How to get a Job at McKinsey, BCG, and Bain (and why I quit!)

one of my craziest stories from Consulting was when I was working on a real estate Expansion Project for a $500 million retail company basically the company just wanted to know where to expand their stores how much they should pay for it and their long-term real estate strategy and in Consulting you will hear the word strategy thrown away all the time it's basically a consultant's favorite buzzword basically my job in the project was to create a model that can take a lot of inputs about the market how much we're paying for the project and other types

of information and then it run through the model to basically say whether or not this is a good deal or a bad deal and now while this sounds super cool and this is probably the fun part this was only 20% of the project the crazy part was the other 80% in the middle of the project the client essentially wanted to consider International expansion not just like United States expansion so they started sending me lease documents and other real estate documents in German Spanish Arabic Hindi Mandarin all the different types of languages and these documents were

basically like scanned PDF documents that were just like not easily digestible and I couldn't just like take and copy paste it and put into Google translate so I literally had to read these documents and try to like decipher what some of the words might mean and try to figure out what the purchase price is what the interest rates are just from those documents anyways I ended up staying up to 3:00 a.m. almost most of the night I ended up like taking two to 3 weeks to try to figure this piece out going through hundreds and

hundreds of pages but anyways the project was super successful at the end and I did not realize that Consultants were basically glorified readers in different languages so if you want to be a good consultant all you need to do is just know how to read lease documents in multiple languages I'm just kidding but seriously though I think Consulting is one of the best Industries you can work in after college I had a great time working in Consulting and I learned a ton so in this video you're probably here because you want to know how you

break into Consulting so I want to help you step by step understand the process of making it to Consulting but also since I left the industry I want to share with you an honest and transparent view for why I quit my job and why I'm not considering or choosing to go back to Consulting welcome to Zia chairs if you're new to this channel I'm a Harvard Business School admit and EXC consultant in this channel we talk about all things career finance and business breaking into Consulting essentially has three parts the first one is getting the

interview the second is Ace the Case and then the third is succeeding in the behavioral or fit interview so let's talk about each of these parts starting off with getting the interview this is honestly the hardest part some people say that you have less than a 1% chance of going from the application stage to actually getting the first round interview so just by getting the interview you're already miles ahead of most people and unfortunately most people get um disqualified in the stage so it is extremely crucial and extremely important to try to maximize your chances

of getting the interview and having a good resume and a great GPA unfortunately will not cut it there are way more people people with super good gpas and like incredible resumés than there are like spots in Consulting in general but if you do want to stand out there is one secret sauce one secret technique that will absolutely help you get the interview and that is getting a referral especially if you come from a non-target school or even if you do come from a non-target school if you want to get a step ahead of everybody else

then getting a referral is probably the best way to increase your chances of Landing that interview and the best way to get a referral is to try to build a relationship with a consultant who already works at the firm honestly LinkedIn is probably your best friend or try to go to networking events but ultimately your goal is to try to find one to two people who are willing to back you and submit a referral through the official company's website that will increase your chances dramatically I remember even talking to one of the HR um Talent

acquisition people at the top um consulting firms McKenzie BCG and Bane and almost all of them say that they start with the referral pile and then they'll go ahead and start looking at the other piles here's a quick tip on trying to get a referral try to pick somebody who already went to your school or has something in common uh with your own background let's say they're from the same city same country you guys play the same sport or were part of the same club that will increase your chances of them responding and wanting to

give you that referral if you want to see my exact script that I sent to people for the referral please feel free to reach out to me directly on LinkedIn I'd be happy to send it to you for free now on to step number two and that is acing the case so once you land the first round interview right now you're going to be invited to to the first round interview which typically has a case interview depending on the company you're interviewing for you might have one interview two interviews and some places you even have

three case interviews and while the case interview can be pretty much daunting I think generally they are actually testing for three things in that interview first is structure second is your ability to do math quickly and then third is your general case leadership when it comes to structure here you want to pick a framework depending on the case that you are given so let's say you are given a profit Prof ability case then you may want to use the profitability framework shown here or if you're given a market entry case then you may want to

use a different framework which is the market entry framework shown here ultimately what matters is that you show structure throughout the entire approach and using Frameworks is one of the best ways to do that if you want more detail around Frameworks I actually created a detailed video on how to Ace the Case interview and how you can prepare for it in less than a week please go ahead and check it in my channel and I will leave a link in the description as well the second part to acing the case is showing your ability to

do math quickly most of the time you're not going to be given a calculator so you need to be able to do mental math super quick and the math is not necessarily anything too complex but basically they just want to know that you have the ability to multiply numbers quickly or you know understand what 60% of 100 million is so it's really just like General quick maths and because you're not given a calculator the last thing that you want is to struggle with the numbers and struggle with the math because you have limited time you

just want to be able to run through the math quickly and really spend the majority of the time on the actual content strategy framework and thinking of the case honestly my best tip here is to just try to find any of the online drills um there are a lot of like quick techniques on how you can improve your math or get faster at Mental Math again you don't have to be perfect but it's good to know what is a billion divided by a million or 80% of a certain number so just try to practice those

