Hi I'm Jenny Rae the managing director of management consultant, and today I’m bringing you an
additional installment in our case interview series. Specifically today I’m talking about
how cases are scored. This is something that is not often revealed. And you will never hear it in
an information session from the company, but
I’m going to pull back the veil today and help you understand exactly what’s being
measured and how you’re being scored when you’re going to the case interview process.
I’m gonna break this down into three parts. The first is that I want you to understand, inside each
question, how the case is scored. Then I want you to understand how overall the case is scored.
And finally want you to understand the differences in scoring between the first and the second round.
So I’m going to break up the two of those. First of all their case by question and
then the case over all. And then I’m going to highlight the differences between the rounds.
So lets get started. The cases are scored by question. And a particular, in the first round, case questions
are really critical because each one of them is given an individual score. The reason the
cases are scored in the first place is that it’s really important for them to be standardization
across multiple different interviews. In the first round of, say 60 people that are interviewed,
you wouldn’t have one person to all 60 of the interviews – you would have up to 12 interviewers.
And each one of them would interview people twice, so you would have multiple different
interviewers that are scoring everybody. So, each of the sections of the case will be given
a different score. At Bain, our sections were four points. But at other firms there are different numbers
of points. So today I’m highlighting the management consulted provided five point
scale, that we include an a consulting interview Bible. I’m going to walk through an example
of how each of these sections are scored. To identify the way that questions, in particular,
are scored, today I am going to use an example of an opening
question. And in an opening question we’ve
got the five point scale. So what I am going to do is walk-through each of the five points –
and how you would fall into bucket 1,2,3,4, or 5.
In particular, I'm going to focus on bucket five – because that’s the one that everyone is competing for.
So if you get a one – it’s because you didn’t recap the background at all. They read you the background
and you didn’t say anything afterwards, you didn’t even demonstrate that you were listening
to them. If you get it a two, it’s because you provided a recap, but it was incredibly
detailed or just totally blown out of proportion. If you get a three, it’s because
you gave a recap, but it was completely unstructured – you’re basically just rattling off a list
of facts. Stream of consciousness in the list that you remember them. If you get a four, it’s because you were
structured but simple. So you didn't demonstrate an advanced
level of understanding the case. You just gave
a quick recap and assumed some things that maybe you should't have assumed.
For five, the candidate provides
a clear, concise, structured response – and if appropriate asks one to three clarifying questions.
For number five – if you want to rank in the highest bucket. It's really important that you use good structure,
you demonstrate clarity, and you’re totally complete when you go through the recap.
This is just an example of how a per-question scoring item would be ranked,
and how you want to fall into
the top bucket. On top of this, there a few additional pieces that
will make sense for the firm to incorporate
and the interviewer will be responsible for evaluating you on those key metrics. There will be summary items.
So for example, in the Management Consulted scoring we have a couple of these.
First, we have the overall structure. That you consistently, as a candidate, present
your ideas in logical lists. The second is that we identify overall problem-solving ability.
This focusses on your ability to maintain awareness
of the key problem, and ultimately solve it at the end of the case.
And finally we focus on overall communication. How clearly do you communicate your ideas,
how collaborative are you, how structured are you and your approach, when you’re actually
communicating in the process. So on top of the sum of each of the individual questions, there will be
these over arching pieces, that the interviewer will be responsible for scoring. Once the score
is completed, the scores will be added up between the two interviewers that you interview with.
Or three if that is applicable. And averaged across them. And then
you’ll be placed into a spreadsheet where you’ll be ranked. So for example, if there
were 60 people that interview in first rounds. In the spreadsheet the goal is to take 10 to 12
to the second rounds. Because of this it’s important that you understand that
it’s not only a science, so it's not just the pure ranking, but there is some
discussion that happens. Usually the people that are placed into the top 10 are discussed.
And if anybody is not everyone’s favorite, they may pull somebody out.
In addition somebody who’s on the margin they may
decide to take to the final rounds. Because there isn’t a perfect number they're looking for. So, at the end
of the day, there is some discussion that happens amongst the interviewers outside of the scoring.
But for the most part, in the first round the scoring is king. In the second round, there isn't the same type of numerical scoring that
usually happens, the key thing that happens is that managers, or partners,
the more senior people that are interviewing you have to vote for you on a binary scale.
One is, I would like to work with and manage this person on their first case on the job. Zero is, I would
not like to work with this person. And they are voting one way or anther.
So, will this person make me look good, will I enjoy working with them, are they the type of person that I want on my team.
So a 1 is yes, and a zero is no. And at the end of the day,
they will get together if they all agreed, they decision is made, if they disagree,
then discussion will happen. And that is how the decision at the final
round ends up going. So it’s really important that as you’re going through the process, you understand
what’s happening behind the scenes from a scoring perspective. It’s also important for
you to understand that one piece of the case doesn’t make
or break the entire case. It's the overall score. So it is really important for you to make
sure that even if you fail one small piece of the case, your recover from it, and you keep
going because that may make the difference between getting to the next round, and ultimately
getting the offer, or not. If you've got questions about case scoring, we've got tons of information about it in our consulting interview bible.
We have our Case Bank that you can try these case scoring metrics on, and we also have lots of information at our website, Managementconsulted.com