Differences between the 1st and 2nd round case interviews at Bain

a little bit about what if any differences between first and second round interviews obviously the the seniority of the people inner doing the interviews is different usually usually it's like partners principals and in the second round and maybe consultants or you know project leaders and in the first but do you think that the style of the interview differs or that different skills are looked for more and can you talk about that I think they're they may come across to the candidate as fairly similar but in reality they're very different first rounds are do they have the chops to do consulting look are they smart enough are they confident enough do they have the quant skills maybe and if we have a question about fit we very well may still pass them to the second round whenever I did first rounds my job was to make sure that that candidate had the chops to be able to do the job doctor and and the chops is like the core analytical skills exactly and we weren't necessarily testing for fit now there were huge red flags we may not pass someone to the second round but if there were questions we would note that and we would tell the second round interviewers to test fit and that's what they would focus on they may not even do a true case in the second round which was you may just have a conversation and test fit so we always said we're gonna leave it to the second round interviewers to look at fit doctor have so that really for that first round quants do they have the actual analytical capabilities but then it's really the second rounds where they're testing fit the difference also with the second rounds you mentioned that the folks are more senior that are doing the interviews what that often means is the cases will likely be a little less structured they may not have as many slides or handouts where they're having candidates go through data they may not have as in-depth of calculations it may be a little more free form and just batting back and forth ideas yeah just given the fact that these are more senior individuals they're just probably not gonna hold to a really specific cases yeah yeah I mean that's very consistent with my experience I remember once your interview with a senior managing director and he basically was like you see that phone on my desk he said what do you think about that and then the whole conversation was about like Cisco TelePresence and phones yes you know just but it started very casually like in the midst of like another question is look what about that phone yeah one of my favorite questions that a partner at Bain used to ask in all interviews is he would ask do you think you saw that receptionist when he walked in today at Bain do you think that she has a good job hmm and what he was really testing for is whether or not you could put someone you could put yourself in someone else's shoes and have a bit of empathy and whereas you might think that jobs terrible it might be a really great job for her and she actually really might like it so it's those higher-level questions when I interviewed at Bain in my second round I got a question around how would you take a business approach to planning a Thanksgiving dinner so this woman was writing an article for The Wall Street Journal it was due the next day and she asked me how would you think about 19 ideas I'm writing this article how would you think about taking a business approach to a Thanksgiving dinner and so we talked a lot about you know what your core competency is with you know having a few good items and then maybe the sides you just kind of go cheap on because no one's gonna rave about the sides but the turkey is the most important I talked about how you maybe have more expensive wine at the beginning than the end mix-ins but again you know bigger questions where you can just have more of a dialogue cool you

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Keywords: case interviews, 2nd round cases, bain & co, bain, bain interviews, case interview prep, consulting case interviews, bain case interviews, bain final round interviews

Id: 1crsXkm-SnA

Length: 4min 1sec (241 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 12 2017