Consultancy interviews can be incredibly extensive, but are a great field for geographers and history students to get into. The guide below will help you know what to expect if you land a consultancy interview!
Round One: Tests
Lots of jobs nowadays have tests prior to meeting with any actual hiring managers. This is done to quickly assess that you have the basic skills needed for the job, but also to weed through a high volume of applicants. Most of the time, you will see two types of tests: math/detail and personality tests.
Math/detail:
These kinds of tests will assess your basic math and data management skills. They typically have fairly simple questions that anyone could answer correctly, but these tests ensure that as a prospective employee you can answer correctly consistently and quickly. A lot of the time, these tests are timed and it is in your best interest to answer as fast as possible rather than checking your work over for a long time.
Personality:
These kinds of tests assess if you have the right mentality for the job and will gel with the work culture of the business. For consultancy tests, you want to stress that you are a team player. Consultancy requires good communication skills and the ability to support others, so you should aim to answer the questions with that in mind.
Round Two: Standard Interview
After the tests, you may be invited to an interview either in person or online with a hiring manager or it is possible that you may be doing your own video interview where you have to record your answers to questions as they are given to you. As with any interview, you should do your research on the firm you are applying to. This includes research into the role you would be fulfilling, who the firm’s clients are, and what success stories they have. You then have to sell how you fit into their firm. You should brainstorm similar work you’ve done or relate other moments of good leadership and teamwork that you’ve had to their company. You want to show them that you are a dedicated individual with strong motivations to join their team. On top of this, you must also make yourself memorable so it is preferable to emphasize unique experiences you’ve had where your creativity shined.
Round Three: Casing interview
In a casing interview, you will be presented with a business case study that is your job to come up with solutions to. These can either be held as one-on-one interviews or at an assessment center with a group of other applicants. You will be presented with a hypothetical company’s issue and be given a task that you will aid in working towards. At this stage, it is helpful to know basic demographic and market facts like the populations of the areas your desired firm works in, inflation rates, and current market trends for their products/services so you can solve the case using relevant data and statistics. You can also ask questions to gather more information on the case. From there, you can apply different consultancy frameworks that outline the problem. It is then up to you and your group to present the current state of the company, your recommendations for the company’s issues, and how you would implement these recommendations. There is no one way to answer these questions, so while presenting make sure to carefully go through your solutions so the hiring manager can see the way you think. The world of business is diverse, so you will need to know how to apply this strategy to many different types of case studies.
Market Sizing/Logical:
Market sizing case studies often ask you to estimate the size of a market the company is aiming to sell to or the quantity of the product they are selling. These questions are not always straightforward and may be asking you to estimate the size of something that seems very arbitrary, but the point is that the interviewer wants to understand how you would break down your calculations. Because this requires a lot of math, it is best to work with rounded numbers and put your previous market research stats to work.
Revenue Growth:
These case studies will be asking you to help a company increase their profits. It is important to know how to calculate revenue, profitability, where the company breaks even, and their return on investment (ROI). You may want to use a benchmarking framework for this type of case. Common solutions to this case are expanding their market to new customers, increasing prices, or selling new products to customers. This is a great opportunity to show off your creativity with a case.
Market Entry:
Market entry may be a consideration in other types of case studies like revenue growth because it helps a company assess how they are expanding their customer base or product range. This may mean the company is looking to break into a new industry or geographic location to sell in. It is up to you to assess if this is profitable business and how the company should bring their ideas to fruition. These ideas may be very specific to the case study, so ask questions to your interviewer about things like pricing and the company’s current consumer base. A SWOT or 3 C’s framework may aid in solving this case.
Mergers and Acquisition:
Mergers and acquisitions are ways for companies to earn more profit through ownership or cut costs through combining task forces and these types of case studies will have you assess the pros and cons of doing so. Again, having a good grasp on the market of these companies is very important so you can understand how these dynamics may shift after the merger or acquisition. Ultimately though, you will be assessing the profitability and stability of the other company and how its success can contribute to the case’s company.