case interview charts


Jason Oh is a Senior Consultant, Strategy & Customer at EY with project experiences in commercial due diligence and corporate strategy planning.

Focus your attention on identifying insights before presenting your thoughts. This will give youthe cheat sheeton how tosystematically win pointsin each part of your case. Unless your interviewer specifies that its okay to talk about an accomplishment outside of work / academics, you should stick to these two areas. Whether you are practicing with peers or by yourself, you should ALWAYS use a good vs. great grading rubric to track your performance trends: Download the case interviewers grading rubric.

Your job in that part of the interview will be to make sure you understand the situation by listening carefully and asking relevant follow-up questions.

Remember that numbers are not useful if you dont know what the units are.

During that step, consulting firms will assess your strength across all four attributes.

The point of a case interview is to simulate conditions youll face in a real consulting project so your interviewer can see how youd perform on the job. Your interviewer will let you decide in which direction to take the case.

Getting into this habit will help you tremendously on the actual day of your interviews. #4 Tell me something thats not on your resume. As a next step, we should shift some product mix to Whirlpool as well as investigate the business case for launching our own store branded dishwasher, You answer the question incorporating the key insights found. A McKinsey case interview is considered to be an interviewer-led format. Nevertheless, youll still explore and ask questions around the key issues and sub-issues that you laid out in your framework. There are a few common patterns you should recognize as you practice interpreting graphs and charts: Many candidates make the mistake of reading off every number that the chart or graph shows.

feedback), Review my Case Interview Tips and Techniques (1 hour). Bubble charts show many dimensions of information. You will work get early exposure to senior executives. Tell me something thats not on your resume.

Instead, you should focus your energy on learning to adapt your own frameworks using the information you have gathered from your interviewer when talking about the situation and any clarifying questions you had. This question is particularly popular at Bain. In fact the more differentiated or unique the better (it makes it more memorable). Therefore, you need to build strong stories that they will remember to make sure you stand out. Its more important to be able to connect the dots, including the title, axis descriptions, and legend.

More importantly, the majority of these resources will not push you to great.

The axes will tell you what dimensions of information are being shown. Charts questions usually require extracting information from a chart, elaborating on it and getting useful insights from it, which is what consultants usually do.

To outperform, you need to know the key principles, use a consistent method, and be aware of what case interviewers need to hear in each question type. McKinsey uses the McKinsey PST and BCG uses the BCG Potential Test.

But here are our three favorite ones: You will learn a lot in little time: Changing to a new industry, project, and team, every few weeks or months makes the job provide so much learning.

Interviewer prompts a math question: The client wants you to calculate the impact of profit in dollar terms if they shift 20 of the 60 percentage points from GE. The category had sales of $1.2B last year. How many claim handlers handling low complication claims should be let off at the current productivity?

Interviewer prompt: What are your preliminary observations and takeaways? A common mistake many candidates make is memorizing frameworks and reusing them as-is in their interviews. Second round interviewers are typically with Partners or Senior Partners.

Statistically, it is harder to pass the first round, than it is to get an offer once youve made it to the final round.

Example Interviewer prompt: What would you like to understand?

In this example, the pie chart represents 100% of sales by product line. When candidates learn about the difference between McKinsey cases and cases at other firms, a lot of candidates ask us to help them tailor their preparation to each type of firm. : Tell me about a time when you had to overcome a big obstacle.. The purpose of this page is to be the most comprehensive and updated resource for case interview prep online. Thats a whole lot of things you have to pass!

From this histogram, we can conclude that the 81+ years age group has the fewest number of people. For instance, you may want to ask if the client has any specific profitability targets and understand how long the problem has been going on.

Discovering your baseline is important so that you know what areas you need to focus on.

Additionally, we see that Company A has two drugs in this quadrant while Company B only has one.

A stacked bar chart adds another dimension of data to a simple bar chart. There aremany great reasons to go into consulting. Within the last year, many small competitors entered. However, there are occasions when these seven questions will not always get asked in the same order.

The interviewer will provide you with clues and will want to see you drive the case. But they are good places to find online practice partners if you dont have enough friends or peers to practice with. This part of the guide is all about the fit / behavioral interview portion.

: Tell me about a time you changed the mind of a group of people., E.g. on How to Interpret Charts During Case Interviews, 5 Ways to Protect Yourself from Cyber Attacks, 5 Leadership Traits that You Must Cultivate.

Heres a common question we get: Is the second round of interviews different from the first one? Entrepreneurial A pie chart shows the same information as a 100% stacked bar chart.

