As fall recruiting season is on the horizon, it’s inevitably a busy time for many students looking to recruit into consulting. On top of regular life commitments, you also must spend time on preparing applications, practicing for interviews, and partaking in the interviews themselves. With such a busy schedule, it can be tough to find a partner to practice cases with. Despite this, there are plenty of things you can still be doing, independent of a partner being available.
Although the following 4 tips are not a substitute for practicing with a partner, they can help you to improve your skills and stay sharp, in preparation for the next time you do cases with a partner.
1. Conduct targeted practice through drills
You are probably familiar with the advice that you should do intense directed preparation for case interviews, but the suggestion is worth repeating.
The idea is simple:
- Identify aspects of the case interview that you are weak on (e.g. mental math, analyzing exhibits)
- Practice them in isolation
- Integrate your enhanced skills back into your overall casing
This approach is similar to that taken by athletes. For example, if a basketball player identifies that they are weak on shooting three-pointers from the left side of the court, their practices will consist of taking those same shots until they have improved and can replicate them in the game.
The benefit to isolated practice is that you can focus on making improvements to one specific area without the distraction of the entire case. For example, by running math drills, you won’t have an unfamiliar case and general casing nerves impeding your ability to make calculations. Rather, you can focus on practicing certain techniques to perform calculations. Then, once you’ve gained some confidence, you can put your practice to the test in the overall case.
There are plenty of great resources that can help you practice. One that I’ve personally used is RocketBlocks, as their entire platform is based around this focused practice concept. Some other good resources include Victor Cheng’s mental math tool and CraftingCases’s free course.
2. Make use of interviewer-led cases
In addition to the great resources for conducting targeted practice mentioned above, you should also take a look at the cases themselves, specifically the interviewer led ones. This was something I particularly made use of. I prepped some interviewer led cases with a partner, and also used those cases for solo practice.
There are two ways you can use interviewer-led cases for solo prep. The first is to use them for targeted practice. For example, if you want to practice analyzing charts, then read the prompt of a case, go to the section that introduces the chart, analyze it by yourself with a timer, and then compare your own insights to the suggested response. The second method is an extended version of targeted practice, which involves doing the entire case with a timer. Although this won’t replace the environment of an actual interview, it can serve to sharpen your skillset.
3. Read the news
Reading the news is a great way to keep up to date with the business world while also providing you with realistic scenarios that contain business problems you can examine as a thought exercise. By understanding the latest trends, you’ll gain diverse viewpoints on topical issues that you can incorporate into your case recommendations.
Although cases aren’t as complex as real-life scenarios, being able to mention relevant issues can show your overall level of business aptitude. An example of when this can be leveraged is during brainstorming, either at the beginning when approaching the problem, or at the end if given a prompt such as “do you have any other items the client should consider?”. For example, if you happen to have a case revolving around car insurance, it may be worthwhile mentioning the rise of self-driving cars as an emerging trend, and the opportunities and complications this poses for the automotive insurance industry.
Even if the news you read isn’t directly relevant for the cases you get, it can be worthwhile simply reading and thinking through actions companies have taken. For example, if a company just announced a recent wave of layoffs, a good thought exercise could be to evaluate what factors led to that decision. This line of thinking can greatly improve your business sense, making tackling cases far more intuitive.
If the firm you are applying to serves a niche market or specialized area, reading the news is particularly important in order to improve your depth of knowledge of the industry. For example, if you’re applying to a firm that does work exclusively for oil and gas companies, it’s in your best interests to know about the issues which are making the latest headlines.
4. Practice behaviourals
In addition to practicing cases, don’t forget to focus on behavioral questions. These are often overlooked during the preparation process, especially with the attention given to cases. Yet, they are an incredibly important part of the consulting interview that allow you to highlight your strengths, showcase your experience, and demonstrate your fit with the firm.
Don’t take behaviourals lightly and attempt to wing it, but rather dedicate ample time to prep. The advantage you have, when it comes to behavioral questions, is that they generally have a greater degree of predictability compared with case questions. Hence, if you do ample practice, you should have a high degree of confidence in answering the questions that come up. Even if you don’t get the exact questions you were expecting, the general approach of going through your experiences and identifying stories you want to tell means you’ll be well prepped to give crisp answers that the interviewer can easily follow. In developing your stories, be mindful that the way you tell your stories can be more important than the specific details. You can adopt a clear structure by using the STAR method: situation, task, action, result.
Concluding thoughts
Not having a case prep partner shouldn’t deter you from case prepping. There are a range of ways that you can maximize your alone time in order to hone your skills, until you are able to find somebody to case with. This includes conducting targeted practice, making use of interviewer led cases, reading the news, and developing some go-to stories to ace behaviorals.
I hope this article gave you some useful ideas that you can use to improve your case prep routine ahead of the fall recruiting cycle. I wish you the best of luck!
Jawad Khandoker is a recent graduate from the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University, where he completed both a BMath and BBA degree. He recently joined Monitor Deloitte as a consultant. Outside of his professional interests, Jawad enjoys playing and watching sports, and playing flight simulators.
Image: Unsplash
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