CQ_Consultalks | Manthan Doshi | L.E.K. Consulting

Placements 2020

Interviewer: Hello Manthan! This is Arnav from Communiqué. Congratulations on being placed at LEK. If I have your consent may I take a short interview with you?

Manthan: Thank you Arnav! Yeah sure, let’s have a discussion. Please go ahead.

Interviewer: What was the general interview process for the companies you interviewed? Please mention the number of rounds and the nature of the interview process.

Manthan: During my CDC internship time I had given interviews for many profiles but for placements, I only have interviews for management consulting companies, so let me just focus on the interview process for the consulting profile. LEK and BCG are the companies in which I had my shortlist. There are other companies too like Dalberg, McKinsey & Company, Arthur D’Little, etc, that come to campus but my focus was LEK and BCG at that time. So management consultancy is a very niche area wrt to campus placements because there are very few offers from the companies. The selection process includes multiple rounds, most of the rounds being a combination of a case and fit interview. A case is like a general discussion on a certain set of problems with the interviewer and the problems would be specific to a company or a situation. A fit interview includes the HR section, where your personality and your body of work is discussed.

Apart from that, you asked ‘how many rounds’, so that is not very specific as it depends from company to company like for BCG we have 6 rounds in the end, at L.E.K. I had 4 rounds during my internship after which I had my PPI for which I had to face 2 more rounds. In each of the companies, it is made sure that you are being interviewed by people across the hierarchy, from associates to partners. So yeah that goes for around 4 to 6 rounds. That is how it is.

Interviewer: Could you please list down questions were you asked in the different rounds? Puzzles, technical questions, any other discussion in general that you think will prove to be helpful for students.

Manthan: As I have already mentioned to you earlier I was preparing for consulting. It’s not a technical thing, it’s managerial, and we don’t have technical questions so there are not any puzzles or any other such things that are asked in the questions but we are asked cases, and cases are containing different problems or different situations; let me list down a few to you. Cases are usually considered of two types one is a guesstimate and the other one is a business situation. Business situations could vary from profitability problems to market entry problems to growth strategies to product launching, to let’s say mergers and acquisitions to even policymaking, the categories are huge in numbers. Talking about the guesstimates, a few of the questions that I was asked in my interviews were “Calculate the number of private schools in Mumbai”, “Estimate the number of birds in Australia’’, “Guess the number of cheques processed in a bank per day”, “Calculate the total market for steel in Russia’’ etc. I think these were the few questions in terms of guesstimate type. Most of the cases were business situations, I believe it is not easy for me to mention all the business situation cases over a call, but yeah the cases are of a similar kind to the ones mentioned in Case Interviews Cracked and Day One books, which also are some of the best books to prepare for cases. To elaborate further on case preparation, you require a time of around a fortnight to a month or 2. I prepared for cases for 2 months. The way I started was by watching Victor Cheng’s videos on YouTube, as these videos give you a basic understanding of what cases are. I also watched the Mock interview series on youtube by Case Interview Cracked, IIT Bombay. This gave me a basic understanding of what way cases need to be solved. Now a case is not something that is practised by yourself, so you need a group. I was fortunate enough to have a really good case group at the institute; the strength of my case group was of 6 friends. Rather I had 2 really good groups, one at the institute of 6 ppl, one with my IIT Delhi LEK co-interns of 3 ppl. Having 2 groups helped me accelerate my case prep. Ideally, 3–4 people is the best strength for a case group so in the institute case group we divided ourselves into two sub-groups of 3 each. First, we developed a schedule. We had a very good schedule and practised around 70–80 cases in 2 months starting from scratch. The books we did cases from included Case Interviews Cracked IIT Bombay, Day 1.0, ISB case book, IIMA case book, Case In Point, LOMS victor cheng, LBS case book. These are a lot of books, because I had a lot of time this year, as this year was extraordinary due to COVID 19. In usual cases, CIC and Day 1.0 are enough. The way cases should be done is there should be one interviewer and an interviewee, the interviewer should read the case and help the interviewee solve the case properly. Again, communication is the key. Make sure that the whole process should be interactive and not a monotonous dialogue. There is a free 7 days course for cases on the internet called ‘Crafting Cases’ which is a brilliant course for those who want to practice cases in a few cases and a short time I would suggest everyone do that once and for all because that is worth it. If you find that too long Crafting cases also have “5 ways to be” videos on youtube, everyone MUST watch them, they are amazing. Another very important part of my case preparation was joining the Relay Campus cohort. Relay campus is a new startup started by IIT grads and they had a special program where they selected a 25 people cohort across campuses to help students prepare for case interviews. Relay campus helped me connect with best consult mindsets across campuses and provided live learning from authors of books like IIMA casebook amongst others. The contribution of Relay Campus in my consult prep has been significant.

Interviewer: What are some of the FAQs in most companies that you faced and think students must prepare for? More specifically, in the context of HR rounds.

