Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
com/efficient-and-quantitative-in-case-interviews
≡ Menu
Question:
The closest I have gotten to an offer was the final round case interview with Bain. But I
got dinged, the feedback was: My pace was too slow, and I am not quantitative enough.
My last shot at the consulting industry is with BCG. I have about a month to prepare for
it, and these are the things I am doing:
2. Reading publications (books and reports) done by the firm and the specific office I am
interviewing with
My Reply:
1 of 16 3/25/2018, 10:14 AM
Becoming More Efficient and Quantitative in Case Interviews https://www.caseinterview.com/efficient-and-quantitative-in-case-interviews
Let me start be interpreting the feedback you've received and make some suggested
changes to your preparation plan -- which I would recommend doing very differently.
It means you are asking too many questions to figure out a conclusion for one part of the
case.
Slow = Inefficient
Stated different, the real problem you have is you're asking the wrong questions -- in
particular your questions are not specific enough.
This is a very common problem. In my Look Over My Shoulder® program, the candidate
who did Case #2, Example #1 is a perfect example of the problem you're having.
How you get the answer is as important as if you get the answer. If you really study the
recording and transcript of this particular interview, pay very close attention to what
questions the candidate asks.
Then, compare those questions to Case #2, Example #2 -- the questions asked by the
candidates are different.
The candidate who did it the right way, "zeroed" in on the "exact right issue", often asking
a question regarding specific data.
So let me give you an example of the difference in how a "slow" candidate asks questions
vs a "fast" one.
Slow Candidate
2 of 16 3/25/2018, 10:14 AM
Becoming More Efficient and Quantitative in Case Interviews https://www.caseinterview.com/efficient-and-quantitative-in-case-interviews
1) Slow Candidate: I know profits are down 20%, do we know if sales have declined?
3) Slow Candidate: I see, next I want to analyze costs. Do we know if costs have
changed?
8) Interviewer: Labor costs have gone up by 30%, all other costs are unchanged.
11) Slow candidate: Do we know how our competitors' costs have changed?
13) Slow Candidate: I see, so this is a industry-wide cost problem. Do we know if profits
for our competitors have changed?
17) Slow Candidate: I see, it looks like industry-wide profitability is being driven by a
decline in sales volume and an increase in labor costs. So the question is what should
the client do given these two factors. What I want to do next is...
3 of 16 3/25/2018, 10:14 AM
Becoming More Efficient and Quantitative in Case Interviews https://www.caseinterview.com/efficient-and-quantitative-in-case-interviews
(Okay, notice that it took 17 lines of back and forth to get to this point. See how the "fast"
candidate does it.)
Fast Candidate
1) Fast Candidate: I know profits are down 20%, do we know if sales have declined?
3) Fast Candidate: I see, that means costs are up 10%, do we have a breakdown as to
which costs have increased?
4) Interviewer: Labor costs are up 30%, all other costs remain unchanged.
(In the candidate's head she figures out... if the labor costs are up 30%, and overall costs
are up 10%, we know labor is 1/3 of total costs... got it, remember that, no need to ask
the question.)
5) Fast Candidate: Next question, have labor costs for our competitors' changed?
(In the candidate's head, she says to herself... competitor profits are down 20%, their
costs are up 10%, so it must mean mathematically that sales for competitors are also
down 10%. Got it. No need to ask the question.)
7) Candidate: I see, so mathematically we know sales for all players in the industry are
down 10%, with labor costs driving up total costs by 10%, reduce profits for the industry
overall -- including our client.
So the question we're really try to address is what should our client do, given these two
4 of 16 3/25/2018, 10:14 AM
Becoming More Efficient and Quantitative in Case Interviews https://www.caseinterview.com/efficient-and-quantitative-in-case-interviews
MY COMMENTS
Notice the line count comparison: The "fast" candidate uses only seven lines of going
back and forth vs. the "slow" candidate using 17 lines.
