shady one is how you deal with them. Interviewers love candidates who own their responsibility. Even if you were not fully responsible for the mistake, you have to recognize as much of the responsibility as possible.

Management consultants are hired at expensive rates to solve the most challenging problems of large organizations. Interviewers, who are always real consultants who do real project work, will go through a simulation of a real or fictional problem with you. They want to test you in a made up scenario before throwing you into a real one with real clients real stakes. Think of it as a flight simulator used to train and test pilots. And let me tell you: every respectable management consulting firm will do case interviews with you.

There are many formats to these cases: they might give you a slide deck and ask you to come up with conclusions to the client based on that or even give a presentation , they might do it in a group format….

In the interviewer-led case, the interviewer leads. Then another… Until the case is over. Needless to say this makes candidates anxious and agitated, which is why many candidates invest s of hours preparing for their cases. Yes, your interviewer can ask you about ANY type of problem. And yes, they can ask you about ANY type of industry…. That video shows the different ways the questions described below tie together to form a whole case interview.

The Framework question is the question where the interviewer gives you a problem as large and complex as a whole project and asks you to break it down into a plan to solve it. Contrary to what many people think, not every case interview starts with a framework. In these situations, the role of the beginning and middle of the case is for you to find enough information and context to build a decision-making plan or framework as well as possible at the end of your minutes with the interviewer.

Purpose: Breaking down complex business and public sector problems is the hallmark of management consulting. Interviewers want to test your ability to break down a big, complex problem into manageable steps that would achieve the objective.

Within the plan, they want to see your ability to foresee what are the main issues regarding the problem and hypothesize the answers. They also want to check your ability to organize your ideas in a clear, concise, prioritized way check out the MECE principle. And because most candidates memorize frameworks from well-known books and sources, they know what are the memorized ones… They all look the same.

In simpler terms: no gaps in your analyses categories cover the whole problem and no overlaps each category is fully distinct from the others. The best way to do it is using hypotheses. After you finish presenting your plan, you ought to mention how to start using it. And you should.

Additional resources: The Framework Module in our free course, Case Interview Fundamentals , is considered by most students the best source to learn how to create framework from scratch properly. There are a few Framework video drills there as well, so you can put your knowledge you learn into practice and compare your Frameworks to mine.

Another key resource is our comprehensive guide to Issue Trees. As you will learn in the Framework module in Case Interview Fundamentals, when building a Framework you can always choose between using a Conceptual Framework or a customized Issue Tree. There are specific situations for each, so you need to learn both. Finally, our Youtube channel has a few insightful videos on Frameworks, including techniques to improve them and examples of great Frameworks.

Brief Description: At the start of AND throughout every single project, consultants or any problem-solver will have to 1 generate ideas to solve problems and 2 come up with hypotheses of why problems are happening. The brainstorming question is a test of this critical skill of coming up with good ideas and hypotheses.

Consultants are only recognized for good ideas that solve the actual problem. Purpose: There are four main things interviewers are generally testing when they ask you a Brainstorming questions:. This is what many people in the industry call business sense. The MECE principle helps tremendously here. Great candidates generate more ideas in the buckets parts of their structure that matter the most, and they intuitively know which ideas are best and which hypotheses are more likely.

This is a mistake that will cost you your offer. Interviewers want to see you have the ability to select which ones to test first. In real projects, this will save weeks of a consultants time. Additional resources: The Brainstorming Module in Case Interview Fundamentals our free course is an excellent primer to Brainstorming questions.

There are also a few drills you can take to see it in practice and compare your answer to mine. The essential workflow of a consultant is to structure the problem, generate hypotheses for each part of the problem and then TEST those hypotheses. But here are a few examples of questions with the whole context included:. In a real project, a partner, a manager or even a client might come up with a hypothesis. More often your interviewer will ask you to test your own hypotheses. You need to define and rephrase your hypothesis very precisely, optimizing for testability.

Note that this is a silly question for them to ask, since you will need to change your answer to this question for every firm you interview with, but it is part of the game, and if you want to succeed, you will have to play along convincingly. Do not hold back mentioning other equivalent or more highly regarded firms that you are interviewing at, as this does make you more appealing to the interviewer. What skills do you believe are crucial to success in management consulting?

You could mention many skills, but it is important to mention at least some of the following these are the kinds of people they are looking for : Strong work ethic Attention to detail Ability to grasp complex concepts quickly the steep learning curve in the Consulting industry is as appealing as it is daunting! Intellectually curious and rigorous Strong analytical and quantitative skills Are you also applying to investment banks? We do not recommend you lie , but telling an interviewer that you also applied to investment banks does sometimes lead to immediate rejection.

This is true even though many candidates at top schools apply for both. Perhaps the best response, if you are indeed looking at both, is to suggest that you are interviewing with some investment banks, but that you will take any Consulting offer you may get, even over the most prestigious investment banking firm. If you have a diplomatic way of avoiding this question without lying and without coming across as disingenuous or evasive, then more power to you!

But importantly, we feel you should not be dishonest. If nothing else, it sets a very bad precedent for your behavior in a business context. Note: Consulting and investment banking jobs are extremely difficult to get—we at Street of Walls strongly suggest you decide upon which field you are more interested in early, so that you focus on either Management Consulting or investment banking only, to maximize your chance of securing a position.

