Upcoming case interviews with Altman Solon and Oliver Wyman. Anyone have any advice for either? Haven't done a case interview since college. OW has mock ones on their website but AS doesn't. Any advice about what to expect very much appreciated. 😊

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My case was much more thought / logic focused than capabilities focused. There weren’t any major math problems I had to calculate or challenging graphs that I had to interpret, but all my interviewers grilled me on my thought processes and tried to poke holes in my answers - more so than other firms I interviewed with. The thought process, I believe, is that you can fairly easily teach someone how to read a graph, but it’s more difficult to teach intuition and solid business sense.

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Thank you so much for your input! 😊

Feel free to DM. We’re on a hiring spree so i’ve interviewed dozens of candidates recently. To answer the quant point, we’re looking for either some quant background (STEM undergrad degree / courses / even a decent SAT math) or solid quant performance on the case (easily set up a calculation and walk through without arithmetic or order of magnitude errors).

The case math itself won’t be that complicated. No calculus or accounting tricks or anything. More like, you should be able to eg estimate the annual US spend for a product or service and walk confidently through the PxQ

Also, I’ve seen strong candidates in other areas get away with poor quant. It’s more like, if you’re a mediocre candidate and we’re on the fence, quant is usually the push one way or the other

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Here’s an example: if I tell you Netflix has $9/mo. ARPU with 70% household penetration in the US can you get me to the total annual market size. Nothing harder than that

Altman Solon is a bit different than the OW response above as it’s much more math / quant focused. Each case study will have some calculation aspect. They’ll have a mix of thought process / critical thinking questions and calculate xyz questions. The firm really emphasizes those quant skills so definitely brush up on your math skills.

Old school pen and paper, no calculator or internet available to you. You’ll be on zoom so you also can’t / shouldn’t fake it. As long as you prepare ahead of time you should be fine!

@OP A friend of mine interviewed with Altman I think about 2 months ago, got an offer but ended up deciding to leave consulting (got an industry offer he went with instead). He definitely had good things to say about them though! As far as the cases, he similar feedback to the above. He said he didn’t have to put much effort into a framework (one interviewer didn’t even ask him for one), the cases were more a series of critical thinking questions with a sh*t ton of math. Mental math isn’t my strong point so from what he described I think I’d be in trouble

@OP from what he told me nothing specific around accounting, ops, etc. More just a ton of algebra and mental math. He said the most challenging part was that they would intentionally use difficult numbers for the calculations

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