Today we have Mr. Indresh Kryalos with us who has recently interviewed for the Boston consulting group. So Indresh, can you tell us about the general interview process of the company that you have interviewed for?
Hello everyone. Most consulting companies arrive off-campus so it’s not a much-standardised process. But it primarily involves three rounds, the first is shortlisting of CV. Second is a phone interview or a preliminary interview of sort listed candidates. It’s done over call or skype consisting of two to three interviews with different people. Final shortlisted candidates are interviewed over video call or are asked to flyover to Bombay office for a partner round, a partner is the senior member of the firm.
Is there any CG criteria that these companies follow during CV shortlisting?
If you have a CG below 8 it becomes difficult to get shortlisted in the companies I interviewed. However, there are a lot of consultancy firms coming on campus like Auctus Advisors, A D associates and there consultant role is similar to product manager role up to some extent. For each of the company you can’t say that the CG matrix are the judges, however, there is definitely a function of POR and Projects.
That’s a good insight for beginners. Moving on, can you mention the questions you felt were similar and students must prepare for them?
For the case interviews round, you are given a problem statement, you and the interviewer have to work through it together so you end up asking questions and gathering more relevant information out of interviewer and the interviewer job is to guide you to the final answer without being very simple about it. This is a major part of your preparation for the consultant job role. Apart from that you have HR round in which the questions will be from your CV so be well versed with your CV. General questions are, “Tell us something about yourself”, “Why consultancy and not something else”, “Why this company” along with some case question from your CV.
I hope students do look into the questions mentioned. You have mentioned about case groups. Why do you think a student preparing for Consultancy must form this case groups?
Case groups are quite important in initial part of your preparation, the thing with case preparation is that if you read a case you waste it because you haven’t put any thought behind it, you haven’t put any work in getting to the answer. You don’t have a reliable person who is also preparing, who will ask you the case who will guide you through the case but in the team of four people usually, one person read the case and does it with another person and now two people who know the case they do it with the remaining two so now it’s more optimised. In a case group of four people you end up wasting 25% cases. So four people is a good number for a case group.
That’s a good insight for case group. Moving on, where there any puzzle or technical questions asked during the interview?
No, there are no technical questions for testing your problem-solving capability. However, let’s say if you have a prior internship in finance and your interviewer is also well versed in finance he may ask you questions that may be relevant to your internship or you should know for internship in finance. There are no technical questions as such for which you have to prepare. The case is more and the HR part is important.
Moving on, after qualifying for the case round, what were the changes in preparation changes you made for HR round?
The process essentially shifted from preparatory interview with your case group to mock interview with other people, you may not be as comfortable with like other case groups, recent graduates or even KGP alumni who are in senior position in those firms. It puts you in sort of stress environment and that is a big part of cracking the consultancy interview. Relax no matter who the interviewer is and you will be able to solve the case much better and be able to answer HR question as well.
What preparation should the students who are looking forward to getting placement in consulting firms start from now?
Now is not really the time to worry about case interviews or consultancy interviews in general. Right now the best things students can do is make a CV for this consultancy interview and apart from that I don’t think now is a good time to begin preparation. Being in lockdown the dynamics of internship are slightly changed, so you should still look to explore more about other sectors say finance, data analytics and coding whatever fancies you have. Two-three months are enough time for preparation in consulting firms. Once you usually return to the campus, you should start preparing. If you start preparing before I feel you may end up losing momentum or run out of cases. So this is not advised with my experience. If they want to do something, start making your CV.
I hope student do follow up with your advice. So, what resources did you followed during the preparation?
There is Day 1.0 by IIT madras campus and case interview crack book by IIT Bombay. These are two primary resources that most people are using. There are lot of case questions if you get out and search but lot of those case questions are for IIMs interview so people who are interviewing from IIM, it is more relevant to them. Apart from these, there are actually not very resources available. There are few PDFs out there with guesstimate questions that you will get. For case interviews sake these two are the only books I practice with.
What suggestion you might give to a second-year student looking forward to placement in consulting firms?
The answer to this question for me is in two parts, so the first is as a second year you have a lot of opportunity on campus. To be fairly good at consulting interview, it requires just a window of two months or so. If you are a second-year you should not direct yourself to go to a consultancy firm. There are ample of opportunities for an IITian and you should explore those. And if you do not like any other field at the end of the day I think then you should look into consultancy because consultancy field in general offers you a lot of exposure to different fields so it is a gateway field essentially whereas a consultant I may be working on fishery or a social cause. If it doesn’t get narrow down over your 2nd, 3rd or 4th year then you should perceive that consultancy is a good option. Secondly, I did not do anything that was specifically oriented towards consulting. I just did what I enjoy. I explored my department for 2 years, did projects that are relevant to my department, internship and I was involved in dramatics as well as sports. So that worked out for me by giving me a holistic serious epiphany which has a lot of distinctive points. It’s a unique field. Now as I fifth year I have secured a job and when I look back into things I have done in my 2nd, 3rd, 4th year, I would not be able to do it with career orientation in mind. It did help me somewhere down the line. I would just say that explore what all opportunities IIT KGP have to give to you and do what you like.
Thank you for your time Indresh. I hope the KGP community has got to learn a lot from you.
Thank you