Consulting Interviews Process

Process

Interviews are of course the most important step in the process. Everything in the run up to the interview can be thought of as steps to get yourself a 'good interview slot'. Independent of how good or otherwise your slot is, all you have to do is do well in the interview to get selected. The best slot doesn't guarantee it, and the worst slot doesn't inhibit it.

Let's now understand how the interviews work:
- What is being assessed in each interview - How each interview is structured - How the whole system of interviews is structured

What is Being Assessed

Each interviewer has a checklist against which they are scoring each candidate. The exact set of items will vary from firm to firm, however, broadly, they will fall under the following 3 buckets:

1. Problem solving capability and creativity -

Broadly this is judged by how you go about solving your case. It doesn't precisely matter whether you solve the case, how far you get through it and so on. If you are able to show that you can take complex problems, break them down, make sharp judgements, and arrive at actionable solutions, that's what the interviewer is looking for. Of course, it's easier to show all of this by successfully completing the case, but can often be done even while falling short of that. Therefore, you will often find the interviewer asking questions which seem a little removed from the part of the case that you are in. They aren't so much trying to rush you along, as they are moving onto newer items on their checklist.

2. Communication and team work -

This mainly comes across through the case, since this is still the bulk of the interview. However, you will also have a good amount of time to show clarity in communication through the personal interview segment. Here the interviewer is broadly trying to understand whether you can communicate clearly, crisply and convincingly. They want to check on whether you can work through a problem without alienating your team mates, to ensure that their inputs are available and taken at all steps of problem solving.

3. Personality fit and likability -

Each firm has their own set of values which they believe are needed to be a good fit. But I wouldn't recommend learning them by heart or trying to fit them into your story. These are generic values, and the best way to think of this assessment is through 2 tests that interviewers will conduct:
&emps; 1. Airplane test - This is a rather well known test in consulting circles. The interviewer here is asking themselves whether they would be able to stand you or better yet enjoy your company if they were stuck with you on a plane for 3 hours, and effectively the entire week after that. There isn't really much of a way to prepare for this. I believe that each of us is inherently interesting and capable of not being overbearing. That's basically the side of yourself that needs to come through. Talk to the interviewer, engage and share your interesting side when asked about yourself. Don't try to oversell yourself or stress about the interview.
  2. Turing test - This one doesn't have a well recognised name, so I just call it the turing test, because I find that it's quite similar to it. [The Turing Test](https://searchenterpriseai.techtarget.com/definition/Turing-test#:~:text=The%20Turing%20Test%20is%20a,cryptanalyst%2C%20mathematician%20and%20theoretical%20biologist). Here the interviewer will throw a couple of curve balls your way as a part of the PI questions. The idea here isn't to pressure test you (although that might also be done). The idea is that most people will come prepared with polished answers to HR questions. After diving deep into some of these, an unexpected shift to a random question will throw people off guard and expose robotic answers. If your answers are genuine and not over-rehearsed, you might be taken aback a little, but should be able to respond meaningfully.
In later parts of these notes, we will be discussing effectively how to come off strongly on each of the above assessment criteria.

Structure of the Interview

There is a huge degree of variation in the structure of interviews used in practise. This variation results from interviewers trying to respond to the fierce competition from other consultancies, or any other logistical challenge that they may be trying to accommodate. However, I shall outline the structure of a 'complete' interview, which still represents the majority of interviews.
- Casual introductions - 2-5 min
- Organic flow into your achievements, experiences and resume - 5-8 min
- Abrupt / organic switch to a case - 25 min
- Closing up casual conversation and questions for the interviewer - 5 min

Structure of the System

Let's look at an oversimplified version of the consulting placement process:
- There are 3 firms with 10 interviewers each
- There are 60 candidates (represents complete shortlist for each firm)
- Each firm starts interviewing 10 candidates in parallel during the first slot
- Within the first 2 hours, each firm completes 3 interviews (each with a different interviewer) for each of the 10 candidates that they took in
- Each firm has selected some 8 out of the 10 candidates interviewed, and those 24 candidates are out of the system
- Of the remaining 36 candidates, again each firm interviews some 10 candidates in parallel
- This process repeats, until each firm has interviewed each candidate on their shortlist, who hasn't already left the system

