Get Ready For Management Consulting Experience Interviews

Consulting experience interviews are an important part of every management consulting interview. They focus on your past experience and require detail description of the situation and your individual actions. Combined with case interviews, they give an overall picture of you. This article will help you ace the consulting experience interviews.

Experience Interviews are a relatively new format of interview technique specially designed to dig up applicants' past experience where he/she demonstrates a particular ability or skill which the recruiters are interested in. Developed during the 1970s, the new interview strategy soon became world-wide popular and adopted by lot of famous management consulting firms as Mckinsey, Bain, BCG and Booz.

You will be given a series of standard questions which push you to think about your certain past experience or an accomplishment you were involved in, especially on how you actually did in handling that particular situation. Through the process, the interviewers evaluate your proficiency in one or two job-related areas, and thus reflect your future behavior to a great extent.

Here, I will compare consulting experience interviews with case interviews. The main difference between the two techniques is that experience interviews focus on your detail actions in your real past experiences which are in the context of a crucial consulting skills. Case interviews, on the other hand, put you into a hypothetical situation which interviewers constructed in order to determine your logical thinking process and analytical abilities. Either of them is only one dimension of the recruiting process, thus these two styles work in conjunction in most cases.

Virtually, consulting experience interviews tend to be a step further than traditional interview process. You could expect an interview question as: "Tell me about yourself. What kind of person are you? What are your strengths and weaknesses?" These questions almost set no restriction. Your answers can be very unfocused and too difficult to be evaluated. How about this one: "Describe a specific analytical problem you have been faced with. How did you succeed or fail on it?", or "Tell me about a situation in your past experience in which you had a very upset and critical superior?"

These questions are a bit more difficult and targeted. However, questioning would not stop here. Recruiters always follow up your initial response by going some steps further to elicit more details. The consulting recruiter may interrupt you and ask: what do you think about at this moment? Then you need to stop, deepen your memory into that particular point, and organize your response.

Preparation does play a crucial role in a successful management consulting experience interview. No matter what kind of interview you may come across, make sure that the very first thing you do is to acquire adequate acquaintance of your desired position. Even if you are applying to a top tier consulting firm like McKinsey, Bain, BCG or Booz, there are still differences. For an experience interview, the next step is to list a couple of your important qualities. Then go through them one by one and pick ones which suit the requirements well according to the job description. Make any notes you prefer to prepare yourself to discuss these in a factual, specific way in the interview.