Case interview prep for dummies

so what exactly is case interview and why are consulting companies so obsessed with them hello hello hello this is zenji welcome back to my channel for those who don't know me i was a mckenzie consultant from 2016 to 2019 out of the chicago office i was also a trent mckenzie interviewer and have interviewed over 50 candidates over my career there and today i want to talk about case interview now thinking back of the summer before i started recruiting for consulting i kept hearing this phrase case interview and at the time i was actually confused and scared about case interview because i have no idea what it meant why is it different how to prep for it it seems to be the hype that everybody talks about except i seem to be the only one who had no idea what it is or how to prep for it so i want to help you to avoid being in my situation and that's why in today's video we're going to do a little case interview 101 and i'll cover what exactly is a case interview why are they so popular what are the typical formats how can you possibly stand out from your peers and finally all the misconceptions about case interview prep now let's get started so let's start with the basics what exactly is a case interview so a case interview in its core it is a problem-solving interview that simulates real life challenges that consultants face on a daily basis it is gaining a lot of popularity as i've seen case interviews not only in consulting interviews but also in a lot of tech or startup interviews because it is such a great way to assess multiple skills from your problem solving to communication to analytical and critical thinking so typically you'll be given a prompt that tells you about the context of the situation that you're trying to solve and they will be given a problem statement which is exactly what you need to solve and then during the interview the interviewer will also supplement with data or graphs to help you analyze the problem and then eventually you will be asked to provide a recommendation so let's talk about example since the start of the pandemic in 2020 ride sharing companies have been hit very severely lyft is one of the examples where it has suffered a lot in its ratio in business and it has seen a decline in its revenue over the past couple years so if you're the consultant being staffed from the project how would you help left turn their business around typically you can expect a few categories of problems that you will need to solve first and in my opinion one of the most popular and probably also one of the easiest one is profitability so the example of lyft that i've given you is a profitability problem where you have to analyze either the revenue or the cost or a combination both the second category and by the way the remaining are not in any sort of popularity order i have no idea i don't have the stats to rank them but the second one for example is market entry where you have to help a company decide whether to enter a new country new geography or whether to enter a new business segment so an example of here is maybe would it make sense for google to enter the i don't know the food delivery market and then typically with this type of problem market sizing is also a component of it where you would have to assess how big the overall market or addressable market is for example how many likes will ng get in this video third category mergers and acquisition which as you may have guessed it is about whether it's worth for companies to acquire or merge or start completely from scratch if they want to get into a new business or if they wanted to compete with the competitors so an example here again completely made up is you know one of my dream is to open a bubble tea cafe if i were to do that should i start from scratch or should i acquire an existing cafe next is pricing how to price certain items i mean you see them almost everywhere it's also a very common business problem so an example would be that you know how would spacex for example price its future right to outer space program so after giving the prompt and the problem statement you'll be expected to lay out the structure or the framework in terms of how you would go about and solve the problem and then you will either ask for additional information or the interviewer will give you additional information you will use analysis either qualitative or quantitative to draw insights and eventually link all the information together to give a recommendation typically i would expect taste interview to run from 20 to 25 minutes sometimes it could run a little longer it really all depends why do companies especially consulting companies or tech companies that case love case interviews so much as i mentioned before casey interviews they do assess multiple skills at the same time so in this link on bank's website it would actually give you a really good idea in terms of what exactly they're looking for from a case interview so it will be the approach that you take to solve a problem the analytical and creative thinking the usage of data to quantify and make recommendations communication skills when conveying your ideas and your suggestion around how to implement those proposals and those i would probably say would be the five dimensions where they consider are the core or the more intrinsic consulting skills that you know the companies really care about although in my opinion the word intrinsic is really interesting because you can definitely improve all of those dimensions if you're able to do targeted practice and then you can trend you can pretty much train your intrinsic alright next up how are those interviews run what are the formats i want to say that the most popular obviously there are more different formats but the two most popular ones are the interviewer light and the candidate lot let's talk about the interviewer like first i think that's the famous mckenzie style of case interview i don't know why they decided to do this maybe they want to stand out but in my opinion interview where a lot it is more straightforward and it's easier typically in an interviewer like type of case the interviewer would leave the case which means that after you present your framework which is essentially how you structure the case the interviewer will tell you exactly the area or the aspect that he or she wants to go dive deep into so you don't really have to ask all these questions and trying to eliminate or prioritize um to me i think that really takes a lot of pressure off for so for example in this case what you would typically hear from the interviewer would be that you know let's dive into area x in a candidate loud example as you may have guessed is the opposite where you will be the one driving the flow and the direction of the case so in this type of interview you'll be the one who decides which area you want to dive deep into so what you