What if there was a COMPLETE LIST of all the possible questions interviewers can ask you in a consulting interview?
That would make things a lot simpler, wouldn’t it?
Well, that’s what you’re gonna find in this guide.
If you’ve had any contact with consulting interviews before, I know what you’re thinking: “That’s impossible, consulting interviews are too complex for a complete list to exist!”
Here’s the thing: I can’t predict which specific questions your interviewer is going to ask. That would indeed be impossible.
However, I can predict with 99% certainty which TYPES of questions they’re going to ask. And then, I’ll give examples to each of them.
How can I do that?
Pretty easy: I’ve personally done dozens of consulting interviews in multiple firms.
More importantly, I’ve also personally done long-term coaching with hundreds of candidates so they could excel in their own interviews. This means I’ve been in touch with every single question asked in 3000+ interviews in all continents.
Then I’ve categorized those questions and put them together into this guide for you.
Here's what you'll get:
Think of this guide as a useful high-level roadmap of what you need to be able to answer in order to get a dream job at McKinsey, BCG, Bain and other top consulting firms.
In case you’re wondering, yes, these same questions will also help you go through interviews at smaller consulting firms, such as Roland Berger, AT Kearney and Oliver Wyman.
AND, they will help you with interviews in the consulting practice of the Big 4 (Deloitte, KPMG, etc.) and Accenture.
Here’s what I won’t do in this list, though:
- I won’t go into the specifics of how to learn and practice (though I will point you towards the resources to learn just that).
- I won’t usually go into the specifics of which firms use each question the most (as I’d have to write a whole book to cover that).
However, if your plan is to have a 99%-complete list of the types of questions your interviewer might ask you and how to prepare for each, you’re in the right place!
Interview warm-up questions
You get into the room…
And you’re NERVOUS.
“Is the interview gonna go well?”, you ask yourself.
“What does this interviewer think of me? Will it be tough?”. Your mind just can’t stop.
And guess what? Your interviewer is a little nervous too. Everyone is a little bit nervous when they meet someone new.
So what do they do?
They’ll ask you some warm-up questions.
I honestly don’t think you need to prepare for these, but it’s useful to see what are some of them, for two reasons:
Reason #1: It helps you prepare your mind for what to expect. It’s much easier to remain calm as you enter the room if you know the ritual.
Reason #2: Interviewers often use these questions as transitions to either the fit interview or the case interview. This flowing transition happens especially with partners.
There is also a hidden goal with these questions, which is why partners use it so often: to understand if you’re going to make a nice first impression with clients.
Here are some of the most common interview warm-up questions:
“How are you doing?” type of questions
Frequency: 70-80% of interviews.
Time to Master: You learned it as a child 😉
Common phrasing:
- “How was your day so far?”
- “How was your flight here?”
- “How do you like this city?”
Purpose: No tricks here. This question is here purely for social interaction.
How to answer: Answer the question politely and as you’d answer it to someone slightly older than you. Needless to say, don’t call them “dude” or anything like that.
If you feel like it, you can add some insightful observation. Example: “I noticed there are some great places for lunch around the office – must be nice to get lunch with colleagues on Fridays”.
Then, ask them a similar question back (“How are you doing?”).
“What do you think of X?” type of questions
Frequency: 5-10% of interviews.
Time to Master: Zero.
Common phrasing:
- “What do you think of our office?”
- “What do you think of our firm?”
- “What do you think is going to happen today?”
Purpose: To break the silence and also see how observant/aware you are of what you’re doing at the interview.
How to answer: Answer sincerely and positively.
Here, the insightful observation (that was optional in the last question) becomes important. They’re asking you what you think about something, might as well show you can notice things.
Then ask something related to them (to show curiosity and humbleness).
Of course, there can be other specific “ice breaker” questions and it’s not my plan to cover them all as they can all be answered with common sense.
HOWEVER, one important thing to notice: it’s fairly common for interviewers to ask a follow-up question on top of your answer that already is either a more formal, evaluative fit question or case question.
(More on that in the next sections of this list.)
These fluid transitions can be sneaky and many candidates don’t notice them, so pay attention to it or you’ll risk answering these more important types of questions without any sort of structure.
(Consulting firms require that for you to do well.)
In other words: answer these warm-up questions in a relaxed way, but don’t let your guard down.
Regular Fit interview questions
Consultants use fit interviews to assess three things, in order of importance:
- Your soft skills to present yourself, deal with clients and other human interactions.
- Your personal fit with the consulting profession.
- Your personal fit with the firm’s culture and values.
Most people don’t get this.
Candidates think interviewers are primarily concerned with their fit with the firm.
While this is important, most people would agree that the vast majority of McKinsey, BCG or Bain consultants would do well regardless of which firm they worked at.
Professional fit, however, is more important.
Few people have the interpersonal skills to be advisors, the industriousness to work long hours and achieve a lot in a short period of time (when the stakes are high), the intellectual curiosity to question everything, and the discipline to answer those questions in an analytical way.
And then there are the soft skills required in the job…
Can you communicate a past event clearly?
Can you persuade people to take action?
Can you sell yourself to fulfill a role?
Are you pleasant to talk to?
Without the skills, the fit with the profession is almost meaningless. And without professional fit, a fit with a firm’s culture would be irrelevant.
Interviewers use these “fit interview questions” to test those three things.
Here are the most common:
Tell me about yourself
Frequency: 60-70% of interviews.
Time to Master: 2-10 hours (to craft and practice a good story).
Common phrasing:
- “Tell me about yourself”
- “Why don’t you tell me who you are and why you’re here?”
- “What brings you to this interview?”
Purpose: This question has three different functions.
First, it’s the perfect ice breaker.
Second, it’s a GREAT way to test your storytelling skills: since the question is so broad, how you choose what you talk about and how you organize those topics into a story tells a lot about how you think.
Finally, it serves as a great lead for the interviewer to know what’s the best question to ask you in term of fit after this one.
How to answer: Everyone’s story is different, so there’s obviously not a one-size-fits-all approach to answering this question.
However, I do have two main principles that you should follow.
Principle #1 is to say only relevant stuff about yourself. You don’t want to start with your childhood, and probably not with your high school years.
The best way to guarantee you’re covering just the relevant things is to suppose you were asked “tell me the most concise story you can so I can understand why you’re applying for this role today”.
Principle #2 is to have a tight narrative thread to your story. Humans are complex, and so are you. You probably have a thousand reasons why you want and are perfect for that job. You don’t want to tell them all. Pick 1-2 overarching themes and create a cohesive story around those.
Additional resources: This video breaks down a great way to tell stories in your consulting interviews.
(And by the way, once you’re on Youtube, subscribe to our Youtube channel!)
Walk me through your resume
Frequency: 40-50% of interviews.
Time to Master: Resume-building time + 2-3 hours thinking through possible follow-up questions
Common phrasing:
- “Walk me through your resume”
- “Why don’t you walk me through some of the critical experiences in your resume?”
Purpose: Much of the purpose of this question is similar to the “Tell me about yourself” question: it serves as an ice breaker, as a way to see your storytelling skills and as a lead to other questions.
Most interviewers will either ask this question or “tell me about yourself”, few will do both.
Because there are specific items, however, some interviewers may use the opportunity to deep dive into a specific part of the resume and ask PEI-style questions (more on this later).
How to answer: Have an outline of your resume in your head and give them a little bit of detail where you would like them to deep dive.
