How many consulting firms to apply to

This is because there are fewer people who have the relevant background for a specialist role, are interested in consulting, and have prepared properly enough to pass the challenging case interviews.

Being smart about when and where you apply is important because these nuances will impact your chances of receiving an offer. Home Courses Interview Prep Course Access all the online resources you need for success in your case and fit interviews. Free Resume Course Download resume templates and watch in-depth, step-by-step resume advice videos. Log in.

Submit your review. Bad Poor Average Good Excellent. Share your experience with the CaseCoach community Please enter valid text. Your name Please enter valid name. Private feedback for the CaseCoach team optional Please enter valid text. Dismiss Submit. You're subscribed! Categories Applications Careers Firms Interview tips. How to prepare for Financial Services case interviews.

Part of Consultancy. Campus events Seminars Business Courses Workshops. Consulting Industry. Working as a consultant. What is consulting? What is a consultant? What does a consultant do? Types of consultants. Why consulting? Am I a consultant? Consulting segment? Which consulting firm? Working in consultancy. Salary of consultants. Secondary benefits. Work-life balance. Unfortunately, research has shown that excess information reduces the prediction accuracy of job interviewers.

Further, not having a clear and structured way of evaluating candidates makes it more likely that interviewers will be influenced by their biases when evaluating candidates. Fortunately, more than a century of research shows that there are better, more rigorous ways to screen for general problem-solving skills. To start, General Mental Ability GMA is by far the best predictor of fluid intelligence, or the ability to solve problems in a variety of topics.

GMA has been a well-established and tested construct for decades with thousands of peer reviewed papers published on topic. A significant portion of these students spend more than hours each preparing for so-called case interviews — the favored evaluation method of elite consulting firms such as McKinsey, in which candidates are presented with a business problem and asked to talk through how they would solve the problem. Case interviews have long been part of the ritualistic hiring process of elite consulting firms.

Stressful and intimidating, they have a patina of rigor and gravitas. If you make it through, you are truly one of the chosen few: Many top-tier consulting firms have acceptance rates lower than Ivy League colleges. Case interviews are not a reliable way of predicting job performance. When ECA was founded 10 years ago, we wanted to take a more data-driven approach to executive search. We therefore reached out to Stockholm based economist Tino Sanandaji to start hunting for rigorous, research-backed hiring tactics.

We assumed that case-based interviews would top the list. After all, they seem to be a smart way to evaluate talent: They are designed to screen for general problem-solving skills, which strongly correlates with long-term job performance. Since the pace of change in the business world is ever more rapid, general problem-solving skills are highly valued by employers. In fact, research suggests the opposite.

And finally, not having a right or wrong answer leads to arbitrary decisions.