Scribbles

Countless guidebooks, websites, blog entries, workshops, pdf’s, and what not are floating out there on the subject of interviews, and yet I feel compelled to share my infinite consulting interview wisdom with the Wild Wild Web.  I’ll keep this short and sweet, skipping over the basics normally covered.

- Be confident and energetic.  If you’re not at ease talking about yourself and defending your ideas, how would you fare in front of clients?  Tons of candidates fail the “being presentable to clients” test.  Don’t be one of them.

- Get your story straight.  Draw a convincing picture that ties your past experiences, CV, and future aspirations together in a believable story on why you really want to join the madness of consulting.  If interviewers catch a whiff of you not being sure consulting is for you, then chances are even if you do get in, you’ll hate it, quickly leave, and nobody coming out for the better.

- Ask for feedback and advice.  After passing the first round, talk to the interviewers about your strengths and weaknesses.  Work on them and nail the second round.  Interviewers are more than happy to see people they passed in the first round come out prepared; it makes everyone look good.  Just don’t bother them too much, 15 minutes or so seems realistic.  Anything more and you become an annoyance.

From what I’ve seen, if our candidates had followed these three simply rules, they would’ve greatly increased chances of receiving an offer (assuming they were intelligent enough to pass the case).  So what about the cases?  First of all, I don’t think you can fake intelligence, no matter how well prepared you are.  But even for the bright people out there, a couple of things would help tremendously.

- Develop a good sense for business.  One could argue that this is part of intelligence, but I think the MBA program is there to help prepare for this.  Too many people are too focused on job search or partying that they forget to actually learn anything.  If you don’t feel like you have a good common sense for doing business, or you haven’t seen enough patterns in the real world, don’t go into the case inventing new things on the spot.  It just makes you look naive and clueless.

- Learn and practice the case study structure.  This is so readily available in any MBA program.  If you’re not a genius, don’t come in and wing it.  Even if your excuse is to just use XYZ consultancy as practice, you’re much better off being prepared on your own.  An extra offer or two never hurts.  There’s nothing interviewers hate more than feeling like you’re wasting their time.  You’ll feel the same when/if it happens to you.

That’s it, five simple steps to overcome the most common pitfalls I’ve seen so far.  Just remember, the firms don’t enjoy rejecting people.  They would love it if they could give everyone an offer, but for the most part they can’t because people don’t pass some very basic hurdles, not because of a limited number of spots.