During the next few weeks, we will be publishing the discussions that we had with some of our interviewers about the selection process at their firms. Here is the interview of one of our Booz & Company interviewers, who did his MBA from London Business School:
InterviewBay: What is your background?
I joined Booz Allen Hamilton (now Booz & Co) after completing a law degree. During my studies, I became less and less interested in actually working with it. For the transition into business, consulting was the perfect place to start because other corporate jobs didn’t accept law graduates and consulting firms took on anyone who had good grades and was able to pass their tough interview process. Why did I quit in the end? Consulting is not my calling. I realize that I don’t really enjoy being thrown into a new situation and dealing with a complex problem. I much more enjoy getting really deep into a particular topic and then developing it. And as a consultant you don’t really do this, especially as a junior. And I would be lying if I said that I enjoyed the 70-hour work weeks. But overall I think the experience was great for me for three particular reasons:
I think especially at the beginning of your career, you set the bar high for yourself. Consultants are, on average, smarter and harder working than your average corporate worker bee, that’s a fact. Being surrounded by smart people raises your own expectations on yourself. I can’t overemphasize this point.
It’s a great way to find out what you’re interested in when you’re out of uni and don’t really know what you want to do. You move around various industries and functional assignments and thus get a really broad experience base.
This is kind of an outflow of (1) but it’s so important that it’s worth mentioning again: You really hone your communications skills – both your written and verbal communication gets vastly better. I still draw on the rigorous training I got in terms of writing compelling presentations and emails.
InterviewBay: Would you suggest any special attention for a consulting CV, keywords and the like?
Yes, definitely.
Your CV needs to be spotless in terms of formatting and typos. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot and do stare at it for at least an hour before you hit that print button.
Also, make it crisp and short. 1 page is the golden standard.
Whatever you did so far, phrase it as achievements. Every bullet should start with an action word “developed”, “started”, “sold”, “achieved”, “reorganized” etc. Make it clear what impact you had.
Consulting firms look for two things in CVs, I’d say: Brains and likeability (contrary to folklore, leadership is less important but of course doesn’t hurt) so make sure you show plenty of evidence for both. You surely heard of the airport test – the recruiter needs to be comfortable with the idea of being stuck with you at an airport for 18 hours. So if you have massive achievements in your CV but state stock options trading and reading annual reports as your hobbies and are thus likely to bore your recruiter out of his mind during off time, you have a problem.
I wouldn’t recommend any particular buzzwords – let your achievements and interests speak for themselves. Be yourself.
But that said, if there’s no positive eyebrow-raiser where a recruiter thinks “oh, now that sounds interesting”, you don’t have much of a chance. In my case I was invited because I speak six languages, participated in two Model
...
The remaining part of the article is only available to registered users. Please Click here to register
