Hi, I'm Jenny Rae Le Roux, the Managing Director of Management Consulted. I'm an
ex-Bain consultant, and I'm here with Lisa Bright.
Lisa is one of our fantastic and most popular interview coaches. She's ex-
McKinsey, and Lisa did an internship at McKinsey.
So we're here to talk a little bit about networking for internships. Lisa, can you
just share a little bit about your process first before we give a few
insights and tips? So i started really early in the process. I think I connected
with a partner, it was my sophomore year, actually. So I might
have been a little extra early to the game. I got an introduction and kind of
made my way through - through the system. But it was good to
get and build that network before actually looking to
interview. So I got to know the office a bit
more, know the people involved, especially because it was a smaller
office they're more likely to get you involved early on in the process. So that
was key to landing myself an interview at the undergrad internship stage.
Great. And you networked from a non-target school? Yes.
So what would be your advice to somebody who is really relying on networking as
their only way to actually get an interview at the office? So I
would say leverage your network, right? LinkedIn's a great way to
get to find people who might have similar backgrounds to you.
Probably someone, even professors or upperclassmen or something like that,
might have a connection somewhere, and just really leverage that.
Reach out to them and see if they'll just set up a quick
conversation and get to understand your background a bit more, so.
So that brings up, I guess, one common mistake that i hear
when networking for internships, whether it's at the
undergrad or at the MBA level. A lot of people use networking as
information gathering, but I actually think that they don't do enough
information gathering on their own first. What do you think about that? Yeah,
so you want to know a lot about what you're getting yourself into
in terms of is consulting something you're actually interested in or not.
So sometimes people will say tell me more about consulting as something that
they'd reach out to me for, and I'm well, you know, you should
probably do your due diligence and talk to some people
first, and really do your research before coming to
someone who's looking to give you an interview. Otherwise
I'm unclear if that's something you're really interested in, am I just wasting
my time talking to you. So you want to know that consulting is
something that you're very interested in and that you will be applying.
Not just I'm interested. Was there ever
a question that was always a safe question, or always a good question for
people to ask? Questions that you thought were usually
generally good? Can you think of anything like that?
It could be more about I want to know about your experience specifically at
McKinsey because I'm interested in that firm and I want to know what
differentiates it, and if that's something I should explore. So I think maybe firm-specific questions or
interested more in terms of my background, or something like that so
they can better understand if that's right for
them for that firm. I also actually think that along those lines,
office specific questions are really helpful because it is really difficult
from the outside to understand what is different between offices at a firm,
and I think that a lot of people are willing to just take anything at the
sophomore level or the junior level, but they really -
the top performers have strong opinions about where they want to go and they
really have a sense that they're going to have some selection and
they prioritize those areas. So I like that question because it implies that
you're going to have choices and you want to select well.
Yeah, that's a good tip for sure. Great. What are some
challenges you think that people commonly face with networking,
and how can they get over them? One is just how to reach out and how much time
to ask for. You know you don't want to sit down and
say can you be my mentor for the next year until I apply?
I'm like that's way too much work for me. Yes, absolutely.
So like quick, you know, how do you just draft an email that basically says
I want to just have a quick chat, let's say 10 minutes, at this day,
and talk about these couple things. I'm like okay, I can make time for that.
So just being really crisp in that communication and asking for the
appropriate amount of engagement from the person that you're looking to
network with. Absolutely. I think one thing that was really surprising
actually to me from Bain is that before I came in, I thought that
people wanted longer relationships, and I was hesitant to ask for what I really
wanted in an early conversation. When I was there, I wanted it to be quick
and dirty. I wanted it to be fast and transactional. I wanted to make an
opinion about somebody in my first couple of minutes with them,
and then I either wanted to recommend them or I wanted to tell them what they
needed to go do. So I was surprised at how little time I
actually needed to make an assessment, and also how little I wanted to invest.
So we have lots more recommendations like this. We have an amazing resource.
It's actually the favorite one that I have ever created, and we've done a lot.
We've made Mental Math, we've done case interviews, we've done Excel and
Powerpoint. But we have a course called Networking
for Consulting where we have tips, templates, and everything that you would
need to know to successfully network into a top consulting firm.