This is what people mean when they say someone is "sharp" or that they "ripped" through
a case or problem fast.
It wasn't that they did each step quickly (such as speaking at a faster rate), when
someone is fast it really means the things they choose not to do got them to the
conclusion faster.
Notice how the slow candidate asks a lot of redundant questions. If profits are down 20%,
and sales are down 10%, we already know mathematically via basic algebra (solve for X
type stuff) that costs must be up 10%. Since this is a mathematical certainty, it's a waste
of time to ask about it.
The "slow" candidate tends to not realize the mathematical relationship or is not fast
enough at math to do the calculation in the middle of an interview under some pressure,
and to then quickly interpret what that means for the case.
You can combat this habit by being very conscious about really thinking very critically
after each back and forth with the interviewer, asking yourself, "What do I now know that I
didn't a second ago?"
I remember I had one case interview where I solved the entire case that others took 45
minutes to solve, and I took six minutes asking only four questions -- importantly it was
the right four questions.
So for your specific situation, you want to get "fast" and "pick up the pace" mainly by 1)
doing the mathematical relationship stuff in your head, not waste questions on it, and 2)
cut out unnecessary questions.
5 of 16 3/25/2018, 10:14 AM
Becoming More Efficient and Quantitative in Case Interviews https://www.caseinterview.com/efficient-and-quantitative-in-case-interviews
2) Interviewer: Yes.
2) Interviewer: Yes.
I don't have the time to cover this idea in detail, but sometimes I will do math in terms of
figuring if a number is "big" vs. "small."
So a "fast" candidate will be able to recognize the difference and avoid asking for overly
specific numbers when it's not necessary to draw a conclusion.
6 of 16 3/25/2018, 10:14 AM
Becoming More Efficient and Quantitative in Case Interviews https://www.caseinterview.com/efficient-and-quantitative-in-case-interviews
For example, if you know that your competitors' costs have changed in identical ways as
the client's costs. And if you know the competitors' revenues have changed by an
identical % as your clients, depending on the question being asked, you may not need to
know the exact % change in costs or profits for either.
Why?
Because you can conclude it's an industry problem without knowing the exact %
changes. So if that's all you need to determine at that point in the case, why bother
asking for more specific data?
This is what interviewers mean when they say a candidate has difficulty with ambiguity.
Someone who's training is in math will want to know the exact numbers.
But in consulting (on the job), we don't have the luxury of infinite time and people to
analyze everything. We have to take shortcuts by only getting data that's just sufficient
enough to answer the question at hand.
The example at the start of my reply was an example of a candidate being "slow"
quantitatively. But it is also quite common for candidates to be "slow" in analyzing
qualitative data. In my Look Over my Shoulder®, there were lots of examples of this
common mistake too.
Typically the person has a PhD in physics, math or some other quantitative field, and they
completely miss or are slow to grasp qualitative insights which are equally important as
getting quantitative insights. This is the weak spot of people with this background.
There's the equivalent of a one-hour discussion on this specific topic in Look Over My
Shoulder® so I won't cover that point here, so I have time to cover how I think you might
want to prepare differently.
7 of 16 3/25/2018, 10:14 AM
Becoming More Efficient and Quantitative in Case Interviews https://www.caseinterview.com/efficient-and-quantitative-in-case-interviews
2. Reading publications (books and reports) done by the firm and the specific office I am
interviewing with.
I think given the specific feedback around what's holding you back from getting an offer, I
would forget about #2 and #3.
Reading general business news and books will not help you. The most useful preparation
items will be practice cases with friends with a specific emphasis on the items I
mentioned above, and using and truly studying the Look Over my Shoulder® program.
While I'm on this topic, let me point out something about Look Over my Shoulder®
program. The biggest complaint I've gotten about the program is, "I didn't learn anything
new" in the program. As in, "There wasn't some kind of new mistakethat I had never
heard of before."
