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Tips for Case Interview Mastery

 by Victor Cheng

Question:

I am sure you get many messages like this, but I would just like to thank you for all the
materials and information on your website, as they have been instrumental in helping me
secure my undergrad McKinsey offer.

My story is somewhat similar to yours, in that I tried banking, but was getting no love from
any banks.

Fortunately, various consulting firms have provided me some interview opportunities.

I interviewed with several consulting firms over three weeks, and I can honestly say that I
completely bombed the first interview (scheduled for 30 minutes, ended in ten minutes).

Then I began to stud your videos as core preparation, with supplementary materials from
Case In Point and guides from ManagementConsulted.com and WSO.com.

Though these were good, I felt your lecture videos on introducing the business situation
framework worked out much better because of its simplicity and flexibility.

Then your Look Over My Shoulder® recordings really solidified the principles and
demonstrated how each should be applied in practice.

In two weeks, I went from having no knowledge about consulting to easily analyzing and
solving most (~85%) cases.

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However, solving the case was only half the battle.

Like you said, it is about forming a habit in consistently demonstrating your thought
process to the interviewers, being more client-friendly, and other "intangible" factors that
make up the difference between those who almost get the offers vs. those who actually
get offers.

I learned this the hard way through numerous rejections. I thought I had this down
because I've listened to the Look Over My Shoulder® program at least five times &
highlighted and made notes on the transcripts.

But there's an inherent gap between knowledge and practice, and I should have heeded
your advice.

Ultimately, you have my gratitude. Your advice helped me to get my dream job, and have
dramatically altered my career track. Rock on.

Hints for candidates: use one guide as your core preparation!

Don't try to memorize frameworks / approaches from all sources, as they will often
confound your knowledge base and make it confusing.

Find the one that fits well with your thought process and stick with it.

Then the next step is to "own" that particular approach by tailoring specific approaches to
your thought process so it becomes natural rather than forced.

This is extremely important, since it will allow your creativity to flow, without appearing
disorganized and/or unstructured.

Also, do as many cases as possible.

Scour the internet for cases from university consulting clubs, MBA programs, employer
websites, other guides, and anything else you can get. This is simply to increase your
exposure to various industries.

Chances are, if you see one type of case just once, you will have a pretty good idea of

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what to do when you encounter it again.

My Reply:

Nice job on the McKinsey offer, I do love the enthusiasm.

I'm glad that all of my case interview practice resources were helpful to you in getting
your offer. You mentioned so many subtle, yet terribly important things, that I wanted to
highlight those points for others... as they are often easy to overlook.

There are lots of little things that separate a candidate who does a good job on a case vs.
an excellent job. While it's not necessary to be perfect on every case, it is necessary to
come pretty close most of the time.

As you mentioned, it is far easier to have a higher success rate and be more consistent if
you have good habits and are using them in a disciplined fashion.

Basically I think of the recruiting process as a race against time.

The more your prepare and practice, the better you get - this is a given.

So the million dollar question is actually - When will you get better? By the time you
master the case interview, will you have any interview opportunities left?
It is quite noteworthy (and quite common I might add) that while you ended up with a
McKinsey offer, you had many rejections along the way.

Basically, those earlier interviews were simply opportunities to help you improve your
skills. When the McKinsey interviews rolled around, you were finally able to get all the
pieces to fall into place to deliver a great performance.

When people get rejected from consulting, they generally fall into two categories.

1) Those who are just not a good fit for consulting (like forcing a round peg into a square
hole); and

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2) Those who are a good fit, but their learning curve timing vs. the number of interview
opportunities available were in conflict, and they ran out of time before they finally
reached mastery level.

I do get a fair number of emails from people who "miss" by just a little.

If you've been following the success stories in my emails, you will notice some of those
people figured out what they did wrong, fixed it, and worked like crazy over the next 12 -
24 months to try again -- and succeeded (though it is much harder the second time
around, mostly due to self-imposed pressure, which really can be enormous if you don't
keep it in check).

I continue to feel that the best practice approach to case interview preparation is to use a
50/50 combo of Look Over My Shoulder® and live practice with a partner.

As you know from your own experience of getting pretty good in just two weeks, LOMS
gets you up the learning curve fast.

LOMS helps you build good habits. Once you have good habits, you use live practice
with a partner to improve your consistency under stress.

Live practice simulates stress in a way LOMS can not. Conversely, just doing live practice
without LOMS is a slower process.

That's because you don't always pick up on all the little subtleties that would jump out at
you when you are able to compare your answer to a "best practice" answer on a minute-
by-minute basis in a case.

Or unless your practice partner has formerly worked in consulting as a consultant or

interviewer, your partner is not going to notice the subtle mistakes you might be making.

Often these are the mistakes you don't even realize you are making until you get a
rejection from one of the firms you are interviewing with -- but that lesson comes at a very
steep price because now you are a (N - 1) firms remaining.

This whole idea of managing speed to competency is surprisingly important in recruiting

because you are constantly working against the clock.

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Which happens first? You master case interviews or you run out of interview
opportunities?

By the way, this is the reason why those who start their case study interview practice
efforts early, particularly at an intensive level, have a huge advantage.

Trust me... in the days leading up to a final round, those candidates are practicing like
crazy because they lack time.

In contrast, folks just starting their recruiting process almost always assume they have a
lot of time to prepare as the recruiting process unfolds, so their initial efforts are fairly
modest. In many cases, this is a missed opportunity.

Here's why.

If you think of case level mastery as a algebraic formula, I would argue here is what the
formula looks like:

Talent x Intensity of Preparation x Time = Case Interview Performance Level

You can't control your own talent, so all you can control is the intensity level and time.

