These Three Key Tools Will Immediately Boost Your Confidence and Performance in The Case Interview
Consulting is a $30 million career opportunity, so don’t miss out on your chance of getting in there. Most of you are great and amazing, and in these chapters, I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned in ten years at McKinsey and ten years as a CEO and entrepreneur.
We had an interesting case interview training session the other day, and I’m going to share a couple of key insights and key learnings here. If you want to see the whole video, join the Facebook group and check out C-I-T-O-O-2. It was very instructive.
Key learning number one: most of your mistakes in the case interview come from a lack of confidence. More accurate feedback is to always work on your confidence, don’t work on the symptoms. The symptoms here are: rushing through the interview, not listening to my question, not treating me as a person. But these are all just symptoms. The feedback for this is: work on your confidence. Once you are confident, all this will go away. You will be personal, you will have the right pace, you will be amicable, your mind will work correctly. You will be perceptive as to what the interviewer really wants. So, work on your confidence.
How do you work on your confidence? Change your thoughts and your life changes. You lack confidence because you have certain thoughts in your head, and you need to change these thoughts. I’ve designed a little meditation which I will give you in the next chapter in order to increase your confidence.
The second key observation and this is really key. In the interview, when I asked the person to brainstorm possible reasons, he would dive into a linear process of coming up with these reasons. He would say, “Here’s the reason number one, here’s details on reason number one. Oh, and there’s another thing I can think of and details for the second thing. And here’s the third thing.” This is linear thought. Consultants always think top-down. They always think, here’s level one. In this case, it was thinking about why the bank doesn’t sell enough credit cards in a certain market? You would think about this and say, okay, well there could be five areas of reasons. It could be our pricing, it could be our product, it could be our marketing, it could be our channel partners, and here are the details on each of these buckets, as I’m thinking.
You have to learn not to present your thoughts in a linear fashion but in a structured fashion. The key point here is you need to learn how to be short and only go deeper if you see that the interviewer — or your client — wants to go deeper. Give that high-level answer first. If you’re asked, “Could you do an analysis of my products,” you say, “Yes, I would look at the product, what the pricing is, what your marketing is, and what your sales message is.” First name the buckets, and then you ask, “Do you want me to go a little deeper on this?” Trust the interviewer to guide you. The interviewer will tell you whether he wants you to go deeper or whether he’s satisfied with what you’ve already told him.
Most of you are so pressured, so keen to answer, that you start this linear process of throwing as much stuff out there as possible and see what sticks. But as we learned in this interview, this is not an academic exam where the more stuff you throw out, the more points you get. It’s all about how you deliver it. It’s not about how many points you get. If you miss a few points so be it; it’s about the delivery. Watch the video. It’s really instructive.
In the video, I was showing you what it’s like if you’re doing this. You have to treat that interviewer as if he is your client because this is what’s happening in the mind of the interviewer. The interviewer says, “If I’m a client, what would I think about this consultant?” They’re always in the shoes of the client. If he asks you a question as a client asks a question, and you say, “Okay, let me think about this first,” and you start scribbling on a piece of paper and let your client sit there and wait for your answer, the client will say, “This guy’s a goofball. I don’t want this consultant. I want to talk to a normal person.”
I know that in the typical case interview training, you get the instruction that you should collect your thoughts and design a structure. Of course, you should do this, and you should allot time to do this. Don’t rush it but do it in the conversation. There is another person in the room. You’re not alone. This is not a written exam. So, you should rephrase the question, see if you’ve got all the information. Check with that person whether your framework is the right one. You always have to do it in a way that is interactive and engaging for the other person. The case interview is not an exam in solving cases. It’s an acting exam. Can you act like a consultant? That is the exam. It’s not about solving cases.
In that interview, we talked about confidence and we talked a lot about how it’s important that you keep your mind uncluttered from fear. You’re in the moment and in the zone and you know for yourself that you’ve got the confidence that you will solve this. Because guess what? What do you think it’s like coming to a client’s site with your team of three, and that client makes five billion turnovers and has a 100 million profitability problem? You’ve got four weeks’ time and you’re going to solve this problem and you’ve got no clue yet how you will do it. All you’ve got is a few tools with you and a team.
What do you think, how are you going to solve this? With a lack of confidence that you will do it? No, that’s the business of consulting. You go in and you’ve got the confidence that when you look at this stuff, you will come up with an answer. That’s consulting. There’s no pre-made answer. If there was a pre-made answer, people wouldn’t pay you a million dollars to do it. It’s the same thing with the interview. That’s the mindset you go in with. I can do this, I’ll solve this, I don’t know the answer yet, but we’ll find out.
So check out the next chapters. I’ll give you a confidence-increasing meditation.
Be great, be amazing, because I know you are. You’re just not letting everybody see yet how amazing you are. But we’ll get there.
Don’t know where to get started on your path into McKinsey, BCG, Bain?
Here are the simple steps:
Step 1: SURROUND YOURSELF WITH A GROUP OF LIKEMINDED PEOPLE THAT HELP EACH OTHER ON THE WAY
Join https://www.facebook.com/groups/get.a.job.at.McKinsey.BCG.Bain/for THE place to get insider information on how to make it into Consulting; free training, live coaching sessions, success secrets, insider knowledge, and an overdose of motivation
Step 2: (if you are not yet invited to the interview) GET THE FREE TRAINING ON HOW TO WRITE A RESUME THAT GETS YOU INVITED TO THE INTERVIEW
In this free webinar, you learn how to make the firms chase you, tell your story in a way that excites recruiters and how to tick all the right boxes! https://moritzgruber.net/cv
Step 3: JOIN A PROGRAM THAT GUIDES YOU ALONG THE WAY TO YOUR DREAM JOB
Did you know that there is a specific way to write your CV that makes the top firms invite you to interviews? The secret is to change your CV from “a table of contents of your life” to “the best marketing document you have ever written”. I teach this here https://moritzgruber.net/impress-mbb-recruiters
Step 4: UNCOVER THE SECRETS OF SUCCESSFUL CANDIDATES AND LEARN HOW TO ACT CONVINCINGLY IN THE CASE INTERVIEW
Do you want to be like so many of my students who come back successfully and tell me: “Moritz, actually it was totally easy. I just applied what you told me”. How does that work? Well, differently than 99% of other sources make you believe. You don’t need more business knowledge. You need confidence in your actions, clarity on what they expect, and the scripts that always work (no matter the question). This, I teach here: https://moritzgruber.net/mint
In my podcast I share key insights on how to make it into a top global consulting firm:
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/at/podcast/get-a-job-at-mckinsey-bcg-bain/id1485034843
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5qtSLgdJiC4EInHW0HjOTg
Follow me on Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/get_a_job_at_mckinsey_bcg_bain/
Follow me on TikTok: www.tiktok.com/@job.at.mckinsey.bcg.bain
Follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/get-a-job-at-mckinsey-bcg-bain
Follow me on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ387eIMQ-Z5ExA1eIbtMSQ?guided_help_flow=3
