Stephen Pidgeon T’07 is an associate director of the Career Development Office (CDO) and author of the books How to Get a Job in Consulting and Case Interviews for Beginners.
The most important thing is to understand what competencies the companies are looking for. It sounds obvious, but you can’t really succeed in a job interview unless you know what they’re looking for. The good thing about consulting companies is they’re very, very transparent about that. You can go to their website and there’s usually a page entitled, “What We’re Looking For.” The other nice thing is that they’re all really looking for the same type of person, so you only need to do this research once. They want to know: Are you intellectually curious? Are you very driven to succeed? Are you able to work well with other people in stressful situations?
Once you understand what they’re actually looking for, then it’s a matter of thinking very carefully about your own experience. All consulting companies that I know of use the competency-based interviewing model. Rather than asking you about your theories, they’re asking you for evidence from the past with questions like, “Tell me about a time when you had to influence someone” or “Tell me about a time when you did something you’re very proud of.”
For your answers, imagine that you’re writing a novel or a Hollywood screenplay and use the same techniques that those writers use. Come up with memorable details. If you tell me, “My supervisor called me into his office,” that’s one thing. If you tell me, “My supervisor was a scary person, very intimidating, and his office was on the top floor of a tower in New York and it was all glass and minimalist furniture,” that tells me a lot more about him and it actually allows the listener to remember it and share the emotion that you felt.
Also, tell me the ups and downs in the story. Very often, when people tell a story from their past and they know it turned out well, they make it sound easy. I want you to put me back in your shoes at that point when you really thought, “I don’t know how I’m going to do this” or “This is going to fail.” If you give me that sense of threat and peril at the beginning, I’ll feel more empathy with you as we go through the story.
To recap: know the job, know your stories, and use storytelling tricks to make the person understand, follow, and remember you. That last one is important. For example, today, we’ve got McKinsey on campus. Every McKinsey interviewer is going to interview 8 people. At the end of a very long day, they sit down in a meeting room and decide who to hire. Your story has got to stay in that person’s memory if you want to get hired, so you want to be the one who’s created the vivid images and impression.
The consulting industry uses the case interview extensively, which, simply put, means you will need to talk through a hypothetical business problem with some actual data to show you can use math. It’ll test a number of things, like your ability to come up with a structured approach. Let’s say they ask you how to improve the profitability of Murphy’s on the Green in Hanover. Even if you’ve never stopped to think about running a bar before, hopefully you could take a minute and think, “Okay, here are the kinds of things I want to talk about: the customers, the operations, the staff, etc.” Then, they’ll give you some data so you can show that you can derive insight from it. They’ll also often have some sort of creative-thinking component that will really push you out of the box, too.
The other area, across both the fit and technical questions, is the real question they are asking themselves: “Do I want to work with this person?” So even if you’ve got the great story about influencing your boss and you do really well in the case interview, if you’re not the kind of people person they want on their team or in front of their client, they’re not going to hire you. Whereas on the reverse, if you actually are friendly and they feel that you would do well with their teams and their clients, you can probably make some mistakes along the way and still have a better chance of being hired.
So that’s actually the secret a lot of students instinctively know, but spend so long practicing the technical stuff that they forget—to be themselves.