That’s right: you can (somewhat) control where they’ll ask you further questions by giving more exciting details there.
Also, be prepared to give them a lot of detail wherever they want (see PEI Questions). You should have prepared for follow up questions beforehand.
Finally, just as in the “tell me about yourself” question, have a tight narrative thread to focus your answer on the specific story you want to tell about yourself.
Additional resources: A good, detailed view on the key mistakes candidates tend to can be found in this video.
Why consulting?
Frequency: 70-80% of interviews.
Time to Master: 3-5 hours
Common phrasing:
- “Why consulting?”
- “Why do you want to be a consultant?”
- “Why are you leaving X to become a consultant?”
Purpose: They want to know three things from this question.
Number 1: Do you WANT the job? Are you excited to become a professional in this field? Why?
Number 2: Do you KNOW the job? Are you excited for the right reasons or is your excitement grounded in false premises?
Number 3: To get an initial first impression of your persuasion, communication and other soft skills. As with most fit questions, the way you answer it is very telling of how you perform in this areas.
How to answer: First of all, your answer should be structured.
If you can’t communicate reasons to do something in a structured way you can’t be a consultant. Period.
Second, you should have specific reasons for wanting to join consulting. This is quite obvious, but you’d be shocked of how many answers I’ve heard where the reasons weren’t clear or contradicted each other.
Third, you must be able to provide anecdotical evidence for each of your reasons. If you say you want to join consulting because you want predictable professional growth, you better have at least a story where you’ve verified that actually happens in consulting. Maybe a friend who’s a consultant told you, or you’ve asked a few people in that firm and they all confirmed that’s true. Real consultants are a bit skeptical about everything, so this shows you’re like them.
Finally, be able to connect the reasons to yourself. Consultants are skeptical and if you say you want predictable professional growth, but you’ve switched jobs a couple times per year for the past few years, I can’t trust you’re telling me the truth unless you give me more data to work with. If you tell me that you want to be a consultant because you’re always on for a new challenge, that’s more believable.
Additional resources: We’ve written a comprehensive article on how to answer this question at “Why Consulting?”: Anatomy of the Perfect Interview Answer.
Why this firm?
Frequency: 70-80% of interviews.
Time to Master: 1-2 hours
Common phrasing:
- “Why do you want to join our firm?”
- “Why McKinsey/Bain/BCG/Accenture?”
- “What attracts you to this firm more than others?”
Purpose: When asking this questions, interviewers want to see two main things.
The first of them is to see if you did your homework and understand the firm’s culture. They tend to prefer candidates who have investigated what their firm is all about and have concluded that it’s a right fit for them.
The second reason (which is related to the first one) is to see if you’re highly interested in their specific firm (compared to their competitors). When interviewers ask “Why BCG?”, what they’re essentially asking is “Why BCG, and not McKinsey or Bain”.
How to answer: The structure to answer this question is exactly the same as the structure to answer “Why Consulting?”.
What is different is of course, the arguments. You should have arguments that wouldn’t fully apply to their direct competitors. If you say you want to join BCG for reasons that would perfectly apply to McKinsey or Bain, your interviewer will not be convinced that you want to specifically be a BCG consultant.
Additional resources: The perfect structure to answer this question is the same to answer the “Why Consulting?” question, which you can find in this article we wrote.
To find specific reasons for each firm: look at their website and see how they describe themselves, then go talk to people and find anecdotal evidence for those reasons (don’t use their marketing-speak).
Why should we hire you?
Frequency: 5-10% of interviews.
Time to Master: 1-2 hours
Common phrasing:
- “Why should we hire you?”
- “Give me three reasons why we should hire you over all other candidates.”
- “Why do you think you’ll be a great consultant working in here?”
Purpose: They want to see if you can “sell yourself” with confidence and assertiveness.
Many people get irritated by this question because they think interviewers should figure out by themselves why they should hire them.
Interviewers aren’t dumb. They know THEY must get to the answer to that question themselves through the rest of the interviews. Their goal is not to get you to answer that question for them. Instead, it is to see if you’re self-aware and confident enough to give them a credible answer.
How to answer: There are many ways to answer this question. My favorite? To use the classical sales formula: show them you understand their problem first, then show you’re a perfect solution.
That means briefly acknowledging you understand what makes a great consultant for the level/position you’re interviewing for and then showing you have what it takes.
For example, you might say you understand that they’re dealing with super senior clients on multimillion dollar problems, and so they need someone reliable that can be trustworthy to senior people. Then, you show you had experience dealing with high-stakes problems and senior people in the past.
It’s a simple sales/persuasion formula that works. Even though it’s simple, most people skip step #1 (defining the problem) and jump straight to step #2 (showing they’re the solution).
That’s a sure way to leave your interviewers skeptical.
What are your main weaknesses?
Frequency: 15-30% of interviews.
Time to Master: 2-3 hours
Common phrasing:
- “What are your main weaknesses?”
- “What’s a weakness you think would negatively affect you on the job?”
- “What’s a characteristic of yours that you think need improvement?”
Purpose: Better the devil you know than the one you don’t know.
That’s what interviewer’s think, at least.
There are a few things interviewers expect to get from this question.
First, it’s a great one to see how you deal with nervousness and pressure. I don’t think it’s the main reason why most people ask it, but it’s something that does impress upon them.
Second, they want to see if your weaknesses are not deal breakers. If you’re joining a strategy consulting firm and you have a tremendous weakness in being taken seriously by people older than you, that’s a huge red flag that you won’t be able to do your job there.
Most people aren’t naïve enough to share a weakness of this kind, though, which leads us to the final reason interviewers ask this question: owning your weaknesses.
They know you have weaknesses. Everyone they’ve ever recruited has them. What’s important to them is not to hire flawless candidates, but to see if you “own” your weaknesses. This means taking charge of them and mitigating their consequences.
How to answer: The first thing is that you have to say a REAL weakness.
If you say you’re a perfectionist who works too hard, interviewers will think to themselves “yeah, yeah…”, and then mentally ding you.
You need a real weakness that isn’t a deal breaker for the job at the level you’re in.
This means if you make spreadsheet mistakes all the time, that’s terrible for an analyst role, but not a deal breaker if you’re interviewing for a partnership role.
If you have trouble managing people but you’re being hired as an analyst, that’s not a huge deal… But it would be if you were interviewing for a manager role that’d be the end of the process..
Second thing: tell a short story about a situation when that weakness showed up and caused some trouble. This shows you’re fully aware of the weakness and how it manifests in real life.
Interviewers love self-aware candidates, as this is a strong indication they’re willing to improve. Recognizing your weaknesses is the first step in fixing them or making them irrelevant.
Finally, say how you dealt with it in the situation you just told them about and how you made sure to prevent the same to happen in the future. This is the last step in showing them you “own” your weaknesses and is a responsible professional when dealing with them.
PEI Fit interview questions
Not all Fit Interviews are created equal.
On top of “regular fit interviews”, which are there to test your fit with the consulting profession, the firm’s culture and basic soft skills, consulting firms also have the PEI.
So, what is the PEI?
Well, it stands for Personal Experience Interview. It is basically an in-depth exploration of a personal story (or experience) you had in the past.
The PEI was popularized at McKinsey and you’ll have one such question in every McKinsey interview you have. Other firms have started using this format more often in recent years.
Here’s the deal: consultants know you can bullshit interview questions all day long if you’re prepared for it..
