A case interview is a job interview which focuses on assessing an applicant's business skills via solving a case study. These are based on real business problems, rather than being academic exercises.
The average candidate approaches case interviews using old-fashioned frameworks. This is not a strategy for success.
Interviewers are looking for candidates that think like consultants, rather than those who simply apply frameworks without thinking at all:
The MyConsultingCoach approach replicates how top consultants approach real engagements. The key is decoupling problem-solving skills, fundamental business concepts and analysis tools. This modular system is adaptable enough to apply to any case.
Problem Solving
Our Problem Driven Approach breaks case cracking into four steps. Each of these is discussed in a future video.
A brief overview:
Identify the Problem
Identifying the client's specific problem is sometimes very easy, but is often highly difficult. To hope to solve the case, you need to identify the correct problem at the beginning.
Build Your Problem Driven Structure
Once you have understood the problem, you can move on to break it down by building a Problem Driven Structure. This lets you understand the problem's drivers and how you might solve it. Each new Problem Driven Structure is custom-tailored to the problem in hand.
Problems are structured using Issue Trees. Here is an example:
A valid issue tree must meet certain requirements. These are discussed in more detail later in the course.
Lead the Analysis
Here you navigate your structure to identify key issues, further segmenting end nodes as required. Finally, you can move on to generate solutions for the relevant end node.
Provide Recommendations
You need to provide a concise, top-down recommendation to solve the client's problem. Our later video on consulting thinking is relevant here as well as the lesson on providing recommendations itself.
Business Concepts
Our building blocks allow you to take advantage of recurring themes across different cases.
Building blocks are not frameworks. They are modular components to be employed as parts of your structures only. You cannot apply them blindly to a whole case.
We teach five key building blocks:
- Estimates
- Profitability
- Pricing
- Valuation
- Competitive Interaction
We discuss each in greater detail in subsequent videos
Analysis Tools
You will need to work very quickly to get through cases. Working consultants also use rapid calculations to impress clients.
For example:
The MCC Approach
As opposed to overly-rigid frameworks, our approach is flexible and works for all case types and all interview formats.
Case Objectives
Interviewer Stances
First vs Second Round
The video works through an example case where a standard framework can be applied, but fails to generate a definitive answer to the question. By contrast, our four-step, problem driven approach can be relied upon to quickly and efficiently move towards a solution.
The video also works through a case where no framework can be applied. Any candidate relying wholly on frameworks would be stumped and fail. Our method works in just the same way for these cases, addressing every case on its own merits.
The takeaway
Fundamentally, MCC approaches interview prep the right way:
