I’m currently a junior in college. Post-junior year is well known to be the most important time to get a “good” internship, especially when considering conversion to a full-time job. Because of this, I thought it would be interesting to share my internship recruiting journey, which began around mid-August 2024 (when I wrapped up my post-sophomore year summer internship) and ended around mid-October (when I received some offers I’m happy with).
As a note, consulting was never a “dream” goal for me. Going into the process, I knew I’d be happy with an offer from a top consulting firm, but consulting was not something I was categorically aiming for. Consulting firms were only a fraction (<15%) of the companies I applied to (the vast majority were technology companies); this post is about consulting recruiting simply because those firms were the fastest to get me to an offer I was satisfied with. Before this year, I had never recruited for consulting, and I’ve never been involved in consulting clubs (or any other business-related organization) on campus.
Here is a Sankey diagram of my recruiting experience. This shows which of my applications got to each stage of the recruiting process.
And some stats you might find interesting:
- I applied to nine consulting firms: one smaller transportation consulting firm, Accenture, all big 4 firms, and all MBB (McKinsey, Bain, and BCG). All of these were cold applications with no networking or referral.
- I received first-round interview invites for all MBB firms, 2 of the big 4 (EY and Deloitte), Accenture, and the transportation consulting firm. (The other first-round interview invite was from a financial services company for an industrial engineering role.)
- The only company I completed any type of screen for was Bain, which had a very straightforward math and reasoning online assessment (TestGorilla).
- I received offers from McKinsey and Deloitte after 2 interview rounds, and from EY after 1 interview round. All were for strategy-related consulting roles.
- The one company I was rejected from after a final-round interview was Bain.
- As might be evident, the success rate once I had an interview was much higher than before the interview invite: round 1 conversion to offer or round 2 invite was 5/8, and round 2 conversion to offer was 2/3 (excluding the one round 2 interview I hadn’t done at time of writing).
Because this was my first time recruiting for consulting, I won’t even pretend to be an expert on the process. But I will try to draw some broader insights from my experience that may be helpful for your own recruiting.
Take it easy
I know many people who see consulting as their dream, all-or-nothing career. While I can understand the interest, I don’t think it’s sustainable to see any field in that way when there are so many factors outside an applicant’s control. Having alternatives and backups make it much less stressful during the recruiting process. I felt reasonably sure that I could secure an internship in transportation consulting or technology if big 4/MBB fell through, so I didn’t feel too stressed or anxious during the recruiting process. This, without question, made it much easier for me to perform at my best in my interviews.
Find strong experiences
Last year, I applied to over 150 roles and received only a handful of interviews. This year, I applied to much fewer roles and received many more invites. With the assumption that interview invites are mostly driven by resume quality, there were a few things that I think improved the strength of my resume:
- I completed an internship as an industrial engineer at Disney. Though the title wouldn’t imply it, this role was an ‘internal consultant’-type position, where my team provided operations consulting services to the departments running the Disneyland resort. Aside from the consulting and name aspect, I think Disney has a very well-developed internship program which helped me achieve a lot in my limited time there.
- I became president of two student organizations I’ve been involved with at USC since my freshman year. One of them is a society for industrial engineering students, while the other is a society for professionals in transportation.
I did not do any of these things solely to make my resume stronger; rather, everything happened out of interest and curiosity. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my involvement with both student organizations, as well as my time at Disney. It’s coincidence that my involvement and work has led to some professional benefits too.
So based on this, if my experience is taken to be representative, having impactful experiences at (a) big name company while staying involved on campus will really help secure interviews. This is probably in line with what any university career center would say!
Prepping for interviews
Many people have asked me about how I prepared for my interviews. To be honest, I didn’t prepare significantly for any interviews other than my McKinsey final round – I did about 1 hour of prep before Bain and BCG, 30 minutes a day for one week before McKinsey, and zero for the rest. I would have prepared more if I could, but most of my interviews were scheduled while I was travelling and attending conferences every week. Because of this, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to prepare. (The McKinsey interview was especially late, so I had some more time to prep.)