This is the exact reason why they’ve created the case interview to test your problem-solving skills (more on this later). Instead of asking your strengths and weaknesses and technical skills, they can give you a problem and see how you solve it.
Case interviews are almost bullshit-proof – if you can’t solve problems, you’ll do very poorly in them even if you know the case beforehand.
But how can you do the same for soft skills? How can you bullshit-proof a test on a candidate’s ability to get work done, influence other people and lead teams to achieve a goal?
One way would be to actually watch them work over several weeks, which is what summer internships are for.
But that’s costly and time consuming…
Another way is to ask the candidate to tell a story about a specific soft skill you’re interested in, and then stress-test their story using some of the same methods used by legal investigators to check if a suspect/witness says the truth.
Enter the Personal Experience Interview (or the McKinsey PEI, as it’s more widely known).
The PEI is a super-intense 10 to 15-minute cross-questioning of a story you have about a skill.
For example, your interviewer might ask you to tell her about a situation where you led a team and achieve a challenging result.
Then as you’re telling her your story (which you’re supposed to have prepared upfront if you want to have any chances), she might interrupt you with a bunch of questions:
- Why did you do that?
- What did you think as you were saying that?
- What would you have done had the other person said this to you?
- Why do you think this was going to work given that the other person didn’t have this type of behavior in the first meeting you told me about?
Then as you answer those questions your interviewer might probe you even further, or let you free to keep telling the rest of the story.
This is so much different than most job interviews!
In most job interviews in other fields, interviewers ask you about situational questions (such as about a time where you led a team), and then let you tell the best version of yourself uninterrupted (which may or may not be pure bullshit).
Not in a proper PEI question.
In a PEI, your interviewer will let you tell your best story, but they will also ask you questions. Pointed, assertive, tough questions. It will feel like you’re being interrogated.
If your story is good, you have what they’re looking for and you were well prepared, your story will shine even brighter after those questions.
If your story was pure golden-coated bullshit, those questions will not be so great for you, though…
The key reason why interviewers do all this questioning is that when it comes to soft skills, past performance is not indicative of future performance (so just having a story where you achieved something isn’t enough).
But past performance PLUS a well-thought out rationale when the situation happened is indicative of future performance (because it shows you pull the feat off again and again).
To do well in a PEI question, you’ll need:
- A well-structured story for the specific type of question you’re asked (so your interviewer can follow along and you can fluently go into interrogation-mode and back to storytelling-mode)
- Evidence of competence within the story in the soft-skill being tested (so your interviewer knows there was a rationale in your actions and words and that you have and are aware of a repeatable process to achieve that kind of thing).
- Answers to the most likely tough questions you’ll be asked (so you don’t freeze and panic when they happen
Anyway, enough with theory… Let’s jump into the questions!
The Entrepreneurial Drive / Drive and Achieving Question
Frequency: 20-30% of McKinsey interviews (5-10% in other firms)
Time to Master: 5-10 hours
Brief Description: They want to know about a challenging “project” you’ve completed in the past. At the minimum, this “project”, which could be personal, academic or professional, must have a deliverable or explicit goal.
They’ll want to know how you worked in it and what were the steps you took to achieve your goal.
Also, as important as what you did to achieve that goal is the why… In other words, your interviewer will want to know your thought process along the “project” and how you made decisions as you went through your work.
Common phrasing:
- Tell me about a time when you had to achieve a challenging objective.
- Think of a situation where you had to work hard to accomplish a goal that was out of your comfort zone and that you set up for yourself
- I want you to tell me a story about when you had to deal with a challenging, individual goal at [instance X from your resume].
Purpose: I’ll be blunt… Your interviewers want to know if you can get shit done.
More specifically, difficult shit done on time.
While the case interview is a great test of your problem-solving skills, the world is full of intelligent people who are lazy and get nothing done.
One specific thing they’ll be looking for in your answer is your work process/style. Are you organized? Are you efficient? Can you focus on what really matters given your own objective?
Another critical thing: how do you deal with the unexpected?
Some people have a flawless work process but aren’t flexible enough to deal with the situation when it changes. In consulting, goals are challenging AND they change all the time.
Your interviewer wants to see how you work in steady situations and in situations that have changed. Both are essential to get stuff done in a consulting project.
How to answer: PEI questions in general have a lot of nuance, but here’s a rough guideline:
1) Say what was your challenging goal.
Also, say how it was set-up and by whom. If the question is on entrepreneurial drive, the goal must be set-up by yourself, not someone else. Entrepreneurship in consulting has nothing to do with start-ups, and everything to do with setting new goals and making them happen.
2) Say what was your initial plan to achieve the goal.
This is where you show the expectations you had upfront. Describe it in a step-by-step way to show structure!
3) Say what happened in reality.
Then, most importantly, say how you dealt with the unexpected along the way. If your story doesn’t have anything unexpected (and everything happened according to your initial plan), it’s gonna sound like the situation was too easy.
4) Say the results of your actions.
Also, mention if the goal was achieved or not and why do you think that was. It’s not a problem if the end result wasn’t ideal, as long as you did everything you could to make the situation go well.
In general, blending in your rationale in each step of the way is a good practice as your interviewer is more interested in why you did things than what exactly happened in that specific situation. (This is true for every PEI question).
Additional resources: I recommend the PARADE Method to structure your story. (It’s similar but better than the well-known STAR method, as it focuses on the rationale of every action.)
The Personal Impact / Persuasion / Conflict Resolution Question
Frequency: 30-40% of McKinsey interviews (5-10% in other firms)
Time to Master: 7-15 hours
Brief Description: This question gets people confused because of the generic name McKinsey uses to describe it: Personal Impact.
Personal Impact is all about influencing other people, which is why I put this question in the same bucket as Persuasion and Conflict Resolution.
This may sound a bit counterintuitive, but to persuade or influence someone and to solve a conflict you need the same skillset.
In all these types of situations, you need to change someone’s mind to be successful. Your interviewers will want to know about a time you did that and how you did it.
Common phrasing:
- Tell me about a time where you convinced someone to change their mind.
- Think of a situation where you had a conflict with a difficult person and successfully solved it for the better
- Tell me about a time where you resolved tensions between two people in [Company X from your resume]
Purpose: In essence they want to know if you’re able to change people’s minds. Needless to say, this is essential to drive change in organizations. Even more so as a consultant, as you don’t have any hierarchical power over anyone.
Specifically, they want to know if you can understand other people’s motives in a conflict or reasons to have a different point of view from yours.
Then they want to know what specific steps you took to convince these people to do/think something different. Ideally you were well aware of your approach to do that and in the end the other person was glad you convinced them otherwise.
How to answer: Again, there’s a ton of nuance to have a great answer, but this rough guideline will help you build a superior answer than most candidates:
1) Describe the situation and your goal.
This is basic context so the interviewer understands the conflict or disagreement and why it happened.
2) Describe the other person.
This story is about people. Describe what they thought and why you think they thought it. You want to be very specific in their rationale and show you can think from their point of view.
3) Describe what you did to persuade them.
As always, include the why you did it. You want to show a balanced persuasion approach that is thoughtful but not manipulative. Ideally, your solution made everyone in the situation better off (even the “opposite” side of the argument).
Additional resources: As with other PEI stories, I recommend the PARADE Method to structure your story. (It’s similar but better than the well-known STAR method, as it focuses on the rationale of every action.)
