Associate Consultant

The on campus recruiting process is pretty standard and starts pretty much a soon as fall semester begins. It starts off with the recruiter and recruiting team (composed primarily of alums from your school working at the firm) coming onto campus and giving a presentation followed by a networking session.

After that, you apply through their website and a pretty large group of you is picked for on campus interviews that were held about two weeks later at my school. I would say there were about 40 people selected for first round interviews at my school (and about 10 of us moved on to the final round with three getting offers). First round interviews consisted of two 30-45 minute long cases. One of mine pretty much solely consisted of a market sizing question, while the other focused on an expansion strategy for a consumer goods company. Honestly, neither was particularly intense and both were interviewer led (as opposed to being driven by me).

After that, I got a phone call the next day saying I did a great job and telling me I was moving on to the final round of interviews. The recruiter talked to me about my office preferences, and since I already had an offer from another MBB, I was pretty firm on the city I wanted to interview in. The recruiter was extremely receptive to my preference and passed me off to that office's recruiter who set me up to fly out to interview the next Friday.

Final round interviews were in the office I was interviewing for and consisted of three 30-45 minute interviews - two case interviews with a principle / partner and one fit interview with a manager. The fit interview was the standard "talk to me about your experiences" and "why consulting" type questions and really felt more like a pleasant chat than an interview. The cases were a little more in depth than the first round and were led more by me. I was really pushed to explain why I was thinking the way I was and got "well what about this" type questions.

After the interview, I didn't hear anything for about 10 days and figured that I was on their wait list. I called the recruiter and left a voicemail and when I didn't hear back sent an email to her and CC'd a principle that I'd gotten to know during the recruiting process. I said that they were my first choice, but that my deadline to respond to my other MBB offer was fast approaching so I was going to need to make a decision by the end of the week. I got a call back from the the principle before the end of the day, explained my situation to him and ended up getting my offer within a half hour of getting off the phone with him. The salary was pretty much identical to the other MBB offer and I accepted right away.