Defining
the indefinable
As mentioned, probably
the most comprehensive definition of consulting is “collectively solving
real world business problems.” That just about covers everything but does not really give
you
much more real understanding of the business. Some call it “professional advice-giving”
or
“team-based problem solving.” Consultants are not exactly accountants or investment
bankers;
marketing agents or salesmen; production managers or industry researchers; business lawyers
or systems programmers. Most consulting jobs encompass varying degrees of all of these
functions, which is why the career is so popular – and, thus, so difficult to get into –
among
undergraduate students and MBA’s. A two to three year stint as an undergraduate in
consulting is a crash-course in business, industry trends, teamwork, and decision-making that is
unmatched by most entry-level professions.
The easiest way
to tell your grandmother about consulting is to say that when a company needs
to do something – change leadership, put out a new product, figure out why things are going
poorly – they often hire outside consultants who (a) have the time and expertise to figure out
how to solve the situation or (b) have an outside point of view that the company lacks. It is
often cheaper for a business to hire consultants for a short time than to make long-term hiring
decisions. A team of consultants dedicated to solving one set of particular problems within an
organization will have the knowledge base, time, energy, and outsider’s perspective that will
enable it to do a better and more efficient job than often overworked, jaded insiders.
Consequently, consultants travel a lot in order to serve their clients best. This, however,
is
where the similarities end between different flavors of consulting, so it may be easiest to offer a
list of activities that consultants may do before moving on to describe big industry players:
-
A team of 5 consultants
and an upper manager travels week after week to Louisiana
to help a logging company (a not-too- glamorous but lucrative industry, by the way)
streamline its operations by upgrading the plant, forming relationships with local
trucking companies, and instituting new training programs for workers.
- A technology consultant that is an expert
at IBM’s Tivoli software may travel alone
from Denver to Albuquerque to Chicago to Miami over the course of two weeks to
conduct systems testing and analysis.
- Entry-level consultants working on a project
for a retail company spend a few weeks
interviewing customers and store workers to help in developing a recommendation
about the company’s customer service operations.
- An entry level business analyst (formerly
an English and Communications major at a
big southeastern university) working for a strategy firm develops a highly
sophisticated spreadsheet model for calculating the yearly costs and revenue flows for
a competitor in the long-haul transporting industry.
- Three consultants do the footwork and data
analysis for four partners who are
leading a major telecommunications company through a high-dollar merger.
- Talented programmers for a large technology
consultancy spend six months designing
a distributed customer information database system for a large pharmaceutical
company.
Other job
details
Most consultants
will tell you that no day or workweek is the same, and there is no real need to
ask for an estimation of how many hours per week a consultant works. A consultant that is
between projects may only clock 30 hours in a week as he takes some time to recuperate from
the travel schedule, catch up on emails, and find another project to work on. On the other
hand, team members of a project that is nearing completion may spend 80 hours in a week
preparing for the final recommendation to the client. Between these extremes is the general 55-
65 hours per week consensus. The hours can be demanding – especially on the road –
but the
experience and the difficulty level of the work is the reward. Consulting demands a person to
be inquisitive, hard working, and dedicated to collective achievement and personal growth.
Individuals who want to stand out at the expense of their peers as well as those who lack
enthusiasm or drive should apply elsewhere.
Since most companies
do not want the outside world and, more specifically, their shareholders
to know they are facing serious internal problems, consulting is predominantly a confidential
business. Consultants keep their mouths shut about their clients and receive little or no credit for
what they do for a client organization. The reward, then, is seeing a company adopt your
team’s recommendation and become stronger.
Overview of
Consulting Companies
The purpose of
this section is to highlight the various segments of the consulting industry and
give the reader a brief overview of the major players in each. This industry breakdown is
based on the author’s own experience and is by no means conclusive. Similarly, the companies
highlighted were not chosen by personal preference or prestige but due to their overall industry
presence and, in most cases, their involvement in on- campus recruitment at UNC-CH.
Furthermore, this listing is not a definitive analysis of any of these players; the intention is to
give
the reader a broad awareness of the industry that will be valuable once the career-hunting
season hits.
Strategy
Consulting
Strategy consulting
aims at helping upper management and executives of a company tackle the
long-term, high-level, strategic challenges of running the organization. Generally speaking,
a
team of strategy consultants will work directly with corporate executives to help them gauge
and understand complex issues; after analyzing data, conducting market research, and exploring
the ins and outs of a company, the team will then present a recommendation in the form of a
“deck” (a set of PowerPoint slides in most cases). This recommendation is something
like
professional advice. Increasingly, strategy consultants are expected to go the extra step and
help the firm implement their suggestions.