The Leadership / Teamwork Question
Frequency: 30-40% of McKinsey interviews (5-10% in other firms)
Time to Master: 7-15 hours
Brief Description: The Leadership and Teamwork questions are similar in the sense that both are about how you work with others.
A Leadership question is different than a Teamwork question in the sense that it has a “Leading” component. This doesn’t mean you had to be the formal/hierarchical leader in the situation… Consultants care more about the ability to lead than the formal role of being the boss
When interviewers ask you a question of this kind (leadership or teamwork), they want to know about a situation where you’ve worked with other people to accomplish a goal.
Common phrasing:
- Tell me about a time when you led a group of people to achieve a challenging objective.
- Can you remember a situation when you had to work in a group and you had to overcome difficulties to achieve a goal?
- What was your greatest leadership challenge at [place X from your resume]?
Purpose: As a consultant you’ll be working with other people all the time.
Sometimes you’ll be the formal leader (of a project or workstream), other times you’ll be collaborating. In both situations, consulting firms will expect you to take the lead if needed.
Now, allow me to state the obvious: working with other people is HARD.
But you know what’s harder? Working with people who don’t know how to work with other people.
And so it is only natural that top consulting firms will want to make sure you have that ability before they hire you.
By asking this question, they’ll be able to know if you can understand other people’s goals and ways of working.
They’ll also learn if you have the ability to influence these people as you work together
Finally, they’ll learn about your ability to get things done as a group of people (not only as an individual). This includes dividing the work, setting up incentives, processes, accountability, etc.
How to answer: This question is kind of a mix between the “Achievement” question and the “Personal Impact” question. Here’s a simple template you can follow:
1) Describe the situation, challenge and your goal.
This will give them basic context of what was going on and what you were trying to achieve and why.
2) Describe the other people you had to work with.
Emphasize roles, including your role in the group. This will give the interviewer social context: who was who and who were you in that group of people.
3) Describe what you did to work with/lead the group towards success.
Here you’ll get more tactical and explain exactly what happened step-by-step. Include your rationale along the way.
As for other PEI questions, never forget to explain your rationale as you tell your story.
Additional resources: As with other PEI stories, I recommend the PARADE Method to structure your story. (It’s similar but better than the well-known STAR method, as it focuses on the rationale of every action.)
The Biggest Mistake Question
Frequency: 10-20% of all interviews (McKinsey or otherwise)
Time to Master: 1-2 hours
Brief Description: While not a formal McKinsey PEI question, this is a question you’ll get asked in a fair share of your interviews.
Your interviewer will approach it with a PEI-like mindset. They’ll use the interrogation-style to probe into your story and rationale.
It is basically the opposite of the achievement question.
They will ask you about one of the biggest mistakes you’ve ever made and how you dealt with it.
Common phrasing:
- What’s the biggest mistake you’ve done in your career so far?
- What’s a mistake you did recently that critically affected other people and how did you deal with its consequences?
- I see from your resume you worked at [X Company], can you walk me through something you did there that wasn’t optimal?
Purpose: Interviewers ask this question for a similar to the Weakness question (which we put into the Regular Fit Interview Questions section).
The difference is that it’s targeted at a specific situation you’ve lived.
They want to see you’re sincere, thoughtful and that you own and learn from your mistakes.
Why?
Because everyone makes mistakes! The difference between a great professional and a shady one is how you deal with them.
How to answer: There are three key guidelines when answering this question:
1) Show a real mistake with real consequences to other people.
Most people try to hide from this question by talking the interviewer through a mistake that isn’t too serious or relevant. If you do this, your answer won’t be relevant and the interviewer will be left wondering why you haven’t shown them a real mistake… Have you never done any mistakes in your life? Unlikely…
2) Talk through what caused you to make that mistake.
Interviewers love candidates who own their responsibility. Even if you were not fully responsible for the mistake, you have to recognize as much of the responsibility as possible. This will let them assured that’s what you’re gonna do next time you screw something up.
3) Show how you fixed it and what you did/are doing not to make it again.
Show me someone who’s made a mistake once and you’re showing me a human being… Show me someone who makes the same mistake all the time and you’re showing me a fool. Signaling to your interviewer that you’re the type of person who learns from your mistakes is an amazing way to finish your story at a high tone.
Case interview questions
Management consultants are hired at expensive rates to solve the most challenging problems of large organizations.
That’s pretty much the job description…
And top firms will bill you at 1000s of dollars per day even if you’re fresh out of college.
No need to say you’re expected to be solving problems from day 1…
Which is why the Case Interview is so critical in the recruiting process:
Interviewers, who are always real consultants who do real project work, will go through a simulation of a real or fictional problem with you. They’ll expect you to be able to solve it as well as they would.
They want to test you in a made up scenario before throwing you into a real one (with real clients real stakes).
Think of it as a flight simulator used to train and test pilots. But instead of you having to take off, fly and land an airplane, you’re expected to structure a client’s problem, drive towards a solution and finish with a recommendation of what they should do.
And let me tell you: every respectable management consulting firm will do case interviews with you. The top firms will go as far as doing 5+ case interviews before they give you an offer.
There are many formats to these cases: they might give you a slide deck and ask you to come up with conclusions to the client based on that (or even give a presentation), they might do it in a group format…
But the two most common formats are the candidate-led case and the interviewer-led case.
Both are individual: you’ll solve the case in 30-40 minutes alone with the interviewer.
In the candidate-led case, you’re supposed to “guide” the case… You’ll ask any questions you want and in whichever order you want and if you’re good, you’ll eventually reach solution.
In the interviewer-led case, the interviewer leads. They’re gonna ask you a question and you’re expected to answer that question. Then they’re gonna ask you another. Then another… Until the case is over.
To be frank with you, the format doesn’t matter as much as candidates think.
If you’re able to do really well in the candidate-led format, you’re probably gonna be able to do well in the interviewer-led format with just a little bit of extra practice.
The reason why Case Interviews are so powerful is that the interviewer can ask you to solve ANY type of situation in ANY type of industry.
One interviewer will expect you to come up with a practical approach to increase a supermarket average sale value, another will think it’s reasonable to expect you to figure out how should a pension fund allocate its portfolio.
This makes it IMPOSSIBLE to prepare for a Case Interview through pure knowledge… Which in turn, across many cases, isolates the test to seeing how you think, not what you know.
Needless to say this makes candidates anxious and agitated, which is why many candidates invest 100s of hours preparing for their cases.
And yet, there IS a way out of this infinite universe of possibilities…
Yes, your interviewer can ask you about ANY type of problem. And yes, they can ask you about ANY type of industry…
But they only ask about those things with 6 types of questions (+1, which I’ll show you in the end of this section).
We call these questions the 6 Building Blocks, and they’re the foundation of our free course Case Interview Fundamentals.
I’ll walk you through each of these questions below, but I highly recommend you join our free course and watch the video called “The 6 Building Blocks”. That video shows the different ways the questions described below tie together to form a whole case interview.
The Framework Question
Frequency: 70-80% of case interviews
Time to Master: 30-60 hours of practice
Brief Description: Every consulting firm’s client has a tough, complex goal to reach or decision to make.
That’s why they’re calling the consultants in!
The first thing your clients (and the project’s partner) want is a plan to solve that problem. A cohesive, structured plan that one can look at it from the outset and be confident that whoever’s going to do the work will be able to achieve the desirable results.
The Framework question is the question where the interviewer gives you a problem as large and complex as a whole project and asks you to break it down into a plan to solve it.