Manthan: The answer to this question depends on who is asking which can range from a first-year student to a final year student. So if a first-year student asks me I would say that make a profile because in consulting with LEK the body of work is what matters so, yeah make a good consult profile. There are 2 ways for that, either look at your seniors who got selected and make a profile looking at the things they did — this is typically called a cookie profile, and the other is to do all that you like and be the best there, give your 100%, consult requires extraordinary personalities who are best at whatever they do. If you are interested in consulting, develop a few skills required for the role namely leadership, communication, analytical skills, teamwork, and good academics and research. For a pre-final year student, who at a later stage got interested in consulting at a later stage, I would suggest them to consolidate their USPs. Also, I would like to discuss 2 very important skills required for Consulting — 1. HR skills and 2. Structured thinking skills. I believe anyone interested in consulting for them if they practice these skills in their day to day life consulting would become. So for the HR round, here I will mainly focus on interview-based prep but the same skills can be practised in your day to day life. Now HR round in a consulting interview is a fit round, the main objective of the HR round is to understand if the candidate is good enough to be compatible with or spend time with. So what is the most important thing in the HR round is to make the other person feel belonged. In terms of questions every company asks some very common questions like “why you?”, “Why consulting?”, “what are your strengths and weaknesses?”, “why the firm?” and many others. Answers are not very specific because everybody has a different answer to the same question. There is a book called 64 HR questions that have politically correct answers but I would not recommend using that because everyone has their reasons. Now comes a point: how do you make one feel belonged in the interview!

• Listen very carefully to what they are saying and ask questions to any person from their statements. In a case interview, the interviewer tends to introduce themselves at the beginning, a good HR skill is to directly ask something to the interviewer post he completes his intro. Makes a person understand you wanna listen to them
• Throughout the case round ask the interviewer simple questions like, “are you ok with my framework”, “ are you satisfied with what I did”, “ does this seem fair”, “ is there something extra I should do”. People use these questions a select few times, I suggest to you it at a higher frequency and throughout the interview for a better conversation
• Research well about the interviewer, of course, you see his body of work through LinkedIn and Google. But also see their activities and list down a list of commonly used terms, and use it naturally in your conversation so that the interviewer feels belonged

The next skill is on structured thinking skills.

What is it? It includes speaking in a manner so that the other person retains the maximum of what you speak.

• Many people prefer speaking in an articulate manner and points. This is a very good practice. For everyone reading, I would suggest next time onwards if anyone asks you “ could u tell me how this can be done?”. The way one should learn answering this is, you should take a minute and find all the ways to solve all the steps to solve the answer. Then you say “ I believe this could be solved in 3 ways/ steps”. Then you briefly list down all the three points and if required explain them too! This is an essential structured thinking skill and if practised in life you can become amazing in your communications.
• The second way I see is through storytelling. People answer things through a process or a story. Now to make it interesting, ppl either use very simple language or very fancy words. Choose whatever you find comfortable, but yes if you use this method, you will again sound very convincing in your conversations and develop structured thinking skills.

So yeah, these are a few skills that can help you in all your rounds, including HR rounds.

Interviewer: What are the things students sitting for placements next year can do from now until December to maximize their chances of getting through a company in this sector?

Manthan: Like I said there are some major skills required in Consulting 5 of them being teamwork/leadership skills, academics, entrepreneur activity, research, and analytical ability. So, the pre-final year students must think of their strengths and weaknesses and start taking measures to consolidate their strengths further if they will there is still scope to consolidate them, as I believe no one can excel in all 5 parameters, one needs to consolidate 2–3 parameters where they find themselves strong. Also, one should try to build certain USPs for themselves if needed. Any external person evaluates you on these factors majorly, as though how good you are at these parameters. Now if you find that you are not good enough in at least 2–3 areas too then I think you should work upon that area which you find can be improved in a year because consulting requires a great amount of body of work so for them to shortlist you have to be worth it. So for any pre-final year student, you have one year, I would say don’t rest in the year and make the best use of it. Also, as mentioned earlier communication is a very important thing when it comes to consulting so to be good with your communication skills and one year is enough to develop those skills. I know I have been repetitive but I think repetition is a good way to help people understand the importance of a point. There are three things for good communication skills: first is your fluency and modulation, you need not fear that ‘I haven’t studied in a good school or I am not good enough’ what you have to do is just try and adapt. The second one is how articulate you are. For being able to be articulate you need to read a lot and take up words which can shorten your statements just use simple words and do not over complicate things if you have a habit of speaking more the one thing you can do is stress on the word which you want them to listen to. The third, again is to make the other person belonged which is making the other person satisfied with what you are saying by asking, “are you satisfied with what I am saying?”, “Is this solution correct?” and similar questions. Listen to what the interviewer is asking and don’t rush and tell what you have done, tell those things that will make the other person attracted towards you because nobody is interested in your internships, PORs but what they are interested in is a basic thing that they can connect to like what is your hobbies, etc.

Interviewer: How did your preparation for technical rounds evolve once you were shortlisted?

Manthan: Again, we don’t have any ‘technical round’. First I was shortlisted then there is nothing much changed actually. Let me just be very honest the way it happens in consulting that you have a body of work so you somehow know where you will be shortlisted, in my case I was sure that I would be shortlisted for at least one of the companies. I started preparing before the shortlist. Before the final shortlist the D-day 28th September, I had my notes ready. I only read my notes and didn’t practice any cases and just revised the structure which I had done. On that day I was supposed to have 6 interviews and it ended well.

Interviewer: Anything else that you’d want to share with the students?

Manthan: For the 1st and 2nd-year students I would like to say is to be true to your work. Explore, work hard, and be true to whatever you are doing, don’t work for the sake of getting PORs just because that will help you with your placements. For the 3rd year students: the students who have already built a good profile should prepare and focus on the areas that they are strong at and improve those, to cover up for any weak spot. The student who doesn’t have a good profile as of now, see 1 year is enough to build your profile as far as consulting is concerned and work hard in whatever you are doing and try bringing in the one impact that is unique for them; then I reckon that things can turn around in a year very well. You should know how to solve cases because it is the case that would make you get through many rounds.