Of course there are a bunch of complexities involved in the above system. Some of the complexities worth understanding in a little more detail are:

- Order of interviews -

The first question to answer is how the first set of interviews is determined. A capacitated bipartite rank-maximal (bidirectional ranking) matching is computed on the set of companies and candidates. The below paper details this out if you're interested: [capacitated rank-maximal matching](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-38233-8_27). Over and above this algorithm, the edge set in any given round is derived from each company's priority list, including edges for all vacant panels. In English, what this means is that both the companies and candidates rank their preferences of each other, and interviews are scheduled such that each company's interview panel is kept as busy as possible, while ensuring that maximum number of candidates are interviewing in their preference order. This prompts a few more questions:
  - Company preference orders - Companies order their shortlist in a priority order from the very beginning. The most important part of this ordering is the top 10 candidates that they will aim to interview first. To ensure that these 10 candidates are scheduled for them to interview, and not for another firm, a lot of consultancies inform candidates that they are on the 'hot list'. A candidate on the hot list can either confirm that they will also put this consultancy as their top choice (ensuring the first slot match) or inform the consultancy that a different firm is their top choice. The consultancy's entire priority order list is shared with the placement team. More on this in the section on hot lists.
  - Candidate preference orders - Candidates also rank all companies which they have applied to, and sometimes even other companies (just in case) in the order in which they would like to interview with them. If you have committed to a company's hot list, it should ideally be he only company that you have committed to, and the only company in the number one position. Every candidate's preference order is shared with the placement team.
  - Imperfections - In an ideal world this information would be fed into a computer, and everything would work like clockwork. But there are a few imperfections which interfere with the same:
    - Humans - Recruiting is fairly cut throat, and there is a lot of bargaining and power games that go on behind the curtains. In some cases, recruiting teams may be able to convince placement teams to make minor changes to the order, timing, duration etc of interviews. Factoring in the other imperfections this may or may not be a bad thing.
    - Unpredictability - Interviews don't go on for a very exact amount of time. Consultancies try to wrap up their first interviews quickly, in the interest of interviewing other candidates before competition. If candidate X is next on the list for firms A and B, where X has ranked A ahead of B, but there is a slot available in B right now, and there is expected to be a slot available at A in a minute, where should X be sent? That's a design choice, and it's hard to tell how long this 'minute' will last in reality, as well as what time threshold to make which choice at.
    - Education - In theory, the above shared algorithm is optimal. Of course, in practise there are further design choices to be made, in terms of how many minutes leeway to give, whether to have a time cut off for interviews etc. However, your institute might or might not follow the optimal algorithm in theory, to begin with.

- Number of interviews -

In theory each of the firms has a principle that recommends that every new hire should be okayed by 2 partners, before being selected. Thus, in theory one can expect to be interviewed by either:
- 2 partners
- 1 engagement manager (filtering) and then 2 partners

If one performs rather poorly in an interview, they might be rejected at any stage before completing 2 partner interviews. But the above 2 are the expected combinations for selection. In practise however, all of the firms have adapted to stiff recruiting competition. In some cases, just one interview with a partner might suffice to be selected. Some of these interviews might not run for the full 40 minutes, if the interviewer has made up their mind either way, with less information. Similarly, some candidates whom the firm is on the fence about might have a fourth interview as well. All in all, the time that a candidate spends interviewing with a firm isn't necessarily 2 hours. It ranges from 10 minutes to 3 hours.
- Opting out of the placement system - Depending on the school you're in, an offer might not mean that you automatically have to accept it and drop out of the placement system. You may have the option of holding onto it, or even rejecting it and carrying on with other interviews.

Takeaway

Of the 3 sections covered, one of them is clearly more complex than the other two. I'd suggest that you allow the placement team and the consultancies to worry about how the system works. The above understanding and talks from your placement team should more than suffice. Focus instead on how you will perform during the interview, and how you will bring all of the required competencies out.