Contrary to what many people think, not every case interview starts with a framework. It’s common for interviewers to start the case giving you a chart to interpret, an estimation to solve or a brainstorming question. These types of cases feel more like you’re starting out from somewhere in the middle of a project.
Also, I’ve seen a few cases where the Framework question comes at the end of the case. In these situations, the role of the beginning and middle of the case is for you to find enough information and context to build a decision-making plan (or framework) as well as possible at the end of your 30-40 minutes with the interviewer.
Common phrasing / Examples:
- Your client is an e-commerce store that sells furniture. Their clients say that they wish they could see and touch the items before they bought and that they’d buy more of it if they could do that. Your client is considering to open demo retail stores in selected cities for that purpose. Should they do it?
- How would you help a pizza restaurant recover from a sharp profitability decline?
- A government of an Asian country is scared of an outbreak of an aggressive flu strain in a neighboring country. What should they do about it?
- Help a local school increase math scores of its students in standardized tests.
- What steps would you take to set up the strategic plan of a company like Apple?
Purpose: Breaking down complex business and public sector problems is the hallmark of management consulting.
Interviewers want to test your ability to break down a big, complex problem into manageable steps that would achieve the objective.
Within the plan, they want to see your ability to foresee what are the main issues regarding the problem and hypothesize the answers.
They also want to check your ability to organize your ideas in a clear, concise, prioritized way (check out the MECE principle).
How to answer: The first thing to realize when answering this questions is that you CAN’T USE A PRE-MADE FRAMEWORK.
You need to build your own or you’ll pass the impression that you’re someone who can’t think for yourself and relies on memorization instead.
Let me emphasize this point one more time:
Your interviewers have likely given the specific case they’re giving you 100+ times. They’ve seen every framework you can conceive. And because most candidates memorize frameworks from well-known books and sources, they know what are the memorized ones… They all look the same.
There are 4 steps to create a winning framework on your own:
1) Define the problem clearly.
Interviewers will often give you an ill-defined problem just to see if you’re able to ask the right questions upfront in order to really understand it. Can’t solve a problem you can’t understand.
2) Create MECE categories of analyses.
MECE stands for “Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive”. In simpler terms: no gaps in your analyses (categories cover the whole problem) and no overlaps (each category is fully distinct from the others). Easier said than done, but I’ll give you a bunch of resources in a couple minutes.
3) Show what you would analyze in each category.
Think of this as key questions… If one of your categories of analyses is the “size and quality of demand”, what are the specific questions you want to answer to be fully satisfied that demand is good enough for your client to go through with the decision? The best way to do it is using hypotheses.
4) Define next steps.
After you finish presenting your plan, you ought to mention how to start using it. Select a high priority area of your Framework and say you’ll start from there by testing hypothesis X.
In 99% of interviews you can ask for a couple minutes to build your framework after defining the problem clearly. And you should. I don’t know of any candidate, no matter how brilliant, that can pull off a great framework in no time at all.
Additional resources: The Framework Module in our free course, Case Interview Fundamentals, is considered by most students the best source to learn how to create framework from scratch properly.
There, I’ll show you exactly how to define the problem, I’ll teach you the Landscape Technique to create conceptual frameworks from scratch to any problem (even Public Sector cases) and I’ll show you how to present your framework and manage time.
There are a few Framework video drills there as well, so you can put your knowledge you learn into practice and compare your Frameworks to mine.
Another key resource is our comprehensive guide to Issue Trees. Ask any consultant what’s the #1 thing to learn before your interviews and you’re sure to hear about Issue Trees.
As you will learn in the Framework module in Case Interview Fundamentals, when building a Framework you can always choose between using a Conceptual Framework or a customized Issue Tree. There are specific situations for each, so you need to learn both.
Finally, our Youtube channel has a few insightful videos on Frameworks, including techniques to improve them and examples of great Frameworks.
The Brainstorming Question
Frequency: 2-4 times per case
Time to Master: 10-20 hours of practice
Brief Description: At the start of AND throughout every single project, consultants (or any problem-solver) will have to (1) generate ideas to solve problems and (2) come up with hypotheses of why problems are happening.
The brainstorming question is a test of this critical skill of coming up with good ideas and hypotheses.
Don’t think it’s all about throwing ideas without judgement in a whiteboard and feeling good about them, though. Consultants are only recognized for good ideas that solve the actual problem. To ensure that, you’ll need learn to generate these ideas and hypotheses in a structured way.
Common phrasing / Examples:
- A furniture e-commerce’s clients want to see and touch the products before they buy, but the store doesn’t want to open physical stores… What are some alternatives?
- What do you think might be potential causes for a pizza restaurant to lose 30% of its clients in the past year?
- If you have a neighboring country with an aggressive flu outbreak going on, what are the main paths this disease could enter your country?
- What are the 3 best ideas you have to get a school’s high school students to spend more hours per week studying for math?
- What do you think are Apple’s major competitive advantages?
Purpose: There are four main things interviewers are generally testing when they ask you a Brainstorming questions:
First, they’re testing your understanding of the problem. This is what many people in the industry call business sense. It’s hard to generate hypotheses about why the clients of a pizzeria aren’t coming back if you don’t have a basic understanding of how customers behave and how they interact with a pizza restaurant.
Second, they’re testing your ability to STRUCTURE the problem before coming up with ideas. This is the KEY MISTAKE most candidates make: they start listing ideas in random order, without finding an organizing pattern that ensures they’ll capture all key types of ideas. The MECE principle helps tremendously here.
Third, they’re testing your creativity to come up with novel yet feasible hypotheses or solutions. Because they’ve seen hundreds of candidates answering the same question, they know which ideas/hypotheses are common and which ones are mentioned less frequently. They also understand the problem they’re giving well enough to know which ideas are better.
Finally, they’re testing your ability to prioritize. Great candidates generate more ideas in the buckets (parts of their structure) that matter the most, and they intuitively know which ideas are best and which hypotheses are more likely.
How to answer: Here are three simple steps that will guarantee an answer 10X better than that of other candidates (who’ll only do step #2):
1) Create a MECE structure before you list any ideas/hypotheses.
DON’T COME UP WITH AN UNSTRUCTURED LIST OF IDEAS. This is a mistake that will cost you your offer.
2) Generate ideas/hypotheses for each bucket of your structure.
If there’s a bucket that’s more relevant than the other, focus on that one, but generate at least one idea/hypothesis for each bucket.
3) Prioritize which ideas/hypotheses are most likely to work out.
Interviewers want to see you have the ability to select which ones to test first. In real projects, this will save weeks of a consultants time.
Additional resources: The Brainstorming Module in Case Interview Fundamentals (our free course) is an excellent primer to Brainstorming questions.
In that module, I’ll show exactly how to solve a Brainstorming question effectively and go into the specifics of each step. There are also a few drills you can take to see it in practice and compare your answer to mine.
Another good resource is the 5 Ways to be MECE, a guide that’ll show you the five core techniques to structure your Brainstorming questions effectively.
The Hypothesis Testing Question
Frequency: 1-2 times per case
Time to Master: 5-10 hours of practice
Brief Description: Every time you build a framework or brainstorm ideas/hypotheses, you have created a ton of new hypotheses about what’s going on with your client or how to solve their problems.
Even when you finish charts or analyses about your client’s problems… New answers always generate new questions (which are in fact hypotheses).
And there’s no reason to generate hypotheses you can’t test!
