What is a Case Interview?

A case interview is a hypothetical business situation that is presented during an interview process to determine how a candidate thinks about a particular problem and how they would solve it.

The key point to understand about a case interview and the case interview process is that it is designed to simulate life on the job as a management consultant. It replicates all of the stages of a three- to six-month engagement in approximately thirty or forty minutes.

In the medical profession when you are learning to be a doctor, you are often asked to present a medical case of a patient. You have to describe how you would potentially treat this particular patient. What diagnostic test would you run, why would you run them, what diseases or illnesses do you suspect, and why? As you get different tests results back, how would you interpret them to determine whether your initial thoughts and impressions were correct?

In the management consulting field, you get something very similar. In this case, your patient is not a person, your patient is a company. For example, you might be presented with the case of a client who manufactures automobiles. Their chief concern is what they should be doing as a business with respect to electric vehicles and cars that can drive themselves. They want your advice on what they should do.

That is a hypothetical case situation that you would be asked to address and to solve. The purpose of the case interview is to see how you would approach a problem.

Here’s why that is important:

When you work in management consulting, the approach that you use needs to be reliable and provable. You need to find an answer and recommendation for your client. It doesn’t help if you are able to intuitively make a recommendation to clients if that process of coming up with a recommendation is not repeatable.

Let me back up. One of the concerns that a firm often has in hiring its new consultants is that candidates follow a protocol methodology to consistently analyze data and derive fact-based conclusions from that data. Management consulting firms have an enormous buy-in for conclusions that can be supported by data, mostly because the data makes it easy to defend and justify the conclusion to clients.

It is not helpful to give clients a recommendation that may be correct if you can’t prove that it is correct. Your client is usually a CEO or other C-level executive in a large company. They have to justify their plans to others higher up, such as their boss, the board of directors, their shareholders, etc. They often have to justify their decisions because they are a publicly traded company.

This buy-in trickles all the way down into the kinds of consultants that large companies prefer to hire. They prefer to hire consulting firms that can justify their recommendations, which in turn prompts the management consulting firms to hire future employees who have the ability to approach problems and solve them in a way that is based on data.

The purpose of the case interview is to figure out and observe how you handle these business situations. What analysis do you want? What are you looking for? What working theories or hypotheses do you have? Ultimately, the interviewer wants to know how well you can prove your case in terms of data-derived recommendations.

Case interviews are a really great way to see how a candidate thinks. The case interview originally started with the management consulting field. It started many decades ago and has since been broadened to be adopted in other industries as well.

I have heard that a form of the case interview is used in hiring for software engineering, for example. Let’s say that your client has this technical problem with your products. How would you think about troubleshooting this particular issue? What factors would you consider? What things would you like to do? Why? How do they play together in your overall plan? That kind of a thing.

I have also heard that it is used in private equity firms. For example, if you were trying to get a position in a private equity investment firm that has a particular style or strategy for investing, I have heard of cases being presented in those situations.

I have heard of the case interview being used in jobs in industry, particularly in those such as internal consulting departments. Fortune 500 companies, for example, commonly use them. Sometimes analytical departments or analysis groups use them. Or, sometimes there is a case interview to see how a candidate thinks about approaching a particular analysis.

It is used more and more broadly these days. But the origin, or at least the origin that I am familiar with, stems from the management consulting interview, and it is used as a way to evaluate the way that a candidate thinks about and addresses a particular problem.

Consulting firms, in particular, are looking for several skills to be demonstrated by a candidate in a case interview.

These skills include:

• Problem Structuring
• Logical Reasoning
• Analysis
• The Ability to Draw Conclusions from Data
• The Ability to Synthesize or Communicate Your Conclusions

What is the Difference Between a Case and Regular Job Interview?

Although there are some aspects of a case interview that are like a regular job interview, at their core they are very different for one reason: Every part of a case interview is designed to mirror some aspect of the on-the-job experience in order to find the best potential consultants.

There’s a reason that case interviews have existed for decades. It is the most effective tool in finding the most capable and competent management consultants out there. Once you understand that your interviewer’s only motivation is to test how well you might work with future clients, you’ll find it much easier to prepare and perform in a case interview.

The key is to stop thinking like a candidate and instead put yourself in the shoes of an already-hired consultant. Ask yourself how you would respond to the question you’ve been asked if it were from a client rather than an interviewer.

For example, many real-life client situations will involve estimation questions, this is why there are so many estimation questions in case interviews. Let’s say you have a client wanting to get into the used-car sales market. That client would most likely ask you if you know how big that market is. Using your estimation abilities, you would respond with something along the lines of, “Well, there are 350 million people in America…” and then continue your analysis from there.

The candidates that get taken the most seriously during a case interview are the ones that not only excel in estimation/analytical questions like the one above, but also in their interpersonal skills (a.k.a. not being rude, arrogant or dismissive) because both are critical to succeed as a consultant.

Interviewers test analytical skills by watching for your ability to ask thought-provoking questions, to analyze data to discover new insights, and to develop data-supported conclusions. Perhaps surprising to some, they are also watching for how nervous you get during a case interview. Nervousness or a lack of confidence can translate poorly when it comes to client trust.

If you seem unsure of yourself or your answers when dealing with a client, that client will be more likely to doubt any recommendations you give. They may lose faith in your abilities and the firm as a whole.

When in doubt, always try and think like a consultant and remember why case interviews exist in the first place — to simulate on the job experience.