The "new" part of the program is not the fact there is some new mistake you've never
heard of. The "new" information that's in the program that's not available anywhere else
in the world is a step-by-step examination of why and how someone made the mistake
you may already be familiar with.
It's the step-by-step breakdown of the process leading to the mistake or good outcome
that is the "new" information. And the difference between success and failure is very
subtle.
In hindsight, I think it was a mistake on my part to suggest the program has new mistakes
in it. To be more precise, I should have said the program reveals how and why certain
mistakes were made, rather than the mistake itself being the new information.
The purpose of the program is take people who know what to do and actually get them
good at doing it... especially under pressure.
And the key to making that happen is to make you hyper aware of when you're making a
process mistake that is about to lead you into an incorrect conclusion or "No" conclusion
8 of 16 3/25/2018, 10:14 AM
Becoming More Efficient and Quantitative in Case Interviews https://www.caseinterview.com/efficient-and-quantitative-in-case-interviews
problem.
The goal is when you are in a live interview and you are about to make a very common
mistake (which is thoroughly documented, defined, dissected, and analyzed in Look Over
My Shoulder®), an alarm bell will go off in your head:
** WARNING ** **WARNING ** (You forgot to ask X question!!!! Stop! Don't skip this
step!)
If you study failures and the steps leading up to them, you get good at spotting the
warning signs leading up to when you're about to make a mistake.
He reads this magazine every month, because when he flies his family around, he does
not want to kill them by making the same mistake that killed someone else last month.
And you know what causes plane crashes? It is rarely a single mistake. It is usually a
series of three to four mistakes in a row -- any one of which would not have been fatal,
but all of them in a row was fatal.
I see parallels to those voice recorder "black box" transcripts and the pattern I notice in
the Look Over my Shoulder® interviews for those candidates who got "dinged".
Rarely did the candidate make one big mistake, much more often they made an entire
series of little mistakes whose cumulative effect caused them to miss an important insight
in the case and they got stuck.
(It's the series of process mistakes that leads an interviewer to conclude a candidate is
"slow".)
If you go through the Look Over My Shoulder® program skimming it, looking for the new
mistake you never heard of, you probably will not find it. (And in my video describing the
9 of 16 3/25/2018, 10:14 AM
Becoming More Efficient and Quantitative in Case Interviews https://www.caseinterview.com/efficient-and-quantitative-in-case-interviews
What you want to do is study both the failures and successes... multiple times. Until both
become routine... where you can spot the entry points to common case interview
mistakes from a mile away, and can also use the good habits, automatically.
So here's what my pilot friend does. When he's in a situation that's unexpected, like
suddenly fog has rolled in, and visibility is close to zero...
He remembers all the crash scenarios he studied in detail that began with zero visibility.
He immediately recognizes the mistake people tend to want to do (in this case, the
tendency is to look out the window, rather than at your instruments, and when that simple
mistake happens in general, it means you will crash and die in about 30 seconds).
What he does next is he forces himself to stick to the good habit (in this case, ignore
what you see outside, or what you think you see outside, or what direction you think your
plane is going, and just go by what the instruments say is going on even if your body
senses are telling you the instruments are wrong -- the second lethal mistake that kills
people in zero visibility situations).
For my friend, he realizes when he is entering in a situation where his colleagues tends to
make mistakes, he knows what mistakes they tend to make, he knows why they tend to
make them, and he knows how they make them... and by recognizing the death spiral
pattern is able to avoid it entirely.
Though getting dinged in an interview is nowhere near as bad is getting killed in a plane
crash, I think the training process pilots use to avoid death is probably a pretty decent
process to avoid get rejected in a case interview.
And that was my motivation behind why I created the Look Over my Shoulder® program
the way that I did.
10 of 16 3/25/2018, 10:14 AM
Becoming More Efficient and Quantitative in Case Interviews https://www.caseinterview.com/efficient-and-quantitative-in-case-interviews
When you do a case live, you have to really think. It takes a lot of energy to do that. The
problem I see in those who are less prepared is that they put their thinking energy into
what's the next step I'm supposed to do in the case from a process standpoint (as
opposed to an insight standpoint).
