Name: Case Interview Secrets
Rating: 3.7 (53 reviews)
Author: Victor Cheng

Case Interview Secrets summary

Victor Cheng

A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting

3.7 (53 ratings)

12 mins

What is Case Interview Secrets about?

Case Interview Secrets (2013) is a practical guide to nailing your interview at a big consultancy, such as Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey or Bain and Company. These blinks offer a crash course on the questions you’ll be asked and how you should answer them.

Table of Contents

What’s in it for me? Nail your upcoming case interview.

Once you’ve passed through the eye of the needle and have been invited for an interview at your favorite consultancy, the time is ripe to consider how to become the successful candidate for the job.

In most cases, a job interview at a consultancy is not just another job interview with an assortment of questions about your endeavors and prior experiences. You have to be ready to answer questions that can be both quantitative and qualitative, and that can take the form of a case, such as what’s the current market size for product X?

And that’s where these blinks can make a big difference. They’ll help you get an overview of the different types of questions that you’re likely to encounter and, more importantly, how to answer them in order to get the job offer you’re looking for.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how to perform complex arithmetic estimates, precisely and quickly;
when proxies come in handy; and
why you should expect that your interviewer might act somewhat aggressively.

Even if you are a world champion mathlete, you’ll need to practice hard for your interview.

Have you ever gone for an interview at a major consulting firm? If so you’ll know that it won’t just be a conversation about your qualifications; rather, it will entail solving hands-on business cases. These are called case interviews and they tend to feature quantitative questions that come in two types.

The first is math questions – problems that involve some sort of arithmetic, percentage calculation or interpretation of data. An example of such a question would be, “if the total innovation capital of company A is X and it were to grow at five percent per year, which of the following is the minimum annual growth of human capital necessary for the firm to represent more than half of total innovation capital within ten years?”

Questions like this can be daunting. But the key is to answer them as quickly as possible, which takes lots of practice. No matter how much of a math whiz you are, your brain is a muscle that needs regular training to perform optimally.

In fact, even candidates with PhDs in physics or the highest marks in college math classes can fail at these questions if they don’t practice enough. So, it’s essential to take on daily drills that improve your speed and confidence.

But how?

One way is to practice old interview questions. For instance, you can become faster by searching for the types of questions asked by firms like McKinsey or the Boston Consulting Group. By doing so, you’ll begin to “automate” your reasoning and be able to respond to such questions in a snap.

But keep in mind that test questions are always changing, and it’s important to get the most recently administered tests so that you’re up to date.

Now that you know about math questions it’s time to learn about the second style of quantitative questions: computational-level estimates.

At an interview, act like a professional consultant and treat your interviewer like a client.

If you find yourself at a case interview, you might be confused as to why interviewers ask you to make so many obscure estimations. How could somebody possibly determine how many hamburgers a drive-thru sells?

Interviewers test prospective employees with these kinds of questions to simulate what clients will ask you if you become a consultant. In essence, case interviews are test runs for your future job as a consultant – and you ought to act like it. To do so, you need to know what your interviewers are looking for and why they ask the questions they do.

Use different frameworks to answer qualitative questions.

So, you’ve learned how to tackle quantitative questions. But your interviewer might also throw some general business questions your way, like “why am I losing money?” or “should we merge with this company?”

Handling such questions is no problem as long as you utilize frameworks. For instance, you can use the profitability framework to conduct a quantitative analysis. It works by breaking profit into two groups based on its components: revenue and cost.

Key ideas in Case Interview Secrets