The essential workflow of a consultant is to structure the problem, generate hypotheses for each part of the problem and then TEST those hypotheses.
The Hypothesis Testing question bridges hypothesis generation with gathering data and analyzing.
It is basically the interviewer’s way to say “if someone told you that X might be true, how would you go about proving or disproving that X is true?”.
They’re looking for the steps you’d follow to answer that question.
Common phrasing / Examples:
Usually hypothesis testing questions come up naturally, as you answer other types of questions, so they tend to be much shorter than the ones I’ll show. But here are a few examples of questions with the whole context included:
- How would you find out if having free, no-hassle returns would help a furniture e-commerce store increase its conversion rates as much as opening retail demo shops, but at a lower cost?
- Your pizza restaurant client has lost 30% of its clientele roughly at the same time a new competitor opened across the street… Is this the cause of clientele loss?
- The minister of health of your client’s country wants to close all borders due to a flu outbreak in the neighboring country. How would you find out if this measure is likely to be effective?
- Your client’s a high school principal who thinks kids who do poorly in math do so because their parents don’t value studying math well enough. He wants to educate parents on the importance of studying math as a kid. Is this likely to work?
- Some people have been saying there’s little upside for Apple to grow in the smartphone category. Does that make sense?
Purpose: Your interviewer’s looking for a rare ability: to see if you can find truths in a precise AND practical way given stated hypotheses.
In a real project, a partner, a manager or even a client might come up with a hypothesis. They’ll expect you to independently test that hypothesis and come to them with a definitive answer.
Because of that, your interviewer needs to see your ability to do that.
How to answer: There are three key steps in solving a Hypothesis Testing question:
1) Define the hypothesis REALLY well so it’s testable.
Many hypotheses, even those stated by the interviewer aren’t testable. More often your interviewer will ask you to test your own hypotheses. You need to define and rephrase your hypothesis very precisely, optimizing for testability.
2) Create your Hypo Testing logic.
This is a basic logic statement, for example: the hypothesis is true only if A, B and C are true. Easier said than done.
3) Say what data (quantitative or qualitative) you need.
You should be able to tell your interviewer how would you gather this data and how would you process it to find the final answer.
Additional resources: There aren’t many resources online on how to test hypotheses, especially in a consulting-specific scenario.
Consulting is different from other situations where hypothesis testing is used because consultants need to test hypotheses very quickly, and accept a less than perfect test if it’s quick enough (compared to, say, scientific research, which needs to be precise yet takes years and decades).
Because of this lack of resources, we’ve included a Hypotheses Testing Module in our free course, Case Interview Fundamentals.
The Estimation Question
Frequency: 70-80% of case interviews
Time to Master: 10-20 hours of practice
Brief Description: Consultants love numbers, because you can build strong logic that’s easy to communicate with the organization as a whole by using them. The right data, however, is not always available.
For example, you might need to forecast data about the future, which can’t be available because it didn’t happen yet.
One important reason why consultants need to quantify things for which full data is not available is so they can compare different hypotheses or solutions against each other.
For those reasons, consultants do estimations day in and day out.
Estimations can range from a simple back-of-the-napkin calculation done in 5 minutes to estimate a market size to a complex financial model forecasting the valuation of a company given certain changes (that could take weeks of multiple people working on it).
Common phrasing / Examples:
- Estimate how much of an uptick in conversion rates would justify an e-commerce store build a demo retail shop for its products.
- Estimate the value of each customer that your pizzeria client lost.
- The government of a country wants to plan an emergency plan in case the flu outbreak from the neighboring country reaches it. They’re thinking one part of the plan is to suspend activity in all work and schools to prevent spread. What would be the economic cost of this?
- Estimate the cost of teaching math to each student, from kindergarten through high school.
- Apple’s thinking of entering the wearables market. What’s the potential market size of that?
Purpose: The interviewer doesn’t care too much about the number you reach. It’s all about the process.
First and foremost, they want to see if you can find the numerical drivers of a problem and create a formula out of them. If you want more insight on how to mathematize a problem, check out the Fermi Equation.
After you’ve built the formula, interviewer’s want to see if you have a good intuition with how small or large certain numbers should be. You don’t need to pick the right assumptions with a huge level of precision, but you must be close and be able to justify your numbers.
They also want to see if you’re “numerically comfortable”. That is, that you don’t shy away from math, or that you don’t make too many mistakes with simple arithmetic.
How to answer: There are 4 key steps to solve this type of question:
1) Create a formula to estimate the number.
It all starts with the formula. This is the one key thing you should do before everything else. This is the greatest test of your quantitative modeling skills interviewers have throughout your process. I always recommend you use a “tree” format for your formula.
2) Plug-in assumptions with a rationale to back them up.
After you have developed your formula, you need numbers for its variables. Go through each one, plug in a number and justify it.
3) Calculate based on those assumptions.
The next step is to calculate. You have the formula and the assumptions. All you need is math now. Realize everything is done in a very structured, systematic process.
4) Reality check the results.
Do your results make sense? Most people don’t check their work after doing it, but it’s really important to triangulate your answer against some “real-world benchmark”. You’re estimating, after all… If you’ve found your end result to be a bit “off”, adjust the assumptions as needed.
Additional resources: Even though Estimations are one type of question that can appear within a regular case interview, some interviewers like to have the whole interview be an estimation question. To see some video examples of this, check out our article on Market Sizing Case Examples.
To learn the proper technique to estimate things in a case interview, check out the Estimations Module in Case Interview Fundamentals.
The Quantitative Analysis Question
Frequency: 80-90% of case interviews
Time to Master: 10-20 hours of practice
Brief Description: One of the core tenets of management consulting is to be data-driven. What does this even mean? That you make recommendations based on real data!
You may have noticed this from the last question in this list… Even when data is not fully available, consultants make estimation models to see what the recommendation should be if the data were a certain way.
But in many situations, data is available, and in those situations, you don’t have to estimate anything, you’ll just need to run the numbers.
That’s the essence of the quantitative analysis question. To “run the numbers” in order to answer the hypothesis.
The last piece of the last phrase is essential: no consultant worth its dime does math for math’s sake. Whenever you’re doing an analysis you’re trying to prove/disprove/verify the strength of a hypothesis.
Common phrasing / Examples:
- In a recent test on our furniture e-commerce client, we found out that offering free, no-hassle returns on every product increases conversion rates by 15%. How will that increase affect profitability?
- Your pizzeria client is thinking about dropping its prices by 10% to regain some of the customers lost to competitors. How many of its lost customers must go back to dining with them in order for the initiative to break even?
- Given this table of data, how much would it cost for the government to treat each flu patient? [Consider you’re given a table full of data in an interview question like this].
- Our high school client wants to offer free math tutoring to all students getting scores lower than 60% in mid-term exams so they don’t fail classes as often. Is this feasible given current student scores and the school’s financials?
- Apple wants to figure out which type of wearables market would make the most difference in their bottom line 5 years from now. Assume I have any data you want. How would you come up with an answer to them?
Purpose: Consultants do quantitative analyses in real projects all the time. In fact, this is the kind activity they expect you to be able to do pretty much independently from day 1.
So they need to make sure you can do it. A few specific things they’re looking for:
First, they want to see if you can work with data in a structured way to find a result. There’s two main reasons for this… One, it’s easier to communicate your thoughts and results when the data is well-structured. Two, if you structure the analysis upfront, you know exactly what type of data to look for (which means you won’t waste any time inefficiently).