Those who are prepared automatically know what's next from a process standpoint in the
case, and they can devote their thinking energy to truly analyzing the implications and
insights in the case.
They don't waste their "think" time on the mechanics of asking for a particular kind of data
in a particular way and sequence.
This is the other way you "speed" up processing time, you don't waste time thinking about
process steps that should just be habitual and routine. This takes awareness of what
those habits are and practice.
If you're reading the transcripts and are not using a pen to make notes, observations, and
rewriting the transcripts into a more efficient way to ask questions, you're not using the
program in its most useful way.
If you're passively listening to the recordings and not hitting the pause button every few
minutes to ask yourself, "What did the candidate forget to do? Would I have done it
differently? Was there a more efficient way to get to that answer?"
Afterwards (or even in parallel) you want to practice cases with your friends to get used to
using the new habits under the pressure in a more interactive environment. In particular,
you will want your friend to constantly interrupt your train of thought by asking you
questions about your responses.
Many candidates get a little caught off guard by this, so this is good to practice live when
you have the opportunity.
11 of 16 3/25/2018, 10:14 AM
Becoming More Efficient and Quantitative in Case Interviews https://www.caseinterview.com/efficient-and-quantitative-in-case-interviews
It's also another reason you want as much of the procedural aspects of the case to be
habitual and automatic, so when the interviewer asks you a legitimately interesting
question, you can think about an appropriate answer without losing where you are in the
case.
Additional Resources
If you found this post useful, I suggest becoming a registered member (it's free) to get
access to the materials I used to pass 60 out of 61 case interviews, land 7 job offers, and
end up working at McKinsey.
Members get access to 6 hours of video tutorials on case interviews, the actual
frameworks I used to pass my interviews, and over 500 articles on case interviews.
To get access to these free resources, just fill out the form below:
First Name *
Email *
12 of 16 3/25/2018, 10:14 AM
Becoming More Efficient and Quantitative in Case Interviews https://www.caseinterview.com/efficient-and-quantitative-in-case-interviews
CORPORATE
YOU MUST BE A LEADERS VS.
POLITICS - GOOD OR
DOCTOR... FOLLOWERS
BAD?
Hello:
I am very interested in your website and think it is a fantastic learning tool to prepare for
case interviews. However, I am struggling with your above example about profits being
down by 20%, sales down by 10%, and, therefore, cost being up by 10%. Let’s assume
P=10=R-C=30-20. If profits are down by 20%, then P=8, Revenue down by 10%, then
R=27. But that doesn’t mean that C is 22. P=8=27-C, C=19. What am I missing?
Thanks.
Dan
You’re correct. There’s an error in my example. If you replace the % symbol with the $
symbol, the example should work out. This is what I intended, but I wrote the example
incorrectly.
Victor
13 of 16 3/25/2018, 10:14 AM
Becoming More Efficient and Quantitative in Case Interviews https://www.caseinterview.com/efficient-and-quantitative-in-case-interviews
Leave a Comment
Name *
Email *
Website
Comment
Search for:
Categories
McKinsey
14 of 16 3/25/2018, 10:14 AM
Becoming More Efficient and Quantitative in Case Interviews https://www.caseinterview.com/efficient-and-quantitative-in-case-interviews
Bain
BCG
Internship Interview
Applicant Type
Consulting
Career Success
Success in Life
Recent Posts
How to Be Insightful
Report an Offer
15 of 16 3/25/2018, 10:14 AM
Becoming More Efficient and Quantitative in Case Interviews https://www.caseinterview.com/efficient-and-quantitative-in-case-interviews
Any content sent to CaseInterview.com, including all comments, messages, and contest entries
become the property of Fast Forward Media, Inc. and can be used as needed.
16 of 16 3/25/2018, 10:14 AM