would typically do is that after you present your framework you will say that hey you know based on xyz reason let's maybe dive into area x first what do you the interviewer think and then the interviewer will either provide more information to help you to do deeper level analysis or he or she might say that hey i don't think this era is very important let's skip it for now what's another area that we you would look into so i get a lot of questions of people wondering you know if it's the same case and pretty much everybody can do the same prep memorizing pretty much the same framework and then you will probably draw the same conclusions how would you stand out from your peers because this is only an introductory video so i won't dive too deep into all the you know the the detailed tips and tricks that you can do that but i want to say that you know there are a few things that you should definitely watch out for as you start the prepping process first of all process is much much much more important than the results yes you're right you know in a typical very simple straightforward case such as profitability it's probably true that candidates will probably draw very similar conclusions so however in this case right consulting company how would they evaluate your skills it'll be more from the process of how you get to the conclusion than the conclusion yourself which means that in that process right your structure your framework will be way more important because their belief is that if you have the right structure then you can always solve the problem versus solve it based on pure luck and that's something that they want to eliminate and since i mentioned framework the second point is you know what does it mean to actually have a good framework it needs to be messy and it needs to be customized those are extremely important so meesee means mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive in human words that means that your framework should be comprehensive where it covers pretty much in all the areas that you can think of without all the individual branches overlapping each other for example in a profitability case when you wanted to dive into you wouldn't say revenue and price because revenue is a function of price that pretty much means that your two branches are actually overlapping each other and it is also not exhaustive because revenue and cost are essentially the two you know the two branches for profitability and you have to include both second customization what does customization mean it means contextualize your answer and your framework to the specific problems that you uh encounter i know that over the internet there's a lot of different frameworks that you know people would tell you to memorize to handle different types of cases but remember in a real consulting project in the business world no two problems or challenges will be exactly the same that's why during a consulting interview the interviewers would really really hate if you're just trying to use a you know a memorized framework and you're trying to fit like force fitted in into the current problem that you're solving for so definitely remember to always contextualize to always customize to really draw you know what the conclusion mean to the specific industry but not in the general terms and at the end of the day please please please please do not memorize framework and if you're interested in learning how you can customize framework check out one of my previous videos and then last but not least point here always using a hypothesis driven approach hypothesis-driven approach is extremely important not just in case interviews but in mckinsey i don't know about other company but especially mckinsey way is working we always say you know we always stay what our hypothesis is and then what are the different data points that we need to either validate or disapprove the hypothesis so if you can use the same structure during the interview it will definitely help you stand out all right last area all the misconceptions i made a lot of mistakes actually during my case interview prep and i would want to save some time for you if you're doing the same so a lot of people would ask me you know how many case interviews what i need to do in order to really improve significantly is it 50 100 200 what is the magic number i really didn't break it to you it is not a numbers game there is no magic number and as much as you would like to believe it's actually more about quality than the quantity with each case interview don't just practice and just let go and forget about it practice try to see you know after the interview what are the areas that you could have done better run the same interview again and then absorb and apply all the learnings that you had to make it a better case so you can always make sure that the next case you do you will always keep improving and also please stay away from those people who flaunt around and are so proud that they have done 100 or 150 or 200 there's really nothing to be worried about and for those who does please stop doing that to others to add pressure to people for some people they just need maybe five or ten for some people maybe they need a lot more but also yeah i think 200 cases are also very excessive next how many frameworks do i have to memorize again no match number and also please do not memorizing frameworks you can go back to my video where i talk about do not the reason for not memorizing frameworks please don't do it if you do it they will recognize the interviews were recognized right away and i will guarantee you that you will not make to the next round last point here listen to your interviewer please i feel like a lot of people have this mindset that you know the interviewers are here to trick me um they want to ask all the tough questions and you know really test my ability to perform under pressure no no during the case interview typically what happens is that the interviewers just really there to help you solve the case together so whenever they realize that you are potentially making a mistake or going down the wrong direction they will it's actually their job and they will give you tips to actually try to pull you back into the right direction so please just don't get into this mental mindset that i need to solve this all by myself listen to what they're saying listen to their suggestions and you will probably come out okay if you like this video and want to learn more about you know other tricks of improving your case interview please check out this video where i talked about how i was actually to use this one specific skill and improve my case interview success rate by over 90 percent alright good luck see you next time bye

Channel: MissAngieLu

Views: 52,825

Keywords: consulting case interview, case interview prep, mckinsey

Id: USGud2cinco

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 15 2022