Case Interview Preparation & Management Consulting | Strategy | Critical Thinking

The first 3 minutes of a coaching session, practice session and case interview determines everything. First impressions count.

This is an important and wide ranging podcast around the theme of why candidates fail and some key observations from Felix in The Consulting Offer Season 1.

The concept of a Management Consulting Club is great, but the execution leaves little to be desired. Very few clubs are actually run by presidents/executive council members who know anything about consulting, or worse, care about their members.

You have been brainwashed by every single forum and case book to assume that McKinsey wants a framework and set of hypotheses, that you have stopped listening as carefully to the interviewer and simply providing hypotheses even when the interview is not asking for them!

I want to talk about three incidences and what it says about how women think about themselves.

Choosing a boutique firm as one path into management consulting is a popular choice. While boutique consulting firm appear to operate like McKinsey and BCG, and may even be led by ex-partners, there business models typical mean they create overwhelmingly different experiences for their consultants.

Most aspiring management consultants will spend about 95% of their time focusing on the technical issues to fix their case performance. That is, they focus on hypotheses, frameworks, decision trees, structures and calculations. However, what if that is not the areas which will yield the greatest gains?

Entrepreneurs almost always fail to answer the most basic question: If you were so successful, why are you leaving behind all that success to apply for a ~$150K/annum package at McKinsey as an associate?

This podcast draws on the feedback of one of our principals, Michael Boricki who was a Big-3 principal and left the firm on the day after he was appointed director, to discuss the technique he used to not only fix a stuttering problem, but use the pain from fixing the problem to introduce broader, and much needed, flexibility in this communication techniques.

This podcast is built on a discussion we recently had with a Yale PhD. His friend, who made it to the final round of McKinsey, was told that the firm had no specific development areas for her. She just did not make the make cut and she was upset about this lack of feedback, especially having been denied a place at the firm.

It is quite common for Firmsconsulting to receive the following emails, questions or comments from clients and readers. When reading the comments below, try to think about why a reader would have these questions. In other words, what are their underlying assumptions?

Due to our longstanding relationships at Yale and Berkeley, since several Firmsconsulting mentors are Harvard alumni, our Harvard and Yale clients' involvement in the development of The Consulting Offer Season 1 and 2, students of these schools receive complimentary access. This podcast offers some unique suggestions for PhDs and MBAs from these schools to use the material. In particular, 32 Harvard MBAs were intimately involved in testing the program between December 2012 and June 2013. We discuss their experiences and advice for using the material.

Putting together the September 2013 Quarterly feature article, "Unemployed to the Big-3," was both an interesting and challenging article. It follows the new format of the Firmsconsulting Quarterly. This podcast discusses the lessons you should be taking from this article. The context for those lessons, however, is determined by the way this article was written.

This series of detailed podcasts provides prospective applicants to our program all the information they need to put together an application package, do well in the screening interviews, and, should they be the offered a place in the Firmsconsulting program, succeed at their McKinsey, BCG et al interviews.

This series of detailed podcasts provides prospective applicants to our program all the information they need to put together an application package, do well in the screening interviews, and, should they be the offered a place in the Firmsconsulting program, succeed at their McKinsey, BCG et al interviews.

Networking will not lead to an interview in management consulting. That is because networking is very poorly done and treated merely as a process of asking for help and referrals. We have a very high success rate due to the unusual steps we take to prepare clients. All time allocated in this part of the training is at the sole discretion of Firmsconsulting since it is not subtracted from the 12 hours of coaching.

For the majority of clients, the most important area is resume preparation. A poor resume leads to a poor LinkedIn profile which results in no networking when consultants view the weaker online profile. Our most successful clients take the time to build effective resumes. All time allocated in this part of the training is at the sole discretion of Firmsconsulting since it is not subtracted from the 12 hours of coaching.

Give our extensive screening process; we have a detailed file on clients before the program begins. The planning call sets the agenda, timetable and objectives for the next few weeks or months if needed. Very few candidates tend to work with us for less than a month and the majority are working with us for more than 6 months.

This series of detailed podcasts provides prospective applicants to our program all the information they need to put together an application package, do well in the screening interviews, and, should they be the offered a place in the Firmsconsulting program, succeed at their McKinsey, BCG et al interviews.

This series of detailed podcasts provides prospective applicants to our program all the information they need to put together an application package, do well in the screening interviews, and, should they be the offered a place in the Firmsconsulting program, succeed at their McKinsey, BCG et al interviews. Third Application Step: Interview with an ex-McKinsey or BCG partner.