McKinsey
&Company: Often considered the benchmark of consulting firms, McKinsey is an
international presence that has been highly respected for its work for nearly 80 years. The
largest of strategy firms, McKinsey provides more industry analysis, generates more business-
shaping thinking, and employs more employees than any other firm. Its clients are the biggest
of the big, and its employees are the some of the most competitive in the business. McKinsey
has a very strong corporate culture that encourages meritocracy and adherence to the
McKinsey way of thinking.
The Boston
Consulting Group: BCG is often considered the leader in theory and
innovation, as the founder, Bruce Henderson, is called the “founder of strategic consulting.”
In
addition to its rock solid client work, its 40 years BCG has contributed various new ideas to
the business arena: the growth-share matrix, the experience (or learning) curve, time-based
competition, deconstruction, and the “change monster.” Consultants use a
“generalist”approach, by which they become part-time specialists in many industries rather
than
picking one industry in which to specialize. The academic atmosphere is augmented by
dedication to community service and a balanced approach to work and life.
Bain &Company:
Bain focuses on diversified, international corporations in all industry
sectors, and as the smallest of the Big Three (McKinsey, BCG, Bain), it prides itself on its
tightly-knit internal culture and dedication to continued learning and training. Workload and
travel schedule are moderate compared to some of the other players.
Other major
players: Mercer Management Consulting, Monitor Group, Parthenon Group,
Booz Allen Hamilton, A. T. Kearney, [Accenture, KPMG Consulting, Deloitte Consulting].
Technology
(IT) Consulting
IT consulting –
not to be confused with E-consulting – focuses on helping client organizations
use technology to accomplish their goals. Activities may range from business analysts helping
the client get a feel for the overall competitive landscape to teams of programmers designing
custom software. Technology consultants help large business change and integrate computer
networks or troubleshoot new data processing systems, and the focus is not on
recommendation but rather implementation. In a sense, IT consulting is the more specialized
and practical side of strategy consulting.
Accenture:
Formed from the pre-Enron-scandal Anderson Consulting, Accenture is one of
the largest technology consulting firms, reaching over 2,500 clients and pulling in over $10
billion a year. The company employs nearly 80,000 people in a wide array of countries, and its
work ethic reflects it global mindedness. Accenture consultants often develop a mastery over a
set of business software tools – finance, customer relation management, supply chain
management, or data processing, for example – and then travel to clients all over the US and
the world to install, test, and improve corporate systems.
IBM Global
Services: Like its Big Blue parent company, IBM Global Services is the biggest
technology (and otherwise) consultancy in the world. Its biggest areas of business are
outsourcing – managing technology systems for companies – customer relationship
management, hosting, and information systems development. Given IBM’s size and breadth,
travel and work schedules are quite flexible, but it is easy to be a small fish lost in a large ocean.
Deloitte
Consulting: After breaking away from Deloitte & Touche accounting, Deloitte
Consulting established itself as a major player in the technology sphere. While an entry-level
position entails a lot of travel, Deloitte is hailed for its devotion to its workers and its learning
atmosphere.
Other major
players: Electronic Data Systems, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, KPMG
Consulting, Computer Sciences Corporation.
Human Resources
Consulting
Human resources
consulting is mainly concerned with helping organizations get the most out of
their employees (human capital). Key service areas with human resources consulting include,
but are not limited to HR Strategy and Technology, Benefits Outsourcing, Organizational
Change, and Talent & Reward Strategies. Human resources consulting firms tend to be smaller
than Strategy and IT firms, but no less prestigious.
Key Players:
Hewitt Associates, Towers Perrin, Watson Wyatt, Sibson, Mercer Human
Resources Consulting, AON Consulting
E-Consulting
(E-business Consulting)
E-consulting firms
focus on the problems that are unique to companies operating in e-business
via the web. Some of the largest IT firms such as Deloitte provide services in this areas, but
the
bulk of e-consulting is done by small companies with a handful of talented experts.
Consulting Case
Interview Preparation
The case interview
is one of the prominent tools consulting firms use to assess applicants’
critical thinking skills, ability to carry on a business conversation, and personal
“fit”characteristics. Opinions about the case interview vary from absolute terror
to enthusiasm;
often, however, the attitude of any given individual shifts from terror to enjoyment as he or she
gains experience with the process.
In essence, a case
interview is a structured conversation in which an interviewer presents the
interviewee with a business scenario in which a company –likely one he or she has recently
worked with – is facing a set of factors or variables and has come to you for advice on how to
approach or “solve” the situation. The interviewee is then expected to work with the
interviewer to break the problem down and formulate a solution within thirty or forty minutes.
