Hey, I'm Jenny Rae Le Roux, the Managing Director of Management Consulted.
We get a lot of questions about how to break into consulting.
But a lot of people don't ask exactly the right question.
I'm going to focus today on one of those,
which is, "How do you shine at a Bain interview?"
which basically means, how do you walk into the room, and make somebody know that
you are Bain quality material.
I'm going to talk about my experience both interviewing for Bain, and also in the interviewer chair.
And I just want to give you a couple of key things that you really have to focus on.
Number one, when you walk into the room for a Bain interview, you have GOT to
smile at your interviewer.
A lot of people miss some of the subtle cues - that you are ready to play, confident,
and game on!
People at Bain are generally very forward, game on, type of people.
That doesn't mean that you have to be an extrovert.
It doesn't mean that you have to be
the life of the party.
It just means that you are ready to go.
And so every way that you can think of to demonstrate that - get feedback on
it before you go into the interview.
Make sure that you are ready to bring your A-game when you come in.
If somebody wants to work with you, at Bain they generally have the confidence that they
can train you in the skills.
So number one, is just setting up the expectation that somebody would want to work with you,
that you feel comfortable in that space.
Number two, something that you need to know at Bain is that they don't rate their interviews
the same as BCG, Deloitte, McKinsey, or many other consulting firms.
The interviews are rated in an integrated way.
What that means is that they care a lot about pulling the pieces together, more than they
care about the individual mechanics.
They are not sitting there with a stopwatch to say, "Oh, you did your math in 17.2 seconds,
but somebody else did it in 11.6."
That doesn't matter to them.
What matters is that when you're doing the math, you're thinking about the bigger picture.
You're pulling the math back to the overall problem,
and you're driving to a conclusion.
That leads me to the third thing.
So not just 1) having a lot of energy and also 2) pulling it all together, but probably
most importantly 3) when you're at Bain, and thinking about going through a case, thinking
about going through the problems, thinking about going through everything -
they care about your time management.
Seems like a weird thing to be testing inside the interview.
But at Bain, even more than the other consulting firms, you're given a ton of leeway.
You're given the freedom to work on projects, you're given the freedom to work out of the
office, you're given the freedom to not work at the client's site -
even more than at other consulting firms.
They need to know that you can manage that freedom.
What does that look like?
When I ask you a fit interview question, it means that you answer it in a minute or under,
unless it's "Walk me through your resume" - on that one, I want two minutes.
I want it to be very direct, very clear, and very short.
When we're talking about the case interview, it means that you're finishing each piece
of the case interview in the expected amount of time.
As a standard, two minutes for everything, except for the math, which you can spend five
minutes on.
But I need to know that you're not just languishing, or looking for my direction -
that you have your own ideas, that you're going to defend them, and that you're going
to pursue them inside of the case and fit interview.
If you do those three things, you are going to shine inside the Bain interview.
Make sure you bring tons of energy, make sure you pull all the pieces together, and make
sure that you manage your own time to focus on what they care about the most - which is
driving to the major conclusion.
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