Another core skill they’re looking for is your ability to see all the major factors that’d be needed for a precise result. In practice, this means they might not give you all the data you need upfront… They expect you to and ask for extra data so you can find a reliable answer.
Finally, they want to see if you can understand what the results mean to your client. They’re not in the business of hiring human calculators (they could hire these for much cheaper). They’re in the business of finding people who can find key INSIGHTS that are derived from the DATA.
How to answer: A simple step-by-step plan to answer this type of question:
1) Create a formula that answers the question.
Do so, you’ll need to define where you want to get and create a formula that works with the data you were given.
2) Ask for any additional data.
Your interviewer will likely withhold some necessary data. They want to see if you can see that you don’t have all the data you need yet. Having to ask for 2-3 pieces of missing data is fairly common.
3) Do the math.
While most interviewers don’t really care for you to be super-fast with your math, they want to see you’re numerically comfortable, as you’ll be working with numbers all day.
4) Say the implications of your results.
You need to go from “analytical” mode to “insight” mode. Clients care about what they should do, not what the precise numbers are. Notice that when consultants say they do “data-driven recommendations”, they need both the data AND the recommendations.
Additional resources: Our Quantitative Analysis Module from our free course, Case Interview Fundamentals is a great resource to show exactly how to answer these questions in a step-by-step manner, with examples applied so you can see this method in action.
The Chart Interpretation Question
Frequency: 80-90% of case interviews (some will have several charts).
Time to Master: 10-20 hours of practice
Brief Description: Whenever consultants analyze data or create estimation models, the output is ALWAYS a chart.
By chart, I mean a table, a graph or a combination of multiple tables and graphs.
Consultants need to be visual and show just the required information for their clients to make decisions. Their clients wouldn’t have the time (or patience) to analyze a whole model.
Charts are the answer to save your client’s time by just giving them the key message, as well as being much more persuasive as the key pieces of information are shown in a decluttered and meaningful way.
In general, consulting firms don’t test your ability to create such charts. Most firms figure they can teach you this skill later.
What they do test, though, is your ability to read, interpret and communicate the insights in a chart.
It sounds simple, but you’d be amazed at how many people can’t grasp the key message from a simple graph or table, getting lost in a sea of noise and even coming up with wrong conclusions!
Common phrasing / Examples:
- What are your key insights from this chart?
- Take a look at these tables, what do you think is happening?
- What would you recommend to your client given this data?
PS: Differently from the other Building Blocks, I’ve reduced the chart questions and phrasing to generic examples… And the reason is that interviewers often ask these questions this way – what changes from case to case is the chart itself.
Purpose: The main thing they want to see is if you can understand charts and if you ask for more information/clarification in the cases you can’t. Most candidates assume they have to understand everything upfront, without asking clarifying questions. Deadly mistake!
To a consultant, the core of understanding a chart is to find the nuggets of insight from the chart data. They’re not looking for people who can read numbers. Instead they’re looking for people who can separate the relevant data from the noise.
Finally, they want to see if you can use/synthesize those insights to drive next steps to the project and recommendations to clients. Just like in the Quantitative Analysis question, they want you to transform facts (data) into actions (recommendations).
How to answer: Here are three key steps you can’t miss when answering a chart question:
1) Explicitly say what you understand from the chart structure.
Before saying anything about the data, show you understand how the chart was build. What do the columns and rows in a table mean? What about the variables and axis in a chart? Clarify what you don’t understand.
2) Point out insights from the data you see.
Don’t read the whole dataset! A high-schooler can do that. They’re looking for people who can instantly spot the important nuggets of wisdom.
3) Derive project next steps and/or recommendations.
The insights you found are just worth anything if they’re actionable. Find the actions that derive from those insights and got through them with your interviewer!
Additional resources: To see our step-by-step process in more depth, as well as real charts being “read” by ourselves, check out the Chart Interpretation Module in Case Interview Fundamentals.
The Recommendation/Next Steps Question
Frequency: ~50% of case interviews.
Time to Master: 2-5 hours of practice (usually within full cases).
Brief Description: While we don’t consider the “recommendation question” one of the 6 Building Blocks, it is a 7th type of question that interviewers often use to finish the case.
Why is it not a Building Block? Because it isn’t a “task” per se. It is just a way to communicate/synthesize everything you found in the case so far.
Consulting projects usually involve multiple people (clients, partners, experts), some of which are not involved with the project every day.
These people need updates. Lots of updates. What this means is that consultants need to have the skill to quickly synthesize and summarize weeks of work into a few minutes…
Or 30 minutes of a case in just 30 seconds!
Common phrasing / Examples:
- Imagine the CEO of your client just entered the room and wants a quick update of the project. How would you tell him your recommendations in less than a minute?
- Given all that we’ve gone through today, what would you recommend to your client?
- Why don’t you wrap up everything you’ve learned into a recommendation the project’s partner could give to our client?
Purpose: The interviewer wants to see if you can communicate the essential of a half-hour long discussion of a complex topic in a structured way in 30 seconds to a minute.
Not many people have this skill, though it is possible to practice and improve.
Also, they want to see if you can quickly delineate next steps to a problem that isn’t fully solved yet.
(And they want to see if you can see the difference between a problem that is solve and one that isn’t yet),
How to answer: Here are four things you can include, in order, in your recommendation:
1) Your recommendation to the client’s key question.
Your client’s key question is usually the first question in the case. You’ll usually not have everything you need to give your recommendation, so make it as strong as you can, but not stronger.
2) 2-3 key supporting points for your recommendation.
These should better explain the essence of the problem and provide rationale to your recommendation that someone who hasn’t seen the whole interview would be able to understand.
3) 1-3 next steps (optional).
Only include these if the case question isn’t 100% answered by the data yet. Your next steps should be ordered by priority or appropriate sequence.
4) 1-3 risks/points of attention (optional).
It usually just makes sense to include these in case the case question IS fully answered and your recommendation is final (i.e. you have no next steps).
End of interview questions
At the end of almost every consulting interview, your interviewer will ask you if you have any questions to ask them.
Yes, the tables are turned… Now it’s your turn to interview them!
So, what’s the catch?
None, really. The essence of this last part of the interview is to actually have a conversation and let you satiate your curiosity by asking them questions.
But while there is no catch, there is an opportunity.
An opportunity to show your insight, to show your ability to listen and to ask great follow-up questions.
In essence, your ability to be a great consultant and create a connection with the person at the other side of the table.
Think about it… Which candidate is more likely to leave a good impression, Candidate 1 or Candidate 2?
Candidate 1: “Hmm, good question… Do I have any questions? Oh yeah, there’s one thing that’s not quite clear to me… How fast do people advance here? And how does the job change in each position?”
Candidate 2:
“Yes, I do have a question…
I was talking to [Consultant’s Name] and she mentioned that you measure performance in 5 dimensions here. She used examples such as problem solving, teamwork, etc.
I was wondering… Is any of those dimensions more important than others in my first year or my first few projects? I was also wondering how am I actually evaluated in that dimension.
The reason I want to know that is so I can come prepared to do well in it in case I get the job”.
Yet, most people don’t give much thought to these questions they’re supposed to ask at the end of a consulting interview.
Which turns them into the easiest part of the interview you can use to differentiate yourself and be remarkable.
In that article you’ll find not only examples of great questions to ask, but also your interviewer’s mindset in asking that question.
Most importantly, you’ll find out why having great follow-up questions is even MORE CRITICAL than asking a good question in the first place.