You can more easily measure your progress and focus your preparation on the specific areas of the case interview that youre less comfortable with.

You will note that it is quite similar to the interview timeline of McKinsey. WHAT you do outside of work does not really matter. Product Mix You need to take the insights you have identified and connect it to the case objective.

: Tell me about a time you led a team through a difficult challenge., E.g.

-I'd like to understand if declines in the client's volume or changes in its pricing have led to the below-target profitability Youll find out in the next chapter of this guide! Initative For instance, answering that you create board games on the side or have applied to Shark Tank will get you noticed more than saying I like basketball., #5 Tell me about your greatest accomplishment. You wouldnt believe how many materials from popular sites weve seen give misinformed and poor advice that can lead to you sabotaging your efforts.

Time is almost always on the x-axis for line graphs. At BCG, this is a Project Leader or a Principal. At McKinsey, this is an Engagement Manager or an Associate Principal. Interpreting what you read to draw insights is what matters. The interviewer will provide you with clues and will want to see you drive the case. You make some relevant and reasonable assumptions, You are somewhat effective with calculations, You make mostly relevant and reasonable assumptions, You are mostly effective with calculations.

Shifting 20 percentage points away from GE to and split equally to Whirlpool & our own store brand increases profit by $60M Almost all consulting firms will ask you that question at some point. Finally, its also important to prepare for the fit / personal experience interview as well. As youve seen, the consulting recruiting process is rigorous.

Identify data points that are unexpected, unusual, or unique.

This part tests your ability to generate new ideas or solutions.

Additionally, the insights should help you identify the potential next steps you need to take to solve the case. If you already had a hypothesis, it should help you refine it. And you could then tell brief stories around the three most relevant points on yourresume.

MyConsultingCoach reserves the right not to proceed with the refund if the supporting evidence provided were not adequate.

Costs A vast portion of a management consultants career is spent analyzing data, summarizing information, extracting insights, and helping to convert knowledge to action. You can find yourself working with a wide variety of backgrounds including liberal arts, business, PhDs, lawyers, and medical doctors.

Step 5: Connect the insights to the case objective.

Heres why these case interview examples are going to be better than 99% of the stuff of the internet: You get to be an active participant instead of just a passive listener. The best thing to do for this question is to re-purpose one of the stories youll prepare for Personal Experience Interview questions which well cover next. In the meantime, we suggest reading this blog post onfrequent McKinsey PEI questions how to answer them (coming soon). Vendor Relationship Risk For example, we could conclude that if a companys annual growth in supply chain investments is 10%, then its annual revenue growth would be greater than 20%. The most efficient way to do this is to read the title of the chart or graph before you look at anything else. Price increase, quantity increase, and a decrease in variable costs all caused profits to increase. cottam paul interview This is usually stated as the header of the diagram below, read this!

Review our. The best indication of this is to practice our ten Case Interview Prep Course videos and ensure youre scoring great overall on the interview grading rubric.

Here are the top 5 most common Personal Experience Interview (PEI) questions: You worked in a team and had to manage conflict, You had a disagreement with a colleague / boss, You had to change someone's / a group's mind, You overcame a really difficult challenge. Fit questions are focused on all four attributes that top consulting firms look for: Consulting behavioral interview questions can be categorized in two buckets: Fitquestions: These are generic questions such as Why consulting? or Why McKinsey / BCG / Bain?, Personal Experience Interview (PEI) questions: These are questions such as Tell me about a time when you lead a team through a difficult situation. Or Tell me about a time where you had to manage a team conflict.. You can read more about how to craft great frameworks in our upcoming Definitive Guide: Case Interview Frameworks (coming soon).

First, seek to understand the foundational elements of the case interview: problem structuring, problem solving, quantitative analysis, insights generation, and creativity. Leadership, Problem solving Whenever I show a graph to someone where the profits were growing from yr1-5 and falling from yr5-7 but margins were falling much faster from yr5-7, and if they come back repeat that same info to me, they get rejected in my book. Let us look at all the steps in more details. These bags are fed into a vacuum sealer machine, which sucks air out of the bag to remove all moisture and oxygen.

The basic charts are: You should be familiar with all of these. This way you can focus your energy on the specific areas that need the most improvement and get rid of the weak links in your overall case performance. In McKinsey cases, youll find the interviewer is more active than at other firms.

