Hi I'm Jenny Rae, the Managing Director of Management Consultant, and I'm here
today to talk about eight consulting fit categories that are essential to know
about when you're preparing for the fit interview. I've already said, preparing
for the fit interview is really critical, and these categories should highlight why.
Because there are a lot of different stories that you can select, but picking
those that will be strategic to show off your best traits in that interview are really important.
So let's get started -- in the eight categories, I've broken them into two parts.
The first are story questions. These questions are questions
that need to be responded to with answers that tell a story. So you should answer
them with "Let me illustrate with that by telling the story. Let me explain the
time when... Let me talk about a time when I went through this example."
So I'm gonna highlight four key areas of story questions and just give some really
brief examples. The first type of story question are experiences from your resume.
McKinsey does a deep dive for this -- they call it the personal
experience interview. And they will ask you, or you will get to select, either one
experience on the resume. They'll spend an entire 20 to 30 minutes on it, with 10
to 20 questions. The questions will be incredibly probing, all the way down
to the details of what you were thinking when you made certain decisions.
That's one of the reasons why it's really critical to prepare for the fit
interview especially in the McKinsey environment. But even for other
interviews, it's paramount that you understand everything that's on your resume.
You can't forget something, you need to know the data, and you also need
to know every single detail that's on there. When you're asked to talk about an
experience on your resume, you want to tell a story about it. So it's really
important that you know what's on there as well as all the facts that are included.
The second part of the story questions are teamwork, leadership, and
people management questions. For teamwork, leadership, and people management, it's
important that they understand that you can work under people, with people, and
above people, and that you can work with anyone, in any environment, facing any challenge.
It's really critical for consulting because you're going to be
rotating on teams constantly, and every team has to be high-performing. So it's
really important that you're able to tell stories about times that you've
worked with people, worked under people, and worked over people, when you faced challenges
or conflicts and how you resolved those. This often constitutes the bulk of
consulting interviews, because it's such an important piece of what they're looking for.
The third type of story question are education and school questions.
Consultants aren't just interested in
the experiences that have shaped you. They're interested in people who are
consistently excellent, consistently amazing. And if you are
going to be amazing in your work experiences, that's one thing; if you're
also amazing in an academic or a school environment, that's another. They want to
see not only that you were strong in the classroom, which is important, but that
you were strong because you were intellectually curious. They also want to
understand that outside of the classroom you were very oriented on leadership and
involvement. So you need to be demonstrating activities and also
teamwork in extracurricular environments, even if your educational experience is
five to ten years in your history. The final type of story questions that are
really important to know about are ethics and integrity questions.
Ethics and integrity are important because in a post Enron society it's critical for
people to know that you are able to be trustworthy to handle data and to handle
good judgment when you have situations that are grey areas. A lot of the time
you'll have situations where there isn't a right or a wrong answer -- they want to
know what code of conduct is leading you, and how you manage not only the right or
the wrong, but also people's feelings and emotions in the process. Alongside story
questions, there a second category which I call "curveball" questions. It's kind of
funny with the name curveball questions, but the important thing for curveball
questions is to hit them with straight answers. So even though they're coming at
you with a curve, you need to make sure that you're addressing the issues directly.
There are four key types of curveball questions that I've laid out here.
The first are general business and current events questions. This could be
anything from essentially a quiz about what was on the front page of The Wall Street Journal
that day or the day before, or there could be something about
your opinion about key legislation or a key trend in the economy. It's important
to have a general sense of some important current events that are in
business, as well as some of your favorite companies that you can have
opinions about them and be able to talk intelligently. The next type of curveball
question are strengths and weaknesses. You can pretty much anticipate that at some
point in the consulting process you're going to get a question that's needed to
respond to in this way, but it's important that, again, you answer
straightforward with quick illustrations. You don't want to tell big stories about
strengths and weaknesses. The third type of curveball questions are return offers.
Firms will ask you plainly who you're interviewing with and who you already
have offers from. You don't need to discuss financial information. You don't
really need to discuss the particulars, but it is beneficial to be dynamic and
straightforward when you're talking about this. There are a lot of nuances
about how you shouldn't answer it but one of them isn't to just not talk about it.
You need to address the question in a proactive way and be prepared for what
you'll say in every interview. And then finally, the fourth thing is where
you see yourself in five years. Where you see yourself in five years is an
important question for the consulting firms, however it's not meant to be
answered with "I see myself in consulting." It's kind of a lame answer. What they're
interested in understanding is what are the options that you're currently
considering, and how this consulting play into the next five years, in terms of
shaping some of your aspirations for your future. When you're going through
the process of preparing for consulting fit interviews, there are a couple of
things that are really critical to keep in mind, regardless of whether you're telling
story questions or answering curveball questions. Here's how it's going to work.
I'm going to lay it out for you. The first thing is that you need to be
constructing 30 second to one minute responses. This just reinforces that it's
critical for you to actually prepare for the consulting fit interview, because
it's not natural for us to tell stories in 30 second to one minute sound bites.
It's important for you to understand what you're going to say
and how you're going to say it. Next, you want to make sure that you're using
summaries and structure. Summaries and structure are helpful for consultants.
They have ADD. Sometimes they tune out while you're talking. They're not
meaning to be rude, but you can be very polite to them by just adding something
at the end of the process or adding something even at the beginning that
highlights if you're using structure. If you're using structure, you don't want to
be too forced, however, so the next point is related to that. If it's something
that you have taken the time to prepare for, we're going to go through a couple
of these questions in detail in future sessions. If you have taken time to
prepare for it you want to just give quick introductions, and just let them
know that you've thought about something for a long time, or if you recognize that
this is an important question, you want to soften the hard core structure at the
beginning so it doesn't sound like you're a structured robot. The next
thing that's important to know is that it's important for you to smile.
People who are enjoying themselves in the fit interview are immensely more fun to
interview, so it's really critical that you smile in the process of preparing
for the fit interview. And finally, probably most importantly, be yourself.
While you're going through the fit interview process, it's a two-way street.
You are assessing your fit with the firm -- hopefully you'll receive multiple
offers -- they're also assessing your fit with them. So it's important for you
to enjoy yourself and really bring yourself, bring your personality, and your
flavors to the table so that you can get a clear assessment about whether
you're going to be a great fit at the firm and so that they can get a clear
view about you. We hope that you've enjoyed this session on consulting fit interviews.
We've got a ton of information in our
Consulting Interview Bible and also a lot more on our website at managementconsulted.com.