Organized brain dump for consulting recruitment
**sorta organized
<1%. That is the acceptance rate of McKinsey, BCG, and Bain (MBB). Quite silly.
Like any brand, exclusivity multiplies its value.
Joining that oh so silly 1% is not the right decision for all people.
But if you think a job with extreme learning potential, good comp, near-zero work life balance Monday through Thursday, ton of travel, occasionally hard-to-derive-meaning-from projects, really smart and skilled coworkers, and a resume stamp more powerful than an MBA is a good way to kick off your 20s…this should help.
This is a brain dump, so I can share everything I know with 2 clicks when people message me for support.
Framework time:
A beautiful resume that’ll impress within the 11 seconds of human attention it receives
Case interview competence that makes an interviewer think you can be placed in front of a client and effectively drive problem-solving
A behavioral interview that has you seeming “storied,” empathetic, and smart
Master these three things and big firm you shall join young corpo aspiree.
Feel free to skip to what you need help with.
1. Resume
I have not been a part of a resume review cycle but from my understanding, physical humans who are related to the region you apply for and/or the school you are applying from will review.
The firm likely has an employee who attended your university responsible for reviewing your app.
If you do not mind working in the nearest office to your university, have at least one of your office preferences (usually you get to list 3) be that nearest office.
You might be exempt if you come from Harvard or Penn. Otherwise, an office is much more likely to take you on if you come from a school within the region, e.g., Bain Atlanta is more likely to take an applicant from University of Georgia than Bain LA (which is more likely to take someone from UCLA).
You have already lost if you:
have a two-page resume,
extreme white space
do not have a PDF (& sometimes Word) version for submission,
or you chose to freeball it and not fit a reasonable template.
No need for creativity. For corpo roles, sometimes standardization and less creativity is better as it’ll be easier for a reader to scan.
Feel free to use my resume as a template (linked at the bottom).
Cheap activities to improve your resume a lot:
Lead every bullet with a verb
Make yourself sound as badass as possible…be honest but extremely generous to yourself on the magnitude of your contributions
QUANTIFY your impact (e.g., catalyzed production process by 50% through XYZ actions)
No need to literally measure the percent “catalyzation.” If you feel like you improved something, slap a reasonable, thoughtful estimate of how much.
Have interests at the bottom!! Say 8 things you like (e.g., Forrest Gump, violin, surfing, etc.) in a bullet and it could help you overcome being just another one of the 200k people with a college degree who apply to these firms.
Those simple tips will improve your resume by 76% 😉
You do not need crazy work experience on the resume. Nor do you need consulting experience, as you’ll see in my resume at the bottom.
The clubs you joined in college matter less than what you’ve done outside of college. A premium is placed on leadership experience even if its at a micro scale—weave in a leadership experience somewhere.
Crucially, your resume should tell a story. You need to make sense to someone scanning it.
Jake Santaniello landed BCG without a single internship on the resume. But the entrepreneurial story his resume told “made sense.”
If you want more info on how he made that happen, listen to minute 29 of this episode
2. Case Interview
You do not need to case 1000 times. You do not need to case 100 times. Hell, you might not even need to case 10 times.
I am going to assume you know what a case interview is, but if you don’t,
has some awesome examples. At the bottom of this article, I attached one.The keys with casing are:
HAVE EXCELLENT PEOPLE CASE YOU (try to find someone who worked at a firm to do 1-2 interviews with you)
Your peers may not be honest with you about what sucks, especially how boring or awkward you might be to case
BE FUN TO CASE
Record every case interview you do and watch yourself fumble and triumph. Ask yourself, “Do I look fun to case?”
When other people case you, tell them you are working on your charisma. Be absurdly excited when they share painful truths, so they are reinforced to share more harsh truths.
FAMILIARIZE YOURSELF WITH THE MACRO QUESTIONS/CASE TYPES (profitability, M&A, etc.)
In the resource section at the end, I included my hella disorganized cheat sheet that condensed my learnings during my case practice
GET COMFY WITH MENTAL MATH
Out to dinner, calculate the tip. Practice a silly amount. And remember the shortcuts of rounding things to the nearest 5 or 10. Ask chat GPT for other short cut ideas so I don’t have to spend half this blog on this but for example:
If someone asked me 167,000 X 28% and they were okay with a rounded answer (if they weren’t, I’d do it on paper), I would round 28 to 25. I know when I multiply something by 25%, it is 1/4. What is 1/4 of 167,000? Well, 1/4 of 160 is 40. Add a few thousand since you rounded down twice and confidently state 45k (its ~47k). Writing this took me 10 seconds, and if I was in a case interview, I WOULD SAY THIS ALL OUT LOUD AND IMPRESS MY CASE INTERVIEWER WITH HOW I CAME TO MY ANSWER…getting to my next point…
DO NOT BE A BLACK BOX with your answers.
