So, what is this casebook thing again? The first casebook we’ve ever made, and the best casebook we’ve ever seen, with only two cases.
1. Why does it only have two cases?
The objective of this casebook is to make sure both candidate get the best feedback possible from one another.
This means the casebook needs to have realistic cases, with several questions, some of them containing follow-up questions (which a real interviewer is more than likely to ask). It also has several examples of strong and weak answers for each question, along with common mistakes candidates make.
A casebook with many cases but shallow answers and little to no real aid to candidates would go against everything we believe, so we ended up prioritizing quality and thoroughness over quantity.
2. Why is it the best we’ve ever seen?
Casebooks out there just have the case questions and that’s it. At most they will have one answer, often times not a really good one.
Even some paid casebooks we’ve used aren’t very good on the answer side.
We all know a correct answer is not enough to pass – you need to solve problems in a structured manner, and not one case book mentions this issue.
The results are painful.
In any mock interview, the candidate’s answer is always different from the casebook’s.
The interviewer has no way of knowing if it was ‘good different’ or ‘bad different’, so the feedback is almost always one of three:
(a) Generic advice regarding communication, like “state the most important issues first”, which are true, but hardly ever are the candidate’s most urgent issue.
(b) “The answer to this questions was X.”
But of course neither you nor your interviewer can really assess the quality of your answer. Yours might sound right to you, but the “official” answer is different and there is no one to help settling the issue.
(c) “The casebook’s answer is different but your looks right too – in fact, I think it’s even better than the one I have here.”
That is the best case scenario: your interviewer uses their judgement to help decide whether your answer is good or not.
But still, you don’t know whether you should trust him and use his guidance to steer your practice focus, and there is little to no focus in the thought process behind your answer.
This means the output of your time practicing is a little disappointing: you have seen a new case, with a different business problem, and that will freak you out less if you see it again. You expected to learn your weaknesses, test your new techniques, understand your strengths, and have an idea of the best way to practice after that. But no, you just saw a new case and you probably aren’t even sure of the answer to it.
What if you could know for sure whether your answer was good or bad, get feedback on exactly what you did wrong where it matters the most to the interviewers, and have a clear idea of how to do it right the next time?
That’s why we made a casebook containing best practice examples, weak answers, common mistakes, and so on. You’re going to love it.
And why are there two different sides?
Our goal with this casebook is that you do these cases with other people and exchange valuable feedback based on each others performance and on the answers we provide.
You will get, in your email inbox, both sides of the casebook. My recommendation is you use one of them to interview a mock partner and give them the other one, so they will interview you. Don’t read both before doing that, otherwise you’ll spoil your case.
Enjoy!
– Julio