Tuesday, July 12, 2011

What The Boston Consulting Group States About The Case Interview

By Victor Hong


Beginning with a solitary workplace a half century back, the Boston Consulting Group now has a presence in 41 countries. It's finished in the top fifteen of Fortune's "Best Companies to Work For" six years in a row and has made it into Consulting Magazine's "Best Companies to Work For" list every year since the magazine was released in 2001. If that sounds like the kind of place you'd prefer to work, then you are able to start by becoming familiar with the case interview. Like a lot of top ranked consulting firms, BCG utilizes the case interview as being a standard technique of discovering the needle of the potential star in the haystack of resumes that are sent to it every year.

BCG describes its interview procedure as "a dialog aimed at getting to understand you personally, learning more about your analytic abilities, and also introducing you to our people and our work." Crucial to those last two objectives is the case interview. At BCG, the "case" in the case interview is likely to become a business issue that the very individual interviewing you had to wrestle with in their career as a advisor. Does this mean that you simply are expected to come up with the same solution to that issue that your interviewer did? Completely not - like all companies acquainted using the case interview, BCG would be the very first to let you know that it's not the answer that interests them but instead what your search for the answer reveals about your capability to rapidly grasp the essence of a issue and construct creative but reality-based methods to it.

Listed here are some of BCG's ideas for candidates facing a case interview:

Structure the problem. Following the case has been introduced for you, ask your self what the key problems are that you simply should consider and which of those are most important. Make this the framework for the case interview answer - and be ready to explain your choices to your interviewer.

Don't stubbornly and inflexibly stick to your initial answer. If the interviewer raises questions about your initial answer, don't see this as being a criticism of one's skills that you should react to. Keep in mind the case interview is supposed to replicate the work procedure at BCG, and part of that's to become open to input from other people and also to alter your hinking accordingly.

Don't rely on information you brought into the room with you. Everything you discovered from case interview practice sessions or your previous knowledge in some branch of business or the public sector is beside the point now. The interviewer is much less interested in what you know than the way you deal with a issue you initially know absolutely nothing about. That is how you will truly shine in the case interview!




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