Think of the case interview as a collaborative business conversation, not an exam. THINK OUT LOUD
Story time
My final round interviews were just that: business conversations. One of my interviewers asked me about the current case he was working on. He gave me zero time to framework. I wrote maybe 20 words on my piece of paper, but once we started going, it was off to the races.
Your case will likely not be like that, but I believe that if you could succeed with that type of case, you can easily succeed if given time to think and structure.
You lucky bastards have chat GPT to help you prep. Use it.
If you do not understand a case question, throw it into chat. Ask chat to help you brainstorm frameworks. Chat GPT would absolutely pass the case-interview Turin test.
Have it build cases for you…I included a prompt at the bottom of this section!!
Optimal casing calendar
There is none…Jake did like 5 cases in 7 days. I probably did 30 over the course of 2 months. Edward Collinson (Bain) did 100+ over the course of a year.
But if I had to recommend a strategy, assuming you have a month before your interview and you have never cased before, I would fail fast.
Yes, watch a case or two online, but do a live case (it is okay if with mom or a peer) as soon as possible. You need to feel what it feels like to problem-solve verbally and live.
Here is a more organized calendar:
Week 1 (Crashcourse):
Watch 3-5 case tutorials (Matt Huang is a great start)
Read Case-in-Point or Hacking the Case Interview (the book I read that took 2 hours to read)
Do your first case (case book link in my cheat sheet at the end)
Week 2 (Fundamentals):
Record yourself doing 3-5 diverse easy to medium cases
With each case, give as much time to reflection as to the actual case. What did you do well? Poorly?
To end the week, have a case scheduled with an awesome interviewer who can provide very critical feedback
Week 3 (Build):
Start the week with a hard difficulty case and feel the fire under your arse
Study that case. Ask yourself, how could this have not been a trainwreck? How could I have asked more questions or done the math quicker?
Do 2-3 easy to medium difficulty cases in that week, implementing your feedback from the hard one
To end the week, have a case scheduled with an awesome interviewer who can provide very critical feedback
Week 4 (Taper):
You know what the heck a case is
Every one of my weird cheat sheet notes resonates from the ugly excel resource attached
You have worked out your awkwardness and you smile when you deliver conclusions / have a flavor of personality to your answers
You are excited when you hear “acquire a company” or “boost profitability” because you have frameworks loaded that can be tailored to the case
If one of these bullets is not true, make it so it is. Case til it is.
CHAT GPT CASE INTERVIEW PROMPT
Act as a BCG-style case interviewer conducting a medium-difficulty consulting interview. The case should include a realistic business scenario with all standard components: a clear client background, a defined objective, relevant exhibits or data, and opportunities for candidate-led exploration. The case should test skills in market sizing, profitability analysis, qualitative reasoning, and creative problem solving.
Do not provide answers, calculations, or summaries unless I ask for feedback or say my answer out loud — treat this as if you're a real case interviewer waiting for the candidate to respond. Begin the case with the prompt and let me drive the conversation step by step, just like in a live case.
3. Behavioral interview
To be interesting typically means to be interested. Stalk your interviewers if given their names and have tailored questions for them.
Have a cool story. Most people at my firm are not the hardo finance bros. They are the Princeton astrophysics major who figured they could make some money when they exited college before they authored books. They are the Stanford musician, the UChicago chemical engineer, the Berkeley environmental science grad, the UCLA philosophy major ;)
Most people at consulting firms did not know what consulting was at 19, no need to act like this is your life’s calling but explain how it supports your life’s calling
Seem curious and like you love challenging problems and love collaboration even more
My most recent manager used to be a general surgeon and pivoted…another manager was to be a mathematician but got tired of academia. I can only speak for my firm, but diverse interests is deeply appreciated.
These firms know that one of the ways they keep top talent is by having really fun to work with people who are very emotionally intelligent. DO NOT BE A BOT.
Okay brain dump over. Apologies for where I was far from eloquent…but as Mark Twain said,
"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."
All resources I mentioned are below but…
If this was helpful at all, all I ask is that you share it with a friend who it might also help. Trying hard to provide resources I wish I had when I was younger.
RESOURCES
My cheat sheet — screenshot it and throw it into chat GPT if this format blows, but you could use this template to track your cases and add notes. I promise 6 months of BCG has me eating spreadsheets alive, unlike this. These are not all the cases I did, I was too lazy to update the LHS of the sheet
My resume when I applied
My cover letter in case its helpful. I mention people I networked with in the letter. None gave a referral, but I think its good to show you have done due dilligence in learning about the company and name drop if you can.
Episode with Edward Collinson (Bainee who was the first Cal Poly undergrad to make it to MBB straight out of undergrad). Tried for the internship and missed, then went all in.
Matt Huang killing the game
Deep dive on this subject—most of the intel is in this article, but a subscribe means the world :)
Dude this is super cool! Especially loved the behavioral interview bit and would be excited to hear more— I feel like(and this could be because I haven’t done much research into this bit) trying to seem interesting/do well in behavioral interviews isn’t taught enough.
Great post! As someone who is just starting to learn about consulting, this was perfect!