This usually involves asking a lot of questions, jotting down basic math problems and factual
information on a notepad, sharing your thinking process with the interviewer, and ultimately
producing a recommendation that may be similar to one the interviewer’s team may have taken
three months to prepare (in their situation, however, the team faced client pressures and
information barriers that the interviewee does not face).
Before offering
sample case interviews, the authors feel it necessary to provide brief notes
about how one may prepare for and approach a case interview.
Bain &
Co. – “Ace the Case Interview”
The following are
notes taken during the Bain case interview workshop given in the fall
semester of 2002. For explanations of some of the terms (4 Ps, 3 Cs, and others), refer to the
Carolina Consulting Member Workbook, which can be found online at our club website.
Structure:
-
Things to remember:
- Make your logic and reasoning transparentby
talking out loud about
everything you are thinking about. Interviewers could not care less if you can
sit there quietly with a pad and give them an answer five minutes later.
Consultants work as teams, and the case interview is oriented at gauging
your ability to think as well as your ability to convey your thoughts.
- Stand by your answer and your reasoning
if they challenge you. Being
confident and assertive is valued; second-guessing yourself – unless you are
clearly wrong – is not recommended.
- If you find you have made bad assumptions –for instance, if you give an
answer like, “According to my analysis, it’s clear that McDonald’s makes
$15,000 per year in the Asian market”– take a step back and work with the
interviewer to figure out where you went wrong.
- Be hypothesis-driven.
Come up with ideas – some out of the box, some
obvious – work through them individually based on logic and intuition.
Approaches:
-
Top-Down / Bottom-Up:
There are two ways to approach problems involving
sizing a market, making estimations, or solving brainteasers (such as, “How many
ping-pong balls fit in a Boeing 737?”).
- Top-down: Start large
and break the problem into pieces. For example, if
as part of your case you need to know how many American customers a
Burger King serves in a hour, you may progress in the following way: (a)
estimating the overall US population, (b) isolating the segment of children,
teens, and adults who eat fast food, (c) deciding how many meals those
people eat a year, (d) estimating what proportion of those are fast food, (e)
choosing the percentage of thosemeals that would be eaten at Burger King,
(f) dividing by the number of days in a year, (g) distributing this number
(which is now how many meals a restaurant serves in a day) across the hours
of operation, and (g) discussing how the geographical location, time of day,
time of year, and demographic characteristics of the surrounding area might
factor into any single restaurant’s customer service rate.
- Bottom-up: Start locally
and build up to a final solution. This approach is
generally more difficult. For example, if asked to determine how many sales
Wal-Mart makes in a year, you could attempt the following: (a) how many
purchases does a single Wal-Mart shopper make per visit, (b) what is the
dollar value of those purchases, (c) estimate how many times a person may
visit the store in a year, (d) estimate what percentage of Americans shop
regularly at Wal-Mart, (e) multiply it all out. This will obviously lead to a
less-than-optimal solution than a top-down approach.
- Quantitative – The Profit Tree:
This is an easy and logical way of structuring
cases in which you are asked to find out why profits are dropping while sales are
increasing, for example.
Example:
Why are profits going down when revenues are going up?
-
Qualitative – Three C’s and Four P’s: These methods are heavily taught in
business curricula and serve as good ways to structure your thinking for cases
involving entering new markets, developing new products, reacting to the moves of
competitors, and so on. However, be flexible and do not simply fall back on these
frameworks, for these tools may not fit your given scenario. In fact, mentioning
that you are going to use one of these frameworks to structure your case
analysis is certain death. Even if you are using it in the back of your mind, do not
say that you are.
- Three C’s:
- Competition: Who, how many, threat
they pose, and are they
making money?
- Customer: Who is my target group?
How can I best reach them
with my products? Is building a new branch in this area going to eat
away at my current customer base?
- Company: Internal capabilities (finance,
operations, research and
development, personnel, innovation, managerial talent), distribution
channels, cost structure.
- Three P’s:
- Product: What am I making, and how
does it fit a customer need?
How susceptible is it to imitation? What kind of patents might I
need?
- Price: What is my pricing strategy
from when I first release the
product until I phase it out? How does the cost of production affect
the profit I get from each sale?
- Promotion: How am I going to convince
people to buy the
product? What kind of publicity, advertising, and discounts will I
use? How can I establish brand recognition?
- Place: Where am I going to sell this
product? How am I going to
get it there quickly and efficiently? What kind of relationships do I
need to set up with retailers, wholesalers, and distributors?
McKinsey
& Co. – Case Interview Prep
Approaching
the case:
Verify that each strand/hypothesis is still
dealing with the given problem and not
veering off topic. Continually ask questions and clarify logic used.
Reach a timely, cohesive solution.
Present a coherent and assured recommendation.