We suggest the simple SCARF framework below. So how can you make sure you impress both managers in the first round and partners in the second round? Not taking into account all the other data represented on the chart often candidates become complacent when they see a hint of evidence that supports their hypothesis when other available data may not.

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Therefore, this stacked bar chart shows the sales of different products by company.

The first step is to get an overall understanding of what the chart or graph is showing.

Do NOT waste time trying to mentally calculate margins fell by 22.67% in year 2-4 it may impress the interviewer but not at the cost of you actually telling her something that takes the case forward!, Student Interview Room Reservation Request, Look at the graph type and define the type (pie chart, line chart, etc), Look at the legend (ask for clarifying questions if necessary). In this example, we can conclude that laptops have the highest sales at $5,000 and tablets have the lowest sales at $1,500.

In this example, you can see that Company B has the highest overall sales since the width of its bar is the widest.

Double check you are not missing anything and try to identify the twist, if one exists, to the problem. However perhaps there are other costs not captured here that we should investigate like the cost to develop the product The next chart is the pie chart, which is heavily used by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). First, etc.

In this example, instead of the y-axis being sales in dollars, the y-axis is now sales as a percentage of total sales for that company. Now lets step through each of the top questions so youll be prepared for them. However, things usually get more complicated than this as charts are used to show more insightful data. Consulting interviews are typically split into two parts - the fit / behavioral interview and the case interview. Heres our suggestion on how to best allocate your time, given the amount of hours you have to dedicate to case interview preparation: Review our Case Interview Tips and Techniques (1 hour), Practice our ten Case Interview Prep Course videos (1 hour each, incl. In this example, the x-axis represents the different companies, the y-axis represents the percentage of total sales, and the stacked segments represent the different products. If you can get overall great scores on 5 cases in a row, you are in outstanding shape for your real case interview with the top consulting firms. We offer exclusive MBB ex-interviewer content. Since they likely wouldnt have heard of the brand, wed need to make sure we can earn their trust with perhaps a better than average warranty backed by the name of our store. After you go through a case, it is very important that you assess your feedback in each of the seven areas of the case. Achievers

Preparing for case interviews does NOT have to be complicated.

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Do not over-rotate on margins/profitability.

During these interviews you will need to answer two types of questions: behavioral / fit interview questions and case interview questions.

Charts showing Trends Quite self-explanatory, these charts are usually line charts and they show how a quantity changes with respect to another.

These are the insights that distinguish outstanding case interview candidates from average candidates. This means that the interviewer is more active than at other firms, and most of the time theyll lead you from one question to the next. Its important to keep these four attributes in mind because top consulting firms will grade you along these dimensions at each step of their recruiting process.

Not all firms use these tests but many of them do.

How do I prepare for a BCG or Bain case interview? Ive done three things in my career so far that are relevant to consulting and motivated me to apply for this firm. Flow/Process Charts Again, quite self explanatory, these charts show you how a process is carried out. The point is that every chart, whether there is a lead noted or not, serves as a source of insights.

You can do case question drills for each of the seven areas of the case.

This is an extremely efficient way to progress quickly.

With the same principles applied, you should always try to be as MECE and structured as possible. (from Former McKinsey, BCG, and Bain Case Interviewers).

In order to make their decision, they will use a mental model of good vs. great scoring that youll learn about in the next chapter. Step 3: Identify the one or two biggest insights. An increase in fixed costs decreased profits. Its a quantitative question but when youre not provided with any data. Bain tends to put a little more focus on typicalfit questions such as Why Bain? or Walk me through your resume.. There are four basic components to a chart: title, axis descriptions (units), legend, and values. Revenue This feature is only available in our full Practice Case Interviews program.

In this example, the x-axis shows years and the y-axis shows annual revenue.

Previously, he was a Management Consultant at Novantas with a focus on the financial services sector, where he advised on pricing, marketing, channel distribution, digital transformation and due diligence.

feedback). It is then useful to group charts cased on their purpose rather than on their type. Venn diagrams are often used to show qualitative relationships.

Its not to memorize or regurgitate frameworks. How do I prepare for a McKinsey case interview? Now that you know what type of questions to expect in case interviews, you need to know about the important differences between McKinsey cases and cases at other firms such BCG and Bain. Your email address will not be published. You sometimes mention considerations / trade-offs / implications, You often mention considerations / trade-offs / implications. Passing the first round or passing the final round? There are some others but these are the biggest ones. Your client is a manufacturer of copper electrical wiring for commercial building applications. Impact If the dropout rate for medium drops to 15%, is the drop proportional to the increase in claim handlers productivity.

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