Overview

Many companies are moving toward case

interviewing as a test of functional skills.

Behavioral Case

•Marketing •Consulting •Consulting

•General corporate •Marketing •Marketing
•Companies that tend to •I-banking •I-banking
have a less-sophisticated
recruiting processes

Note that even in consulting, you will almost always

have at least one “fit” or behavioral interview 1
 Key Interview Skills
Consulting tends to be different because of the
heavy emphasis on case and analytic skills.

Keys to Case Interviewing Success:

•Structure driven (not any specific structure—just show
you can organize your thinking—lay out your approach)
•Analytic nature (can you handle the numbers?)
•Key business insights (do you know anything about
general businesses?)
•Ability to 80/20 (don’t ramble—get to the most
leveraged areas—fast)

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 Consulting
The goal of a case interview is to have a business
CONVERSATION with the firm.

Possible Interviewer Styles: Only ONE Response:

•Question-driven Have an intelligent business
conversation & follow their
•Open-ended approach
lead
•Seeking a specific answer
•Hostile (VERY rare)

Whether the firm specializes in strategy or operations, they are trying to

assess your ability to converse intelligently in front of the client. You are the
firm’s only asset—they want to invest wisely.

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 Bucket Problems
The first basic step in any case interview is to break
apart the problem “horizontally”.

Problem: A company’s revenues have been

declining…why?

Revenues Costs

This is basically a logic tree…

The key is to make this first pass “MECE” or
“Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive”

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 Drill Down
Once you’re satisfied you’ve listed all of the MECE
buckets, you then “drill down” to find root causes.

Problem: A company’s revenues have been

declining…why?

Revenues Costs

Price Volume Mix Fixed Variable

•Price falling? •Volume down? •Shift to less •Rent too high? •Labor costs up?
profitable lines?

The key is to figure out what is driving the problem

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 Drill Down
Frameworks often overlap--say, for example, you
know that prices have been falling...

Revenues Costs

Price Volume Mix Fixed Variable

•Prices ARE falling...

Use Porter’s to find out why prices are falling...

•Industry rivalry
•Buyers
•Suppliers What is driving
•Substitutes price decline?
•Threats of new entrants
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 An Example
In general, horizontal-then-vertical attacks work on
most problems. A random example.

Problem: I got a speeding ticket…why?

I was speeding I was NOT speeding

The officer’s Cop does not My stupid The officer is

radar gun is know how to speedometer misinformed re:
Game Over broken use radar gun is broken speed limit

Once you hit on the key bucket, you can investigate

further to get at root causes and suggested fixes.
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 Problem Review
Overall, you pull a problem apart into buckets and find
MECE sub-assertions from which to further drill down.

Separate a problem horizontally

Then “drill down” into relevant areas

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 Frameworks
Classic frameworks provide a generic structure for
you to think about business problems.

•Revenue-Cost model
•Three C’s / Four P’s
•Porter’s Five Forces
•Classic ways to enter a new market
•Value Chain

They should not be memorized—it will make your

thinking sound artificial.

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 Tips
You need to practice—this will determine most of
your success.

Tips:
•Order wetfeet press (wetfeet.com), vault reports
(vaultreports.com), and HBS industry/company reviews and do
some background reading
•Get a few partners, rotate giving each other cases well before
the holiday break—be disciplined
•Get a sense for what type of work a firm does (ops vs. strategy)
—this will often determine your case type
•Know what makes firms different from one another—they
expect you to know
•Do NOT forget about behavioral—do Reinheimer’s matrix
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