In some cases, people don't even know the consulting field exists until the very last
minute. So in those situations, there is no time, and all they have left to work with is
intensity.

But, there is a very specific situation that many people sub-optimize.

It's the situation where the person knows what consulting is, knows they want to do it,
and are in a situation where their likely interviews are 2 - 6 months away.

(The rationale is: why work too hard now when you don't even know if you're likely to get
an interview? This is a valid point.

However, people forget that this is a competitive process for highly sought after jobs. If
there is a way to get an edge and you don't take it, then very likely, someone else will.

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Don't forget that.)

People in these situations have the opportunity to manage both: 1) prep intensity; and 2)
time.

Someone in this situation has the option of having a major advantage.

They could prepare as if they had a final round in a week or two, and keep up this
intensity for the several months preceding the likely time of their first interview.

It's important to note that I did not say this is an advantage. I said: this situation gives one
the option to have an advantage. It is still up to the individual to decide if he or she will
exercise this option.

The rationale behind this approach is fairly simple.

By starting a very intense level of preparation extremely early in the recruiting process,
you maximize your chances that your skills will hit their peak level before your first
interview.

When you delay the intensity level of your practice efforts, you delay the time in which
your skills hit their peak. If you time it well, your skills peak just before your last interview
opportunity.

The downside of this approach is you're just as likely to have your skills peak after your
last interview opportunity too -- when it basically no longer matters anymore.

So the big takeaway here is: Time is your friend ... but only if you take advantage of
it.

Now moving on to some other points mentioned earlier. The idea of learning case
interview skills from a single guide, school of thought or teacher is an interesting idea.

Let me explain my perspective on this. What you have most likely seen me write about
are topics related to the case interview practice process.

And despite the fact that there are now around 300 articles on this topic on my blog, my

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knowledge of case interviews represents less than 5% of what I know about business.

I don't really ever mention the other 95% because it generally is not relevant. But, it is
useful to keep in mind how I learned the other 95%.

While much of it was from personal experience, I learned a fair amount of that 95% from
other people.

So while many people reading this consider me a teacher of sorts, I see myself as much
more of a learner/student. And in that process of learning, I have come across many
interesting insights about the learning process.

Here's the first one.

Not all teachers agree with each other.

So whether the field is leadership, marketing, information technology -- if you ask five
experts what's the best approach, often you will get five different answers.

The temptation is to learn from all five, piece together the best of each, and create a
super-composite.

The problem is sometimes the difference between "teachers" are fundamentally in conflict
with each other. For example, many of the people who read my blog have also read Marc
Cosentino's book - Case in Point.

While there are some things Cosentino and I agree on, there is one major area where we
disagree. He favors a framework-driven approach with lots of frameworks to memorize,
whereby I favor a hypothesis + critical thinking approach that uses only two or three
frameworks.

Now that's a fundamental foundational conflict in ideas. You can't simultaneously learn
more and less frameworks at the same time.

What happens when you're learning something from two different schools of thought is
often you simply get confused -- especially if you try to integrate two different
philosophies that just might not mesh well together.

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This is not to say you shouldn't learn from multiple schools of thought. It is to say that if
you do take the approach, you need to be very careful about trying to force ideas
together (trying to get a best of both worlds outcome) that at some level might be very
incompatible.

Finally, the last point I want to emphasize is the idea of taking whatever approach you are
going to model in your prep efforts and personalize it.

For example, many of my success story emails come from people who used my two
primary frameworks early in their case interview prep process and ended up modifying
the framework to be more intuitive to how they think.

So my framework was the starting point, and they evolved the framework based on their
own experiences. By the way, this is an important step in case interview mastery --
knowing something so well you are able to see its limitations (or at least its limitations
given your tendencies).

(The opposite, which drives interviewers absolutely crazy, is when a candidate is using a
framework because they were told to use it... they don't know what they are doing, and
because of their superficial knowledge of the topic, they are not able to recognize when a
particular framework has reached the limits of its usefulness in a particular case.)

When it comes to case interview mastery, personalizing frameworks is a favorable sign

because it indicates you are trying to modify the framework so that it is more intuitive for
you to use automatically (without having to think too hard about it).

This is important because it frees up your mind to focus on what is unique about this
specific case and how to handle those unique aspects in a creative way or to use that
mental capacity to notice insights that are hard to notice if you're busy working only at the
framework level.

In closing, there is one thing you will notice if you have been paying close attention to my
writings. When it comes to case interviews (as well as serving clients), each case has
layers and layers of insights.

A case interview is like an onion. As you peel off one layer, you discover the next (which
was not possible to see until the outer layer was removed first).

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Whenever you hear interviewers giving feedback using words like "you need to drill down
deeper," "find secondary and tertiary drivers, not just primary ones," "good structure, but
lacking sufficient insight," "good analytics butbusiness acumen needs some work," those
are all code words for the same thing.

You didn't peel off enough layers of the onion.

And the ability for one to do that is a function of case interview mastery... and mastery is
a function of preparation intensity x time available to prepare.

Additional Resources

If you found this post useful, I suggest becoming a registered member (it's free) to get
access to the materials I used to pass 60 out of 61 case interviews, land 7 job offers, and
end up working at McKinsey.

Members get access to 6 hours of video tutorials on case interviews, the actual
frameworks I used to pass my interviews, and over 500 articles on case interviews.

To get access to these free resources, just fill out the form below:

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 Mar 16, 2011

Tagged as:  case interview practice,  case interview preparation,

 case interview tips,  McKinsey offer

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