Learn the Basics

Case interviews have a unique style, and there's lots to know. Here we've pulled together some useful resources to understand how to approach them - but if its your first time we'd recommend just trying one - we'll show you how to improve at the end of it!

General Case Resources

Whether you are just starting out on your case interview journey or looking for vetted resources on how to take your case interview preparation to the next level, this section aggregates some of our top recommendations by topic.

Case Frameworks

One of the most important factors to setting yourself up for success in the case interview is learning how to construct mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive hypotheses branches to analyse with your interviewer in your interview. There are two main components to this: 1. Identifying the case “type” by the question, and 2. Drawing from major analysis frameworks that can help you come up with types of analysis that may be suitable for particular “types of questions”.

For information on both components of this approach, we recommend going through the basics with Victor Cheng, a seasoned case interviewer coach (and former McKinsey consultant). His website offers comprehensive reading and video content as a starting point.

In terms of major analysis frameworks (such as Porter’s 5 Forces, SWOT analysis, profitability tree, etc), we disagree with the “rote memorisation” approach of memorising major frameworks and trying to force fit them onto a case that may not completely fit an analysis framework. As a former case consulting interviewer and interview coach, I can say that the best candidates are those who are able to (through rigorous practice and study), draw on the multiple frameworks they have learned to identify the most relevant and salient categories of analysis for a given case. With this pre-amble, I link to resources with overviews of the major analysis frameworks. You can Google each framework in more depth to understand each better:

Practice Cases

We strongly discourage you from simply reading through cases and case solutions as a means of preparing for your interviews. Doing this a few times to familiarise yourself generally with the format is a good starting point, but the best practice is real, interactive practice, whether through Colloqui or in-person with a friend or peer who is also interviewing for consulting. That being said, when you do practice, having a case interview bank to practice with is helpful. Our interview bank will be released shortly, but in the interim, major consulting firms put out practice cases as do other consulting interview websites:

Mental Math

Most consulting firms want to ensure that their candidates are analytically quick enough to do mental math to size opportunities or investments. As a result, most interviews have some component of interpreting graphs, charts, or tables, and demonstrating that you can use mental math effectively to call out trends or key implications from data.

GMAT introduced Graphics Interpretation (GI) questions to the standardized test in more recent years, recognising the need to screen for this ability in pre-MBA students - preparation material for this question type is relevant if you’re new to interpreting graphs, charts, and tables.

Additionally, I strongly recommend reading The Secrets of Mental Math and putting the tips and tricks into practice to seriously impress your interviewer.

Behavioural Interview Questions

A significant part to getting an offer for your consulting interviews is acing the “behavioural” component of your interview. Often, people overlook this portion of the interview because it doesn’t test any “hard” skills.

I view this component of the interview as a binary input to getting an offer - if you don’t pass it, even if you do well on your case interview, it is unlikely that you will get an offer because being effective as a consultant requires that you demonstrate a whole host of soft skills that are integral to the job. So, in a word: prepare!

My recommendation is to use the STAR or CAR method to write out (on paper / in a document) the key examples from your past experiences where you’ve demonstrated the core set of of consulting skills: analytical / problem solving, communication, leadership / drive. Reviewing those experiences (prioritising the most impressive and salient ones), and practicising verbalising the experiences effectively is solid preparation for your behavioural interview. For a more comprehensive guide, Mastering the Job Interview by Alexander Chemev is a short, but practical book on the topic.