These are some resources I found especially helpful while preparing. Coming from no prior consulting experience, they helped me understand the thought process, structure, and format the interviews were looking for.
- Management Consulted’s case library (stay away from their scoring system, just look at the cases): https://managementconsulted.com/
- McKinsey’s interview prep site: https://www.mckinsey.com/careers/interviewing
- McKinsey’s invite-only interview prep site – ask your recruiter, it should be linked in a round 1 interview invite email
- McKinsey Hard and 2021 casebooks from Peter-K.org: https://www.peter-k.org/
- Bain mock case interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqouKTczJSc
You might notice that these resources skew heavily towards McKinsey. This isn’t a coincidence; I felt that McKinsey had the most difficult interviews out of all the firms I recruited for. On the behavioral front, this is obvious: McKinsey’s Personal Experience Interview is more rigorous than any behavioral interview I had previously completed. I found McKinsey’s own website was an excellent resource to inspire the stories I shared during my interviews. And for the case interview, I think McKinsey’s cases test problem solving skills more the other firms – Bain and BCG skew more towards business acumen, while big 4 is mostly straightforward domain knowledge.
Lastly, go to bed early the night before – it really does help with problem solving and creativity!
Is networking necessary?
Some advice I’ve seen in many places is that you need to network to get a consulting interview invite. At least for internships, this doesn’t seem to be universally true. I did not do any networking relevant to any of my consulting applications, and was still successful. Take this with a grain of salt, but I think this shows it’s absolutely possible to break into the space without networking.
MBB vs. non-MBB recruiting
There are already many obvious differences between MBB and non-MBB consulting firms, such as salaries, working hours, and prestige, but their recruiting experiences differ significantly too. I’ll highlight a few major distinctions I observed.
- Difficulty. Intuitively, MBB interviews are more challenging than big 4. While my big 4 interviews were mostly testing for basic domain knowledge (e.g., technology, supply chain) and rarely had follow-ups or pressure testing, my MBB interviews focused on business strategy more broadly. These interviews were clearly testing higher-order problem solving more than the big 4 interviews, and in many cases my interviewers pushed me to think of ‘more’. I felt intellectually challenged by my MBB interviews, while this was not true for my big 4 interviews.
- Interviewer engagement. It was obvious to me that my big 4 interviewers were interviewing many more people than my MBB interviewers. With a few exceptions, many of my big 4 interviewers seemed disengaged and/or inexperienced with interviewing. In contrast, my MBB interviewers were obviously engaged and many asked incisive questions. I also had excellent and interesting conversations about topics entirely unrelated to the interview with all of the MBB partners/senior partners I spoke to, which helped make the interviews less procedural and more enjoyable.
- Response time. MBBs are much quicker with responses. All three firms had my interviewers calling me with next steps within 24 hours of each interview. And while big 4 firms took 1-2 weeks to give an offer after final rounds, McKinsey called with an offer just 3 hours after my final interview!
Even though MBB interviews were more difficult, I felt they attacked more interesting problems and had more engaged interviewers. Because of this, I enjoyed my MBB interviews more – it was actually quite interesting and fun to talk about difficult problems with smart, incisive people.
Feedback I received
In no specific order, this is the feedback I received from my MBB interviewers:
- ✅ Strong problem solving skills
- ✅ Good at quantitative reasoning and mental math
- ✅ Strong PEI/behavioral answers
- ✅ Polished and clear presentation, “client ready”
- ❌ When there are many charts on one page, prioritize giving synthesized interpretations of the charts together, rather than interpreting the charts separately
- ❌ Make each framework customized for the problem. Pass the “peanut butter factory test” – if a framework could also make things better for a peanut butter factory, it’s not customized enough!
- ❌ Relate every insight (especially quantitative) to the larger business problem at hand.
- ❌ When there is a business question, start with a hypothesis and modify it as needed until a recommendation is delivered.
Conclusion
I’m hoping my experience shows that it is absolutely possible to break into consulting without prior experience in the field. In my view, consulting is more accessible than other white-collar fields like investment banking – it just takes some drive and curiosity!