okay the last one which is showing leadership and this is one that most of the time gets overlooked and I honestly have been seeing more recently that a lot of the um top consulting firms reject people because of it is the case leadership often times as a consultant your main job is to show the client that you know what you're talking about and you're able to walk them through the logic as well as you know decide what the next steps are going to be and what um the next parts of the project should entail this

is something that you want to demonstrate in the case so instead of just answering the question my advice us to try to you know go a little bit above and beyond try to show them that you're thinking about risks try to you know suggest the next steps instead of telling the interviewer Where Do We Go From Here I think your ability to lead throughout the case will give you a lot of positive points and will help you stand out okay so now let's say that you succeed in the case interview you're still going to have

to show that you're a good fit showing you're a good fit also has three parts to it the first is understanding why Consulting the second is explaining why the specific firm you're applying to and then the third one is spelling out your long-term career goals usually this part of the interview is 5 to 10 minutes maybe 15 minutes at the most but it is pretty critical at the end of the day if you don't have a good response for why consulting or you just say the reason why I'm doing consulting is because of the long-term

exit opportunities or because you know it's a great paying job or because your company's prestigious usually you're not going to end up with a good outcome so try to find a unique answer to why Consulting the angle that I like to take is actually answering the third question first your long-term career goals so start by spelling out your long-term career goals and then mention how Consulting and the specific firm you're applying to fit very well into that picture just to give you a quick example in my case my long-term goal is to become a entrepreneur

in the education technology space so one of the things I can mention is in Consulting I can learn a lot of the Strategic toolkit that will help me in entrepreneurship The Firm I'm interested in let's say it's BCG has a lot of cases in the education sector or the public sector so those are experiences that are relevant that I can use use in my long-term entrepreneurship goal so those are just a couple examples that um you could use or that I would say to stand out so let me give you a quick summary of exactly

what you need to do step by step so step number one make sure you get the interview the best way to do that is to get a referral step number two make sure you Ace the Case acing the case means that you are structured you can do math quickly and then you show case leadership all throughout and then step number three showing your fit and that means that you have a solid answer for why Consulting why the specific firm and then your long-term career goals okay so now let's get to the truth about Consulting I

want to make sure that I leave an honest and very transparent view of my experiences in Consulting but more specifically why I left first of all there is no doubt that Consulting is probably one of the best industries that you can pursue once you graduate the pay is super good you learn a ton you get to live a great lifestyle between traveling meeting amazing people going to cool events so this is by no means me like dissing on Consulting discouraging people from going into Consulting but in the same time I also want to tell people

that Consulting is not all U roses and fluffy rabbits and teddy bears and I don't know if fluffy rabbits or teddy bears even make sense but oh well you get the point but basically one of the first and biggest reasons why I left Consulting was that I wanted to focus on a specific sector which was the education technology sector I know longer term that I definitely want to be within this industry working in Consulting I know that in some instances I have to work on mining cases or retail cases or maybe technology and data cases

so it's not always going to be exactly the thing that I want to do and because I was pretty firm and clear that I wanted to do education technology longer term it just no longer made sense for me to work on industries that did not um pertain to that uh whatsoever when you're young and Junior in Consulting you don't really have a lot of say on the projects that you get placed on so even though a lot of people may have known that I wanted to be within the education technology sector if the only cases

that the company's able to sell is a six-month implementation of a tech software then that's what I'm going to be working on for the next six months the second reason which is also tied to the first and I think this is one of um the more important ones as well is that I did not have the ability to work on operational or implementation long-term projects usually in Consulting you're working on 3 weeks to maybe six to8 weeks Max um type projects so you're not really seeing kind of the full endtoend view of the work that

you're doing and also um to build a lot of the skill set that you need or want to do an entrepreneurship you need to be able to kind of understand how to strategize and implement the project also related to implementation projects um usually you learn a lot of project management skills which are important for you as an entrepreneur um those are things that you can only get through an implementation project so I didn't necessarily feel that I was improving my project management skills in general um I was getting really good at modeling getting really good

at Power point but managing a large scale project end to end was not something that I learned in Consulting the third part which is a common one that almost everybody mentions is the work hours and the flexibility one of the things that I did not mention to you um in the story from earlier was that in the middle of that real estate case I actually ended up getting super sick had a virus and had a bit of a skin infection and I still had to stay up to 3:00 a.m. working on those um you know

leases in Mandarin and Hindi and Arabic um and instead I would have loved if if I could just take a couple days off but I didn't have the luxury or the opportunity to do so because we had an important client deliverable and we had promised to deliver it by end of week so regardless of my kind of state or situation I still had to work the long hours and I still had to deliver the project and if you're curious what I'm doing right now I left Consulting to become a director of strategy and operations at

a $500 million um education technology company um if you are more interested I'm happy to talk more about my current job and what I do but luckily this new job does cover a lot of the things that Consulting did not have um I am working on a lot more operations implementation project I'm fully embedded in the education technology sector and my hours are great and there's a lot of flexibility so I'm super happy anyways as always I hope that this video delivered value if you did enjoy it please make sure you subscribe and also leave

me a comment I would love to connect with you lastly I just want to say good luck to everyone trying to break into Consulting I will catch you in the next video