What I wish I’d known before my case interview: Getting past the I’m stuck moment

My name is Sean and I’m currently a Case Team Leader in the Los Angeles Office. With case interviews just around the corner for Summer Associate candidates, I thought it may be helpful to share a few personal experiences from when I went through the process. Like me, if you’ve been through case interviews before you know that moment, and if you haven’t been through case interviews before, than you probably dread it.  It’s the “I’m stuck” moment and it can be petrifying.

I often liken case interviews to journeys; everyone starts at the same place and hopefully you find your way to an end (notice I said “an” end rather than “the” end as there is rarely just one right answer to case interview, though there surely are lots of wrong answers). But when that stuck moment arrives, it’s like the path in front of you is covered up, you can’t see where to go and feel like even the smallest step in any direction might be off a cliff.

There is conventional advice for these types of situation and if you’ve already begun your case prep than you’ve probably heard it already. Usually the advice is something along the lines of ‘talk it out’ or ‘repeat your past few questions and answers’.  The underlying idea here is that your stress / excitement / nervousness / etc. may have temporarily clouded your path to the answer and by essentially retracing your steps, the next one would become clear. Now this is not a bad strategy, in fact it can be a pretty good one, unfortunately it didn’t work that well for me.  A brief interlude…

Back when I was interviewing for management consulting jobs, I had some interviews where I did well, and some where I did not so well. I can remember one particular interview where I had my own “I’m stuck” moment. I had answered some initial questions, and then was provided a slide that had a graph on it (I can still draw out that slide from memory). And then, I froze. I had no idea what to do. I tried the strategies that I had been told such as talking out what I was seeing on the slide and repeating some of my past steps, which only led to my increasingly annoyed interviewer looking at me shrewdly and saying, “Ya, you already said that.” I kept running in quicksand and never made it past that slide. By the time the interview was over, my interviewer looked at me like someone who had just offered him a 4 day old sandwich for lunch (and I looked like this). Game over.

Let me contrast that experience with another one that I’ve had. Recently a friend of mine who’s the CEO of his own company was asking me a few questions about his business. This wasn’t anything rigorous or data-driven, more questions that you might deal with in an intro to strategy course, such as how he can make his services “stickier” for his customers, and how he can better align the incentives of his sales force with his own. During this conversation I offered my candid opinions, pausing only briefly to organize my thoughts. While I don’t think I was anywhere close to solving his problem with my ideas, I’d like to think I gave him some interesting ideas for him and his team to chew on.

While on the surface, a conversation with a friend is a very different experience from a case interview, once you get beneath the surface, they’re not all that different. Seriously. In both cases I was presented with a business problem and asked to think through some solutions without any additional preparation and only minimal background data and context. This is the mental pivot that I wish I had known prior to going through my case interviews. I wish I had known to treat the experience like I was sitting across from a friend, providing advice on their business. While I can’t say with certainty that this different approach would have led to a better result in my above experience, I do think it would have allowed me to view the problem more holistically (apologies for the buzzword) rather than treating it like a math problem where I needed to find the answer. Having conducted dozens of case interviews, the best interviewees are the ones who engage with the problem as if they’re sitting across the table from their buddy over Chinese food (or pizza, or whatever you fancy) rather than the ones just trying to get a high grade.

Most business school students I’ve encountered are pretty adept at this. Whether it be in class, over lunch, or in a study room, most MBAs are pretty willing to put their thoughts forward on how to solve a particular business problem, and most actually enjoy doing it.

So that’s what I wish I had known when I began preparing for case interviews: treat your case interviews like those conversations. Put yourself in the mindset that you’re sincerely trying to help someone you care about figure out a difficult problem. Case interviews are indeed a journey, but by not focusing on getting to the finish as quickly as possible, you might be able to lift yourself over the fog immediately around you, and forge a path to an even better destination.

For more tips and information on Interview Preparation, please visit our website to watch videos, and try some practice cases on your own.