Hi, I'm Jenny Rae, the Managing Director of Management Consulted. I'm here today
to talk about one of the most important questions to respond to in the fit
interview which is why consulting. I'm going to talk a little bit about why
they're really even asking this question in the first place and how to think
about your response, as well as four different examples of responses that
I've received in both preparing people for interviews and actually sitting in
the interview chair when I was at Bain. Now there are a couple of things that
are really important to understand first of all. When a firm is asking why are you
interested in consulting, they're not actually completely interested in why
you are interested in consulting. They don't want to know in the way that your
mom would know, your dad would know, why you're interested in going into
consulting - they're interested in the answer to actually a slightly different
question, which is why are you a good fit with consulting. It's important to
recognize a couple of different things about this question. So the first is that
they're looking for you to demonstrate understanding. They want you to
demonstrate you understand what consulting takes, not only that, but that you
understand it in an academic way, that you understand it in a practical way,
that you have thought about what it will take for you to be a consultant, and you
have assessed to yourself and found yourself to be favorable, not only that
you would enjoy consulting but also they would be really good at it. The next
thing that's important to understand is that you are good at telling the story.
They don't just want you to give facts - I would like to do consulting because of X,
Y, and Z - that's not what they're looking for. They're looking for you to be able
to tell a story around how you became interested in consulting by it's become
more interesting to you and how it fits into the bigger picture for you. And then
finally, it's really important to make sure that you answer the question
they're really asking. As I said before, they're not asking why consulting,
they're asking why are you a good fit for consulting. And so they're trying to
understand, do you understand your audience? Are you good at picking out
when they ask you a pretty straightforward question - what they're
looking for. This is going to be important if you become a consultant in
conducting, for example, customer interviews or working with clients in
order to extract really important information from them. So let's go on to
how you actually answer the question. What I've done is I've broken up answers
to this question into four different categories. These four categories are the
types of questions and responses that I've got. So when I ask why consulting, these
are the ways that people have responded in the past. The first is a terrible
response, and this terrible response demonstrates that you don't understand
what question has been asked. Because people when they respond in a terrible
way, they say I am interested in consulting because of what I will get
from it. I will get training, I will get exposure to opportunities, I will get, I
will get, I will get. It is all about you and it is nothing about how you would be
a good fit or what you would add to a consulting environment. So a terrible
answer is too selfish and too focused on what you're going to take from a
consulting environment. The next type of answer is what I call a lame answer. It's
when you say, oh I thought about it for maybe 10 seconds and consulting is
something that I think I might be interested in doing because you get to
work with really smart people. That answer is so boring that the interviewer
could literally fall asleep when you're telling it, so make sure that you're
staying away from lame answers that are straightforward, flippant, and not thought
out. The third type of answer which is the baseline for an answer that someone
has to give in order to at least be credible inside the interview is when
you talk about three reasons why you would be interested in consulting. And
these three reasons should be well researched, thought out, and have some
kind of story behind them. This is the baseline. So it's not the best kind of
answer that you can give, but at the very least, come up with three reasons why
consulting is compelling to you, and why you think you would be good at
consulting. And then finally, the fourth category, the great category is obviously
the category that I recommend you aim for. And this category says - why
consulting, let me tell you a story. And the story begins with, I was thinking
about doing this, and I maybe had a moment of epiphany,
and in that moment of epiphany I got to have a conversation with somebody who
is really excited about consulting. Here are some things that they told me about
it. Maybe weave in those three things that are really impressive about consulting,
and then you conclude - now I've taken a look at the broadest industries
possible, I've looked at all kinds of alternatives, and consulting is the most
exciting for me. Maybe you even give it a quick summary in terms of what about
consulting is so exciting. But the great answers are always stories - they're not
lists, they're stories. so make sure that as
you're thinking about building your answer to the why consulting question,
you address with a story what you went through in terms of your process to
determine the answer for that question for you. We hope that you've enjoyed this
video on why consulting and consulting fit interviews. We hope that you'll join
us on our website at managementconsulted.com for even more great material.