What interviewers
are looking for:
Resume and Behavior-based
Interviews
The most common
form of interview is the resume or behavior-based interview. Even
companies that use cases to test a candidate’s abilities will usually start an interview with
a 10
to 15 minute period of behavior- based questions. Most non-consulting interviews only include
behavior- based questions to assess a candidate’s abilities, experience, and personality.
With
this in mind, being able to conquer questions based on your resume and history is an essential
skill.
What exactly
is a behavior-based interview?
Like case interviews,
behavior-based interviews can vary in degree of complexity. These may
consist of the interviewer simply reading through your resume and asking off the cuff questions
about some of your activities. More commonly, behavior-based interviews involve questions
that include the phrase, “Can you tell me about a time when…?” Following this question,
the
interviewer may take your answer and probe deeper in order to figure out exactly how you
work and how you behaved when facing different challenges. These interviews can last
anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour, depending on your stage in the interview process.
What types
of questions can I expect to be asked?
How should
I answer a behavior-based question?
How do I
prepare for a behavior-based interview?
There are several
steps that any interviewee can carry out to prepare for these interviews.
Know Your
Story:
Your story is how
you portray yourself during an interview. It is the common link between
your activities that shows exactly who you are, and what makes you a great candidate. Be
prepared to explain why you pursued each of the items on your resume, and what each item
shows about you.
This doesn’t
mean that you should attempt to portray yourself as something that you’re not.
Rather, it means that you understand the qualities that this company is looking for, and
emphasize how your activities consistently show these qualities in you.
Know Your
Resume:
Anything on your
resume is fair game. If there are any general statements on your resume
concerning your participation in activities, be prepared to answer them. Know exactly how
you contributed to each of the things on your resume. With this in mind, if there are specific
skills listed in your resume, be ready to explain them. For example, if you list that you worked
with Carolina Consulting and used the 4P’s or SWOT analysis during projects, you better
know each of the 4P’s and what SWOT stands for.
Be Prepared
with Several Examples:
In the course of
a behavior-based interview, you could be asked anywhere between 3 to 10
questions of varying intensity. Some companies will ask one question, listen to your answer,
and ask additional questions based on your answers. With this in mind, tell the truth. It
is hard
to consistently tell a false story, and it is probably not in your best interests to make up
examples just to answer a question.
Try to prepare
examples of four or five unique, valuable experiences in your life that show
something about you. Before the interview, right down these experiences and consider all of
the challenges, successes, failures, and lessons learned from each one. These could include
jobs, internships, campus groups you’ve been a part of, study-abroad, or unique challenges
you’ve taken on or been through.
When you are asked
a question in the interview, you can use a moment of pause to quickly go
through your list of experiences in your head and determine which fits the question best. This
will not only give you confidence before your interview, but will also make sure you aren’t
forced to think of answers on the fly. While some life examples are so rich that they could be
used to answer just about any question, it is best to use multiple examples throughout your
interviews. This helps to show that you are a well-rounded, experienced individual.
Know the
Company:
At some point,
you will probably be asked why you want to work for the company, in which
areas you wish to work, or why you are a good fit for the company. All of these questions rely
on at least some knowledge of the company. Be sure to study the company’s website and
check for any recent appearances in the news. Learn enough so that you are comfortable
explaining why you are there, and why you are a good fit for the job.
Summary
To some extent,
the interviewer is interested in whether you are someone who he/she
can work with on a day-to- day basis. The interviewer wants to know that you’re not
only capable of doing a good job, but that you will be an agreeable team player. After
all, the interviewer’s job and reputation may rest on the candidates that are
chosen. Therefore, prepare and handle yourself in a manner that exudes your
personality, professionalism, and confidence without arrogance,. Be excited to be
there and give the interviewer a reason to stand up for your candidacy.Helpful
Resources
Career Information
and Company Guides
-
Vault: “The Insider Career Network.” Industry and company overviews, interview
preparation guides, practice cases (both consulting and financial), resume tools, job
search resources.
- www.vault.com - Vault home page
- careerweb.unc.edu/cgi- bin/odbic.exe/cc/pidcheck_vault.htm
- UNC’s
access page to Vault resources (free to UNC students)
- WetFeet: “Helping You
Make Smarter Career Decisions.” Similar to Vault, it
offers company insider guides and handbooks for interviews.
- www.wetfeet.com - WetFeet home page
Monster: Extensive job searching
network. UNC uses Monster to store and
distribute student resumes and cover letters.
CareerSearch: Online research
tool allowing the user to search for employers by
industry, location, and keyword. User = “unc” and Password = “employer”
Interview
Preparation and Firm Profiles
Interactive
Practice Cases
1. McKinsey Research
