Case interviews are the biggest obstacle on your way to management consultancy. They’re challenging, intimidating, and may ultimately decide your future. The best way to prepare? Go through as many case interview examples as possible.
Practice makes perfect is a saying that wholeheartedly applies to preparing for your case interviews. The key to landing the consulting job of your dreams is to go through more examples than you can count.
Before we get into some interesting case interview examples, you should know why they’re crucial to your success.
Why Are Case Interviews So Important?
Management consulting companies (and a few others, such as certain tech corporations) use case interviews to assess whether the candidate has the necessary skill set to work in the industry.
Case interviews are tests of your analytical thinking, working under pressure, and your organizational skills. These hypothetical business situations will show how well you can structure an issue and get to the root of the problem. Your interviewer will be paying close attention to your thought process.
Analytical thinking, working under pressure, organizational skills, problem-solving — these are all characteristics a consultant should have. That’s why case interviews exist and why your abilities are put to such a difficult test.
If you don’t stand out during the case interview, the odds are you won’t get the job. The fit interview is important as well, but you have to ace the interview if you’re to have any hope of becoming a consultant.
To outperform other candidates, you’ll need to study case interview examples and practice solving them. You can find plenty of examples online. Some are provided by the business schools, while others are courtesy of consulting companies themselves (MBB, the Big Four). Coaching services such as My Consulting Coach often collate the best examples on their websites.
The examples you find are usually grouped into casebooks, but you’ll certainly find plenty of case interview videos as well. Consulting companies offer interactive cases for a hands-on case interview experience.
How Do Case Interview Examples Help?
Going through hundreds of case interview examples is the best preparation you can make for the real deal.
During the interview, you’ll need to show you’re confident and have the necessary consultant toolkit. Don’t think you can feign confidence or experience — interviewers are industry experts and they’ll see right through you.
Instead, build confidence by cracking hundreds of practice cases. Find a partner who’s had at least some professional experience with consulting companies and real case interviews. Their feedback will prove invaluable, and you’ll also have someone to talk to. Your communication skills also need to be up to par if you’re to become a management consultant.
After you go through as many examples as you can, you’ll be better equipped to recognize patterns and solve cases. You’ll also feel secure enough to move away from premade and outdated frameworks and instead customize your approach to each case study.
With enough practice, you’ll be more competent, confident, and experienced when the interview day comes. And you’ll have the necessary communication skills to pass on your ideas.
Examples of Case Interview Questions
Now we’ll present you with some interesting (and common) case interview examples. They can serve as a nice starting point for the upcoming hours of practice that await you.
A. T. Kearney Promotion Planning
A common question that you get on an A. T. Kearney’s interview is about a grocery and drug store chain that’s losing market share to its competitors.
The interviewer will present you with the situation. The company uses a high-low pricing strategy, which means the regular prices are higher than competitors’ but there are significant price reductions at certain times that are supposed to increase sales. When the price cut occurs, the company promotes its products through print and in-store advertising.
However, comparisons show that the client doesn’t experience a high enough increase in sales during this promotional period.
How would you go about increasing sales during the promotional period?
Deloitte Retail Strategy
Deloitte, one of the Big Four, also has a very interesting case question.
In their case interview example, the client is the Club Co. It’s a warehouse club retailer that operates 200 warehouse clubs and has about 10 million members from 15 states. The company’s revenues amounted to $10 billion in the last fiscal year. Club Co. offers twice as many products as other warehouse clubs and keeps the prices as low as possible.
Now Club Co. is trying to prioritize offering mobile phones, accessories, and services to their members. To that end, the company has decided to bring in a third party that will manage the wireless business inside each of the 200 stores the company owns.
The third-party will be in charge of its staff and dealing with the wireless carriers. The company and the third party have a choice to make: offering one wireless carrier’s products and services or offering service of three different carriers.
Assess each option and determine how lucrative each would be.
McKinsey Diconsa Case
McKinsey has been collaborating with the Gates Foundation, trying to help remote rural communities in Mexico.
Most of the folk living in these rural areas are relatively poor, relying on government benefits for their livelihood. Since they usually don’t have bank accounts, they have to get money in cash from state-bank branches. The banks are far away, requiring quite a bit of time and money to reach. It’s also a dangerous route sometimes, given how rife the crime is in these areas.
The Mexican Government owns Diconsas, small stores that provide food, clothes, and other basic goods to the rural population. There are about 22,000 of them. Supplies arrive via a network of warehouses and several thousand delivery trucks.
The question is: would it be possible for the Diconsa network to provide basic financial services to the inhabitants of rural areas? The offering should include just the government benefits, to begin with, but slowly expanded to include opening savings accounts, paying bills and insurance, and getting credit.
In the End
If you enjoyed reading the cases above, there’s more where that came from. Those were just a couple of individual consultancy case examples, but you can also find many university casebooks and videos, case interview guides, and firm casebooks online. You’re one search away from a treasure trove of case questions.
Try and read through a couple of case interviews and their solutions before you find a practice partner. When you feel like you’re ready to start cracking cases, know that there are thousands of them all over the internet. The more you go through, the better you’ll perform when the time comes. You’ll be a real management consultant in no time.
