Hi! I'm Jenny Rae, the Managing Director of Management Consulted, and today we're
bringing you the final installment in our exciting series on case interviews.
In particular today, we're talking about a case practice plan that will take you
from where you are now with some information about case interviews all
the way to nailing the case interview in the actual setting. So what I'm going to
talk about today are a couple of things. First of all, I'm going to talk about how
you could practice poorly - obviously we're going to try to avoid this.
Then, I'm going to talk about how you can practice well. And finally, I'm going to
lay out a key step by step plan that you can use to practice your case interviews.
First of all, how can you practice poorly? Again, this is to avoid this, but there
are a lot of people who fall into the trap of doing these two things - you can
practice with weak partners. You can practice with your mom or your little
brother or somebody who doesn't know anything about consulting, and they are a
person or a body but they may develop in you overconfidence and bad habits. So I
would not recommend practicing with weak partners. A low level basic qualification
for a decent partner is somebody who understands the field of consulting, has
watched a number of these videos, and knows what they're looking for in terms
of evaluating you. The second thing that can be really damaging to your case
practice is not practicing out loud. If you just read and read and read cases,
you will have an overinflated sense of confidence and being able to solve them
because you're really just reading how someone else solves them. The only way to
effectively practice for case interviews is to do them on your own and to do them
out loud with a partner. That being said, there are some key things that you need
to keep in mind so that you can make sure that you're practicing well.
First of all, you want to pick three to five great partners when you're practicing
for case interviews. You don't want 20 partners that's just gonna create
confusion. You don't want just one partner. You do want a little bit of
variety because you don't want to bend yourself to one person's style only, but
you don't want tons of partners. This three to five great partners will give
you the variety that you need but also the focus that you want to make sure
that you're practicing effectively. The next thing that you make sure that you
want to think about is practicing in simulated case environments.
You don't want to practice with unlimited amounts of time. You don't
want to be totally flexible with the amount of time that you're taking, and
you don't want to practice in a way that is not out loud. So you don't want to
practice where you're just writing or thinking through cases - you want to be
practicing these cases out loud. Simulated case environments are
incredibly critical. Third, it's really important to make sure that you review
cases afterwards for best practice. You would not believe how many people I've
talked to who come to me and they say, "great I've done 40 to 50 cases and I
can't wait to try one on you" and I want to cry at the end of it because it's
pretty clear than what they've done in those 40 to 50 cases is just ingrained
bad habits. They started off with bad habits in case one; they carry them all
the way through. The way to avoid this is to review your case when you've finished
it, identify what you could have done better, and even verbally out loud go
through the way that you wish that you would have done it. This will ensure that
you're making advances from case to case. And I have seen that people that do only
ten cases using this method can be further along than those who do 40 to 50
ingraining the bad habits. Finally, it's really important to make
sure that you keep in mind that perfect practice makes perfect. So simulate the
case environment, identify great partners, use strong cases, and really push and
test yourself because if you do that, you won't just build confidence and then
flop in the case interview because you're truly unprepared. You will really
be prepared. The first thing that you should do when you're thinking about
practicing for case interviews is to start with market sizing questions.
Market sizing questions are excellent skill builders. They give you the ability
to take a problem that is very open-ended and create structure out of
it - to organize chaos effectively. You need to do two of these a day until
you're comfortable, and I would recommend that you spend the first ten days of
your case interview practice just on market sizing questions. It is nearly
impossible to get an offer at a top consulting firm and not be able to do a
market sizing question - it's a key skill that every person who gets an offer has.
So make sure that before you move on to more advanced
cases that may be more fun to solve, that you've got the basic skills down.
The next thing that you want to do are 10 harder, more complete cases that take 20
to 40 minutes to do, and you'll want to do each one of them twice, like I
mentioned before. You want to make sure that you go through the case once in a
simulated environment under time pressure with no aid from the
interviewer. Then the second time around, you want to go back, review it knowing
what some of the answers are, and identify what the optimal responses
would have been. After you've completed the ten cases and done each of them twice,
the next thing you want to do is get with a partner, and here your unleashed.
You can do as many cases as you want and
need to until you feel totally ready for the case interview. Here are a couple of
guidelines though - the first thing is that when you're selecting your partners,
you make sure that you pick good partners. I already mentioned picking
three to five partners. So the number we've covered, but here what I'm talking
about a good partner, I'm saying you want somebody who is constructively critical,
who is able to be positive about what you do well but very focused about what
you need to do better. If somebody gets to the end of a case and says you did a
great job, they are not a good partner for you. At MC, we have excellent trained
consultants, people who were in MBB. I myself, do over 1,000 mock
interviews a year to train people, and we have the ability to take everyone up to
the next level - even our own excellent peers, we can give critical advice to.
So it's really important that you're picking people that are at your level
and also people who are above your level to really stretch you .Which brings me to
my final point - at the end of the day in cases, what gets you are your weaknesses
not your strengths. And although we at MC generally believe in strengths-
based leadership and focusing on what you're strong in and getting great at
that, when you're a consultant and especially when you're in the case
interview, it's important not to let your weaknesses hinder you. So when you go
through the process of practicing for case interviews, we would recommend that
you keep a map of the interviews that you have trained on - that you cover
multiple industries, multiple geographies, and multiple problem types, so that you
make sure that you are getting the expert practice in to focus on what
could potentially hinder you so that you are able to solve any problem that's
thrown your way. So this brings us to the end of our series on case interviews.
We hope that you've gotten a ton of fantastic information from these videos
there's always more, and we've got our Case Interview Bible, our Consulting Case
Bank, as well as tons of access to the best experts in the world at
managementconsulted.com. So come check us out and make sure that you utilize our resources
as you're practicing for case interviews.