Case Interview Preparation & Management Consulting | Strategy | Critical Thinking

Networking with a partner is counter-intuitive. It is much easier to network with a McKinsey / BCG partner for at least four reasons. First, partners always return emails. Second, partners are generally willing to take a call just to explore your profile. Third, partners are less hung up on things like degrees etc. since they look deeper at a profile. Fourth, partners are accessible with easy to find details. That said, the trick to networking with partners is to treat them as a peer. As soon as you place them on a pedestal, you will kill your networking chances.

We use the terms junior consultants to loosely refer to anyone at the engagement manager level and below: senior associates, associates, consultants and analysts. Our history of working with 279 clients indicates that the best results occur when networking directly with partners. There is no dispute on this point given the difference in our client base between those who networked with partners and those who did not. In this podcast we explain why it is better to network with partners and the inadvertent reasons why junior consultants will be less helpful.

This is a mistake common to most case interview candidates. They start with the McKinsey approach. This is a very, very bad idea. McKinsey cases are those were the interviewer leads the case. If you are only trained to do cases in this format, you will never learn how to lead a case. This is no small matter. The prompts and guides provided by a McKinsey interviewer play a significant role in helping you through the case and you will struggle without them. It is best to first learn to do cases where you are pointing out the areas or importance, and once you have developed this skill, thereafter shifting to the interviewer-led format.

We try to get our clients to understand that they are always being assessed for fit. Yet, many only pay attention to image and communication during the formal FIT/PEI interviews and then relapse into very poor communication patterns for the rest of the case. Listeners must understand that they are always being assessed for their communication, leadership, speaking etc skills, and especially during a full case when they are under the most pressure. If you keep this information in mind, good communication behavior becomes second nature to you.

Finding practice material for corporate finance cases is practically impossible outside Firmsconsulting. We have prepared this podcast outlining a training strategy any listener could follow should they be preparing for McKinsey Corporate Finance interviews. MCF interviews to be tough since candidates must demonstrate above-average strategy skills and a very high domain knowledge of finance, especially the ability to understand underlying concepts and adjust them for the realities of the market. We find this to be the main challenge for clients - getting to understand why a equation exists as it does versus merely being able to replicate the analyses.

Communication and image in a case interview is governed by both what you say and how you say. It is true that how you say something tends to carry more weight. However, in some case, certain phrases should definitely be avoided because they cause much damage it is very hard to recover from them. We discuss them in this podcast.

Storytelling is a very powerful technique to ensure someone remembers you after an interview. In fact, even when we screen people at Firmsconsulting today, we use this technique I applied as a partner. The rule is simple: if I can remember your key messages from the interview the next day, I would make you an offer. That, of course, assumes you had passed all the other hurdles well enough. One way to be remembered is to be your answers around compelling stories using the New York Times rule of facts, facts and facts with a beginning and end.

Being a young business analyst or associate on the receiving end of blunt and harsh feedback from a partner is a very jarring experience. However, it is also somewhat of a compliment. I never understand this very, very important point until my mentor, a senior partner, pointed this out to me when the managing partner gave me a very time about an initiative I was running. In hindsight, this was one of the most profound lessons I had in my consulting career, and the managing partner became a huge ally when I was up for partnership.

In this podcast we have listed some of the most common and most significant networking mistakes made by candidates. Since many of these have been made by clients, we have had an opportunity to discuss the mistakes, their motivations, the fall out and their response. Therefore, we can provide a comprehensive discussion on the implications of these mistakes. In general, no matter how badly a McKinsey partner networking call may go, you have little to fear. There are over 2,000 McKinsey partners. if you mess up, you have about 1,999 partners to start again.

99% of clients misunderstand learning and practicing. At its essence, you cannot practice McKinsey cases until you learn McKinsey cases. Most candidates start of their case interview preparation by reaching out to colleagues and consultants to practice cases, not having gone through the learning steps. Without a good strategy of separating learning from practicing you will simply absorb what you hear in the practice sessions and none of that is designed to teach you how to do cases. You must separate the learning from the practicing.