How to Prepare for Consulting Recruiting?

Hi All -

Up until recently, I was set on Investment Banking, but more recently I have been interested in entering management consulting. This summer I will be interning at a large A&D firm in the strategic planning group and have some other internships under the belt at a very small IB (no financial analysis) and Corporate Development (M&A).

Currently the Big 4 do recruit at my school, but mainly for BTA (Business Technology Analysts) and Audit/Accounting positions and not Management Consulting/Strategy & Operations groups. As I am not familiar with Consulting recruiting (due to focusing my entire time on IB), does anyone have any advice on how I can best position myself for next year's summer internships with MBB or Boutiques? I just finished my sophomore year and have a cumulative GPA of 3.8 if that's of any relevance..

Thanks in advance!

3 Comments
 
Best Response

Having gone through both IB recruiting and consulting recruiting, I haven't found the two processes to be exceedingly different. For both industries, internship recruiting begins in the very early fall of junior year. If you go to a target school, just submit a decent resume (yours sounds fine), and you're probably set to receive interviews. If you go to a semi-target or non-target, additional networking may be necessary.

As far as I can think of, there are two main differences between IB and consulting recruiting:

  • Consulting firms do case interviews. The average person requires about 40-50 live case interview practices to get really really good at the case interview process, and that can take over 100 hours. So if you're set on consulting, you'll definitely want to practice these case interviews over the course of your summer internship, before actual recruiting begins. Don't push this off until the last second.
  • Full-time recruiting for IB is virtually nonexistent, but full-time recruiting for consulting is still alive and well. So if you don't succeed during the junior recruiting season, you can always try again.
 

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