Case Interview Workshop Introduction 1/12

I’m going to try to demystify a lot of stuff.

I think the more you know, the less intimidating it is. Being scared it is not necessary.
Big part is familiarity another par is sort of skills.
My goal for today is a couple of things: I would like to give you familiarity with the process (case interview process), and I would like to give you a couple key skills that will get you
through the first half of the case interview.
I always think of the first half as skill driven, teachable, and the last half is sort of like your talent.

So, the opening of the case is very formulaic,

Getting into the case, the first 10-15 minutes or so, is very formulaic,
Ending the case, very formulaic.
Last sot of the middle 20-30%, that’s where sort of the business judgment, acumen, analytical insights, sort of raw horsepower mentally as well as experience really comes into
play. And that´s talent.
My job is to make sure you get through beginning, the middle, and the end, and your talent is really left to shine on your own and we could sort of get rid of the rest of the stuff.
My other goal for today too, is to give you confidence, like I mentioned earlier, I was very scared of going through the process. I did fairly well.

I’m going to talk a lot about the interviewer mindset, get into the psychology of why they do the things they do. And if you understand what they’re thinking, it is a lot easier to
impress them. It’s sort of like the number one skill for a marketer, if you know your customer extremely well, it’s a lot easier to sell to them. Same thing with interviews, If you
know how the think, and by the way they’re very predictable and someone would argue even a little boring. SO once you understand that and how the firms think, everything
makes sense, all the new twists they’re doing, I know there’s some new twists in terms of case interviews like group format, and half solve cases you have to finish, and all kinds of
things like that. Once you understand the mentality it makes sense and if ever do new things in the future it will likely make sense too.

The other thing we are going to do is, I’m going to go into very specific processes in terms of how to tackle very specific cases, certainly the high level conceptual, but I want to drill
down to what questions you ask, in which order, depending on what the answer to the previous question was, you can’t do for the whole case. I said the first chunk of the case is
fairly formulaic, until you start getting date back. The other thing that’s important to keep in mind is particular since most of you guys are from Harvard, the case interview and a
HBS case is very different, right?

In a case interview you only get a piece of paper and maybe a sentence.
You need in a case interview to have a process for eliciting data from your interviewer, right? SO, that’s the skill and then towards the end when you flush out all the data.