If you were presented with the chance to join a private equity firm or strategy division at an attractive corporation early in your tenure, would you take the position?

This is a somewhat silly question, as in reality you would at least consider the opportunity. But we highly recommend that you say that if you wanted to do Private Equity or corporate strategy, you would have searched directly for such a position. If you are not both interested in business and already reading business and market news, then perhaps you are not really as interested in Management Consulting as you think you are.

In other words: even while you are a student, you should be reading newspapers and keeping abreast of ongoing business events. You do not have to know all of the business issues going on, but you do need to have a broad view of the key current events, as well as some deeper knowledge of a couple of specific events or trends. It is rare that you will be asked about a specific news item—unless, of course, it relates to something that you have discussed. If, for example, you stress a deep interest in healthcare and there has been major news on the healthcare industry, you might be asked for your understanding and opinion, so be ready.

Describe a recent business event that interests you. The key here is the structure of your response. Ideally, you can then lead the topic to an area that you are interested in and can speak intelligently about it—particularly if you are able to steer this into implications for different business or industries.

For example, you might talk about rising commodity prices and how this might be putting pressure on gross profit margins on certain types of businesses. This is your chance to show how you can intelligently present and discuss a business topic, as well as discuss potential ramifications—this is the heart and soul of the job of being a Management Consultant.

This is similar to the previous question about recent business issues. It is not a common question, but does provide an opportunity for you to offer insight into on a particular industry.

You should have a structured answer as to why you are impressed by a particular company and also by a particular CEO. The CEO does not have to be the CEO of the Company that you are impressed with, though doing it this way could make your research easier. Preparing for such a question could help you get familiar with a specific industry, which would be helpful for the two preceding questions. Follow-up questions are likely, so be sure to have good insights into the Company and also into the CEO that you select.

It would also be helpful if you could memorize some information about the industry that the company operates in see two previous questions. If I were doing research and wanted to gain insight into a particular aspect of a Company or industry, what approach would you recommend? This question and variants of it are a way to test both your knowledge of how Consultants operate, as well as your ability to think outside the box.

Start with the usual sources: company filings, industry data, Company presentations, media articles, and a web search. This question very frequently has follow-ups, so be flexible. Try to decide, based on the follow-up questions and prompts, which of these information sources would be useful. If you have working knowledge of the analytical techniques that might be used to address the issue being discussed, be sure to mention it in whatever level of detail you feel comfortable.

Questions for the Interviewer In addition to interacting and asking questions about the Case Study during an interview, you should attempt to ask the interviewer about his or her own experiences in Consulting. Management Consultants tend to like talking about their own experiences, and we believe that you will benefit if you prompt the interviewer to talk a lot about their experiences. Some potential questions or a variant of these questions to ask the interviewer, or ideas for generating smart questions to ask, include the following:.

There are many challenging aspects of Management Consulting interviews, and without a doubt, one such area is the ability to do fairly basic math during the Case Study questions and other quantitative questions that come up.

In real life, we all have access to computers and calculators. What would be the impact on profit? Thus, in addition to our separate Consulting Case Study Training Guide , below we offer you over 60 sample Consulting interview math questions below. A variant of any of these questions could come up as part of any interview.

By practicing these questions and the techniques needed to solve them, you will dramatically increase your speed and accuracy at answering the quantitative questions that arise so frequently in Consulting interviews. These skills will also help you succeed on the job as a Consultant! The key to this problem is to get your powers of ten correct. Answer: 5 beers 5. Answer: Remember that this is an estimation question, but you should try to get close.

Answer: 3. Estimation; try to get close. Answer: 2, units. There is an easy way and a difficult way to arrive at the same answer. Answer: 2, hours. Estimation and thought process are key; try to get close. Use paper to track the pieces.

Answer: 7. Demonstrating long division—use paper. Try to come up with an initial estimate before diving into the mechanics of division. Answer: days. Note that a good initial estimate is 0. Give this estimate first, then note that the correct answer will be slightly higher because of compounding.

Simple division, but there is extraneous information in this problem. There often is on Consulting math questions. Use paper to calculate and track the pieces.

Try to come up with an initial estimate first. See why is a good estimate. Calculate the pieces first. It may help to assume a specific price per brick for one of the types.

Answer: , visitors. Answer: This is a trick question. It cannot be determined without knowing what percent of visiting males make a purchase. The easiest way to calculate this is to look at the difference in tax rates, i. Answer: directors. Calculate the pieces on paper and subtract.

Try to estimate first. The best way to solve this problem is to pick a number of a certain type of chair say, Home and solve for the rest. Answer: 80 mph. Do not fall into the trap of averaging the speeds. Calculate total distance, and then divide by total time. Answer: 19, Remember that you cannot add 7.

Instead, divide 18, by [1 — 7. Along the way, try to come up with an estimate before diving into the long division. Answer: 18, units. Answer: 9, Canadian dollars. Break this down into pieces. This makes the math much easier. Answer: 1,, Euros.

Estimate in this case. For example, 1. Add the two shares together to get The increase in the total market is Answer: miles. Answer: pairs of shoes. For every first pairs of shoes that are purchased, there will be 40 second pairs purchased.

Answer: pages. He reads pages per hour, or 2.