How we prepare candidates for the case interview with case interview training

We always work with the strengths based feedback model in case interview training, taking specific situations that actually happened as starting points and test for understanding and improvement.

 

The strengths based feedback approach:

  • We start with discovering what your strengths are in the case interview
  • We help you determine where you need improvement
  • We give you tools and examples to help you improve in these areas, and help you use your strengths to cover up your weaknesses
  • We help you bring out your strengths even further

 case interview training

 

Example of how case interview training could look like

A student contacted us prior to his McKinsey interviews one week later for case interview training

 

He had gained experience consulting with a student organization in the Netherlands, but when practicing cases he found that he had large difficulty coming up with an effective structure for the problem at hand. Once he’d come up with the structure, solving the case and calculating a good answer was no problem, but just getting started was everything but smooth.

 

We gave him case interview training for 1 hour. Up front, we discussed what would be most useful, and we decided on doing two cases with a very strong emphasis on coming up with a useful structure for the problem in the beginning.

 

We focused on implementing 3 pieces of feedback (as few points as possible, to avoid confusion):

  • When you take your 60 seconds to think about the problem, also think about which element of the problem will be most challenging. Focus your efforts there and create a structure that guides you through that element

 

  • Everyone has moments where he or she is unclear what to do next or even where to begin. Instead of turning inside yourself, we focused on expressing your thoughts or explaining which problem you found confusing to the interviewer. That way, when the interviewer needs to help you, it feels like only a small hint rather than having to help you solve the problem from zero.

 

  • Being a consultant is basically having a job learning and implementing feedback as fast as you can and become a better consultant. You will be assessed on this ability during your interview. A hint or feedback from the interviewer during your interview, is an opportunity for you to show how fast a learner you are.

 

In this particular case, it looked like this:

  • You have been asked to come up with 10 creative ideas
  • However you struggle getting to 6
  • The interviews explains a method to produce more ideas
  • The candidate had already demonstrated to be a fast learned but only generated four more ideas that were quite straight forward, and then wanted to move on
  • We explained him not to be satisfied getting to 10, but to show the interviewer he is a fast learner and goes the extra mile
  • He easily generated 5 more innovative ideas and understood what if feels like to be showing off

 

After 1 hour of case interview training, he was able to

  • understand where it went wrong
  • given tools to improve on this
  • given pieces of advice how he could excel in the interview even more

 

If you are willing to pay for professional case interview training without any hassle, send us an email at peter@theinsidecoach.nl (80 EUR per hour).

Want to read more about how we coach our insiders? Want to read more about consulting cvs in the Netherlands? Want to read more about strategy consultancy in the Netherlands? Want to see which consultancy business courses are coming up? Want to practice cases with other candidates?

For more about case interview training, also see the McKinsey website