In The Consulting Offer watch former McKinsey et al senior partners mentor real candidates into the most elite consulting firms. Across 4 seasons, the program has never failed to place a participant.
Rafik is a 28 year old HEC Paris MBA candidate from North Africa. He is also an experienced-hire. His journey and path into business in Paris was both interesting and challenging. We selected him due to the scope of the challenges he would face in the program. Given the recession and painful economic restructuring in France, employment prospects were bleak at best, and particularly challenging for foreigners.
Rafik’s development areas had little to do with cases. All of the challenges he experienced came down to his preparation before the sessions – in other words, it came down to time and self-management. They were either done inadequately or not done at all. If he could have managed the time between sessions better, he could have been a break-out candidate. Rafik could have conceivably been in the final 2 candidates if he had prepared better.
Advantages: A resilient candidate with a good background: very pleasant person who is keen to take feedback.
Opportunities: Internalizing and acting on feedback
This video provides an overview of TCO content on our sister-site Firmsconsulting.com.
All the video content is the same though some functions like the quizzes and daily candidate activity logs can only be found on Firmsconsulting.com
Session 1: Calibration Call and Resume
Although we use the name Samantha below, Felix, Sanjeev and Rafik went through the same program.
In her first session, a 60 minute calibration session, Samantha is provided no warning about what to expect. We want to see how she really thinks, especial...
Session 2: Starting to Rewrite the Resume
A coach needs to know his/her student. That is why we start with the resume. By asking careful questions about every part of the resume, and we mean every part, not only can we write the resume to build the profile we want to create of the candidate, b...
Session 3: More work on the Resume & Office Strategy
Samantha has now translated her resume into an understandable, quantitative and elegant format. It reads in a crisp and straightforward way which anyone will understand, especially those who have no experience in her background, and into an ...
Session 4: More work on the Resume and the Cover Letter
Now that we know Samantha remarkably well through the process of extensively rewriting her resume, we will have her update her LinkedIn profile and begin her cover letter. Although we prefer to complete the cover letter before beginning t...
Session 5: Estimation Questions
You cannot pass a McKinsey, BCG or Bain case unless you can brainstorm. Although, you may never receive an isolated/explicit brainstorming case, the skill is needed to identify drivers and build out an analyses structure, without the need to memorize frameworks....
Session 6: Brainstorming
This is easily the most important session of the training.
Building off the estimation approach, we now move to brainstorming. You should think of brainstorming as an equation from the estimation cases, but an equation with more than one branch. Like an equation wit...
In this crucial session, we teach Rafik just a few steps to improve his performance. In the next session viewers will see a dramatic improvement in Rafik's performance just by following the simple guidelines presented here.
Session 7: Profitability Cases – BCG Approach
In each training session, from this day onward, we will do a brainstorming case, estimation case and full case.
It is vital to layer case difficulty.
Why would this be an important teaching strategy? If we gave the candidate a complex deregul...
Session 8: Volume Cases
Samantha must now be able to handle all types of simple estimation cases and all types of brainstorming cases. The technique she has learnt for full cases can also be applied across all types of full BCG-type cases, and we want to see her do just this.
We want to see...
Session 9: Debrief
No matter how many times we implore a candidate to ask questions or to simply ask for advice, being under pressure to learn as much as possible, they struggle to do this in the coaching sessions. To rectify this we regularly set up debriefing sessions which have no agenda.
...
Session 10: Communication Fundamentals
In this session, we deliberately use incendiary questions to see how candidates respond to racial, gender, ethnic, political etc. discrimination.
By this stage of the coaching Samantha would have clearly seen that effective communication leads to bette...
Session 11: Realistic Estimation Cases & Data Cases
Here we teach candidates how to solve demand-driven estimation cases from the supply-side, when the demand approach is too difficult to use, and vice versa, as well as estimations for enclosed spaces, for small spaces, multiple equations etc....
Session 12: Market Entry Cases & Strategy Cases
When teaching market entry cases, we keep Bain in mind, since their approach, heavily influenced by their PE work, is the most comprehensive and realistic for acquisitions to enter a new market. The approach we teach here can be used to tackle an...
Session 13: Operations Cases, Pivoting to the McKinsey Approach, Mid-Point Feedback & Unstructured/trend cases
All cases done from this session onward to the end are done in the McKinsey-approach and the answer-first approach. This is a tough session which builds on the techniques taught earli...