Uncommon types of consulting interview questions
This guide wouldn’t be a complete list if I didn’t include uncommon question types.
99% of the interviews at McKinsey, Bain and BCG will be composed by the 5 categories of questions I’ve shown you up until here.
Smaller firms, however, may use these uncommon types of questions more regularly, depending on office and the firm itself.
How to know if you may get one of these?
Simple: ask someone who interviewed in the same office you’re going to interview what types of questions they got. Then ask them if they got an especially weird question.
But even at MBB there’s the rare case of uncommon question types… And it’s better to be aware (and even prepared) for these questions than to be caught in surprise.
I wouldn’t spend much time preparing for these as they’re rare and mostly don’t depend on heavy preparation. Still, it doesn’t hurt to know what could happen so you’re never caught off-guard.
So, here’s the best list of types of uncommon questions I could create:
Brainteasers
Brainteasers used to be a staple in consulting interviews back then…
Luckily, they’re pretty rare nowadays.
(Probably because they suck at testing a candidate’s skills.)
Essentially, Brainteasers are questions that have a “clever” way to answering them, but with no-to-little systematic way to find the answer. Essentially, you’re relying on luck.
Here are a few examples of Brainteasers:
- Why are manholes round?
- What’s the next number in this series? [Suppose interviewer presents you with a series of numbers]
- In a tiny cabin in the woods, two men lay dead. The cabin is not burned, but the woods around it burned. How did the men die?
I suggest you to be skeptical of any firm that uses Brainteasers to test you.
Because of the “luck” component and the impossibility of interviewers to “see through” your thought process and know if you’re brilliant or just got lucky, firms that use this type of testing aren’t really systematic in testing their candidates.
Two ways to improve your chances of doing well in Brainteasers:
1) Go through lists of Brainteaser examples with answers (most interviewers who are lazy enough to use Brainteasers are also so lazy that they’ll just get one from Google’s first page).
2) Watch this video if you think there are high chances you’ll get a Brainteaser in your interview.
Meta Questions
Meta questions are questions your interviewers should answer themselves, through their evaluation process, and yet they ask you the answer for it.
Some examples:
- How do you solve complex problems?
- What’s your leadership style/How do you lead teams?
- What should I ask you to understand if you’re the right candidate for this job?
Clearly, they should be the ones determining what types of questions they should ask you. They should be the ones seeing how you solve complex problems by the way you do your cases. They should be the ones assessing your leadership style…
So, why do they ask you these questions? Are they being lazy?
Not really.
What they’re looking for is self-awareness.
Rest assured they’ll compare your answer with their perception of you through the rest of the interview.
So, how do you answer these questions? Here are a few tips:
1) Be thoughtful.
As you go through the preparation process and notice how you solve problems, how you persuade people, etc. (all dimensions consulting firms care about).
2) Start your answer with a clear message/process.
For example, when answering “How do you solve complex problems”, I might answer:
“Usually I reach out to people who have solved a similar problem before to get ideas on how to solve that specific problem, then I structure the problem to pinpoint what are the leverage points or parts of the problem that might make the most difference, then I look for the best practices to solve that specific problem.”
Phrase it like a process you understand well.
3) Finish your answer with an example of a situation you’ve dealt with by using the exact process you’ve just laid out.
This brings the answer from theoretical into the realm of practice, which makes it more believable and easier for the interviewer to ask good follow-up questions.
Client Situation “Cases”
Consulting is half problem-solving, half being a trusted advisor to a client.
Needless to say, there’s a HUGE relationship component to the second part.
“Client Situation Cases” are hypothetical scenarios where you have a “relationship” or “interpersonal” situation with some client.
While these are very rare (I’ve only heard of these in a few final rounds at MBB), I expect consulting firms to do more of these over the years. As people prepare more and more for the problem-solving-based case interviews, it only makes sense to test candidates in a broader way.
Here are some examples of this type of question:
- You were having dinner with a client and they said: “I was expecting the project to be much smoother than it actually is”. What would you say to them?
- What would you do if you asked data to a client in a project and they said you’d need to wait for 3 months to have the data?
- A senior client has told you her son is soon joining the same school you went to, and asked for some tips. What would you tell her?
So, how would you answer these types of questions?
A few tips:
1) You don’t have to dive right into the actual answer.
In a real scenario, you’d have more context than a simple interview question. That means it’s fair game to ask a few contextual questions, such as “how senior is this client”, or “should I suppose this client just met me or that he knows and trusts me?”
2) If the situation is tense, ALWAYS react by showing the interviewer that the first thing you’d do is to understand the root of your client’s concerns.
Then explain how would you do it.
Interviewers are looking for people with good social skills, not clever lines to deliver in moments of tension.
3) Always explain your rationale.
While saying exactly what you would do is important, it is as important to explain your rationale to the interviewer of why would you do it.
They’re looking for interpersonal intelligence, not “the right answer”.
“Real Life Interviews”
I’ve only heard of these in BCG’s German offices, which means you’re likely not get them unless you’re going to interview in those offices (though they might spread to other offices and/or firms, who knows…)
The format is pretty clever. They put you in real life situations and see how you react.
For example:
- They might give you some data and ask you to draft a 3-slide presentation (on paper) and to present it to the interviewer.
- They might play the role of a desperate client employee and give you a specific goal or desired outcome for that interaction.
- They might show you a client’s e-mail and ask you to draft a response.
In essence, these are things that have more to do with the day-to-day life of a consultant than with “underlying skills”.
Knowledge interviews
These types of questions are exclusive to candidates who are coming with strong industry/functional expertise.
For example…
- If you’re a data scientist, they might ask you how would you develop a tool to get and organize a client’s competitors public information to generate insights for strategy projects.
- If you’re an experienced professional from an airline background, they might ask you what do you think about the major trends in that industry, and which ones are more relevant for a company trying to be a leader in a third world country.
- If you’re a risk specialist, they might ask you what unusual sources of risk would you consider to a typical manufacturing company.
So, what do they want from these answers?
In one word: perspective.
They want much more about insights than hard facts. However, to be credible and authoritative in your answer, you’ll want some critical hard facts interweaved into your answer.
Lifestyle/Hobby questions
Some interviewers like to ask fun, lifestyle questions, such as:
- What’s the book you’ve liked the most ever?
- What’s something you do every day that most people don’t?
- What’s your favorite travel destination?
My guess is that most people who ask this are just curious about who you are as a person besides the anxious face in formal attire that’s sitting in front of them.
If you want to optimize this answer, my best tip is to show you’re actually interested in whatever answer you give. If you don’t care about your favorite book or hobby or travel destination, it doesn’t leave the best impression.
Interested people make interesting consultants.
Now it's your turn...
Throughout this article, I’ve shown you the 26 types of questions you’ll get asked in consulting interviews.
These are the questions that firms like McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Roland Berger, Monitor Deloitte, Strategy&, Accenture and all other consulting firms you can think of regularly ask in their job interviews.
Is it a bit overwhelming? Yes. No one said it was easy.
But now that you have the complete list, it’s a bit more manageable!
So, where are you going to start?
Are you gonna start preparing for the case interview questions, which are the hardest or the ones that take most time to master?
Or are you gonna start with the fit questions and the PEI questions, to take those out of your way?
(And if you’re concerned with the case interview questions, don’t forget to go through our free course, Case Interview Fundamentals. It’s our best content on how to master these types of questions in a short amount of time).